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Boston Chicken, Inc.

Decent Essays

Assess Boston Chicken¡¯s business strategy. What are its critical success factors and risks?

Boston Chicken wanted to be a home meal replacement. Its main strategy includes (1) focus on franchising to larger regional developers who will open new stores in the region; (2) focus on home cook taste food and keen on introducing new varieties of food choices; (3) rapid expand to open new stores; (4) keen on operation and process improvement.

Such a strategy made the business expand fast in term of the business scale and number of Boston Chicken stores, either company owned stores or franchised stores.

The main risk was also clear. As Boston Chicken financed most of its areas developers and competition of the fast-food market was …show more content…

However, such a policy is not in line with accrual basis, given that there was specific franchising period agreed between Boston Chicken and the franchising stores. Instead, one time franchising revenue should be recorded as unearned revenue upon receipts and amortized over the franchising period. Considering the fact that the total number of franchise stores was more than 500 by Dec 25, 1994, the potential growth in the future years might not be as big as in fiscal year 1994.

2. Disclosure of franchising stores operating results

The operating results of the franchising stores were not disclosed in the company¡¯s financial statements, except for the system-wide store revenue. From the data of annual report, we understand that the total of all franchising stores increased significantly from $152 million in 1993 to $383 million in 1994. However, we have no ideas whether such stores were making profits or not. The profitability of the franchising stores was directly related to the recoverability of Area Developer Financing (¡°ADF¡±). The total of amount of ADF was $201 million, for which Boston Chicken made no allowance as of Dec 25, 1994.

3. Marketing and Advertising Funds

The marketing and advertising funds were contributed by Boston Chicken and its franchising stores at the specific percentage of the total revenue. We noted from the annual report that the National Advertising Fund and certain Local

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