Dairy Queen

In nineteen forty, a father and son opened a soft serve stand in Joliet, Illinois. Sixteen hundred people lined up on the first day. Five cents a cone. The product was different — softer, colder, smoother than anything an ice cream shop had ever served. But the real invention was not the ice cream. It was the structure they built to sell it. They could not build a thousand stores themselves. No capital. No bandwidth. So they sold the right to use the name. Franchise fee: forty five thousand dollars upfront. Then four to five percent royalty on every dollar of gross sales, plus five to six percent for advertising. Total ongoing fees: nine to eleven percent of everything a franchisee earns. Every single month. Forever. A royalty is perpetual. When you sell a product, revenue stops when you stop selling. A franchise royalty flows as long as the doors are open. A store that opened in nineteen sixty five is still paying royalties in two thousand and twenty five.