Trade is a simple idea. You give something, you get something. A long time ago that looked like handing over a caribou for three baskets of carrots and a cord of wood, and while the props have changed, the arithmetic hasn’t. Value for value. That’s the whole test.

The tricky part is that “value” refuses to sit still. What a customer wanted last year isn’t what they want this year, and the only people qualified to settle the argument are the customers themselves. They’re the ones who decide. So if you want to create more value, you have to keep asking the people you serve what they actually consider valuable — and then accept that today’s answer expires.

Somewhere along the line, somebody worked out that the customer wanted a fatter caribou. Deliver that, and suddenly you’re getting four baskets of carrots and some extra wood. They probably figured it out by asking the carrot guy.

When you study business-to-business customers today, you find they’re trading in four currencies: money, time, security and knowledge. Understanding those four is useful for anyone running a business. It’s essential for anyone thinking about buying a franchise, because a franchise system that can’t deliver at least one of them convincingly is a franchise system with a problem.

Money

This is the one everybody thinks of first. In everyday language we use “money” and “currency” interchangeably, which is exactly why it’s worth pointing out that money is only one currency — the one we happen to settle most commercial transactions with.

And really, it’s just the bridge between the caribou and the carrots. Nobody genuinely wants a stack of paper. If you’ve already got caribou, what you want is carrots. Our forefathers built a system where paper can be traded for stuff and stuff can be traded for paper, and we’ve all agreed to play along. The paper is mostly disappearing into plastic and phones now, but the concept hasn’t budged.

The dressmaker trades a dress for paper. The landlord rents him space to display his dresses and takes some of that paper. The grocer hands over carrots for the landlord’s paper. No caribou required.

We all understand this one. Which is why it’s strange how often businesses fail to make the connection explicit. If money is a currency your customers want, your product or service has to demonstrably help them get more of it — and you have to say so, plainly, when you describe what you do. The clearer that message, the more attractive your offering becomes.

Time

Any commodity gets more valuable as it gets scarcer, and time is the scarcest thing most business owners have. We were all promised that the computer revolution would leave us with gobs of free time. I don’t meet many converts to that theory anymore.

Here’s a story I tell every group of new Schooley Mitchell franchisees during training.
I was at a national franchise convention, waiting for the opening speaker. Several hundred franchisors in the hall. A guy walks in from the back flipping a head of lettuce up and down, straight up the centre aisle, still flipping. There were snickers — a fair number of us assumed someone had gone over the wall at the local asylum.

He marched to the front, climbed onto the stage, planted himself behind the podium and bellowed: “Somebody in this room tell me why this head of lettuce represents the most important concept you must understand for your business to survive in the next decade!” Spittle flying. Turning red. Half the room was still on the asylum theory. The other half had worked out this was the guest speaker.

He came down off the ledge a bit. “Think back ten years. Picture your local grocery store. How many square feet were dedicated to heads of lettuce at 79 cents each?” Someone shouted, “Thirty square feet.”
“Fine. Now flash forward to today. How many square feet go to heads of lettuce at 89 cents?” The answer came back: ten.

“Now tell me how many square feet are dedicated to prepared salads at $4.95.”
You could feel it land. That’s where the other twenty feet went. In a lot of stores it’s more than twenty now — entire aisles, entire departments.

Then, quietly, almost ominously: “So what is that about, and why does it matter so much to your business?”

It was about time. We will hand over good money — a currency we’ve already agreed is valuable — to avoid chopping carrots and cucumbers. I plead guilty myself.

The research backs him up. A study led by Ashley Whillans of Harvard Business School, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surveyed more than 6,000 adults across the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands and found that spending money on time-saving services was linked to greater life satisfaction. As Whillans put it, “buying time has similar benefits for happiness as having more money.”

Now apply that to your prospective customers. Research from American Express and Small Business Saturday UK found small business owners spending around 11 hours a week on administrative and finance tasks — roughly six working days a month — compared with about 3.6 days a month on sales and business development. More than half said paperwork gets in the way of actually running the business. Separate surveys consistently find that 63% of owners work more than 50 hours a week.

These people are drowning. If you can hand them hours back, you have something they will pay for. The challenge is figuring out how you deliver time, and then making sure your customer understands that’s what they’re buying.

Security

Security here means more than locks, fences and a guy at the gate. It’s the confidence that you’re making the right call — that your decision-making process is likely to land you somewhere good.

The business owner who thinks they know everything has a fool running their company. It’s why we pay accountants to do our taxes instead of trying to keep pace with a set of laws that changes every year. Most owners would rather pay someone and sleep at night than save a few dollars and wonder whether they’ve created a problem for themselves down the road.

Plenty of decisions we’re happy to make alone. That’s part of why people go into business in the first place. But the more complex the issue, and the more alternatives on the table, the more people ache for the reassurance that they’re choosing wisely. The right supplier. The right technology. The right price. The right hire — which is just a purchase like any other, albeit an important one.

Gartner’s research puts numbers on this. Studying nearly 1,000 B2B customers, they found that buyers reporting high decision confidence were ten times more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase. Brent Adamson, then a distinguished VP at Gartner, framed the challenge as “customers’ confidence in themselves and their ability to make good buying decisions” — not their confidence in the supplier.

Call it security, call it reliability, it amounts to the same question from your customer: can I trust this decision? Every business that answers yes becomes more valuable as a vendor. That’s why buyers will trade the currency of money to get it.

Knowledge

We live in a knowledge economy, and the volume is genuinely absurd. Statista and IDC figures put global data created, captured and consumed at roughly 149 zettabytes in 2024, on its way past 180. Read the New York Times cover to cover today and you’d hold more information than a person accumulated over an entire lifetime in medieval times. That was only a few hundred years ago.

Meanwhile we’re still running the same hardware. Dean Burnett calls it the idiot brain, and it’s essentially the brain belonging to the guy who was lunch for a sabre-tooth tiger. There are more connected devices on Earth than people, all of them helpfully firing more information at us. That’s before we start talking about AI.

Herbert Simon saw where this was heading back in 1971, when worrying about too much information seemed like an eccentric hobby. His line: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

That’s the opportunity. Gartner found that customers spend around two-thirds of a B2B buying journey just gathering, processing and reconciling conflicting information, and that sellers who helped customers make sense of it all — rather than piling on more of it — closed high-quality, low-regret deals 80% of the time.

So knowledge isn’t about having the most information. It’s about supplying the relevant piece, at the right moment, in a form your customer can act on. Do that and you become more valuable. And the more knowledge you accumulate yourself, the easier it gets to deliver the other three currencies.

What This Means If You’re Evaluating a Franchise

Every business is built to do four things: get customers, keep them, satisfy them, and grow with them. Each one gets easier when you can show people how you’ll deliver money, time, security and knowledge.

So when you’re looking at a franchise opportunity, that’s the lens to use. Ask how the system delivers each currency to its client base. Ask whether the franchisor can articulate it in a sentence, or whether you get vague noises about a great brand. Ask whether existing franchisees can explain it. If a system can deliver on all four, you’ve found something with real staying power, because those are the things business customers are actually shopping for.

One caveat worth naming. This applies to franchises that serve other businesses. The currency delivered by a cinnamon bun is unadulterated pleasure, and that’s an entirely different discussion — thousands of operators competing for the same disposable dollar and a famously fickle audience.

But in the B2B space, the four currencies hold. Figure out which ones you’re delivering, learn to say it out loud, and you’ll have made a good decision.

Interested in learning more about a franchise models that prioritize long-term wealth creation over short-term cashflow? Consider what your “future self” five years from now would want you to choose today. Book a call to learn more about the Schooley Mitchell franchise opportunity here: https://schooleymitchellfranchise.com/contact/

Adapted from the writing of Dennis Schooley, Founder of Schooley Mitchell.

Sources referenced: Whillans et al., “Buying Time Promotes Happiness,” PNAS (2017); American Express / Small Business Saturday UK SME Business Barometer; Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference research on decision confidence and Sense Making (2019, 2021); Statista/IDC Global DataSphere data; Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” (1971).