After your first conversation with our team, your next step is to learn more about the Wild Birds Unlimited brand by taking a deep dive into our culture, our support and our community in the best way possible, talking to and learning from the people who live the Wild Birds Unlimited experience every day — our franchise store owners.
The Validation step, called “A Soaring Opportunity” in our Discovery Center is where research meets reality. This is your chance to hear directly from store owners about their journeys, challenges, and successes. And to have the opportunity to review our most recent annual Franchise Satisfaction Survey results. Not just our scores and rankings…but a fully transparent opportunity to read all of the comments (yes…all of the comments) that our franchise store owners made when completing the survey.
Why This Step Matters
When you’re considering joining a franchise system, there’s nothing more valuable than hearing the unfiltered, fully transparent, perspective of those already doing the work.
Validation helps you confirm whether what you’ve learned so far truly matches your goals, expectations, and lifestyle.
At Wild Birds Unlimited, we encourage openness and transparency at every level — and that includes connecting candidates directly with our franchise owners. You’ll call at least ten stores and visit a few in person to see the business in action prior to making our mutual decision about joining the Wild Birds Unlimited Flock. In this step, we do require that you talk to at lease 3-5 existing franchisees before we move to the next step of our process.
What You’ll Experience
During your calls and visits, you’ll:
- Learn how franchisees built their businesses and how they define success.
- Observe how they serve their communities and connect people with nature.
- Understand how Wild Birds Unlimited provides ongoing support in operations, marketing, and product innovation.
- Get candid feedback on what it’s like to own a store and balance purpose with profitability.
Each conversation helps you see how our franchise model performs in the real world — and how it can fit your life.
We will provide you with a full contact list of our current franchise store owners. We even provide a list of questions that may be helpful as you develop your own list. We find that many of the conversations between people in your shoes who are investigating becoming Wild Birds Unlimited franchisees and our existing Franchise Store Owners have a very organic flow- but having access to that list of questions can keep you both on track. We do encourage you to ask your own questions too, but our franchisees will not be comfortable answering any personal financially focused questions. You will get much more information on the financial performance of our system when you get to the next step of our process.
Building Trust Through Real Conversations
Validation isn’t about selling; it’s about alignment. By the end of this step, you’ll have honest insight into what it takes to succeed and how our culture of integrity, participation, and collaboration shows up in daily operations.
Every franchisee you meet will remind you that this business is about much more than feeding birds — it’s about feeding joy, community, and purpose.
While many other franchise brands push this step to the end of their franchise development process, we feel that it is paramount to understand the culture of the Wild Birds Unlimited system early on in your journey. Validating that our culture is one that you want to be a part of is so important that we allow this to happen early on in your journey.
