Brand standards alone do not decide it. What matters is whether the franchisee still controls the business: hiring, staffing levels, local marketing within the rules, banking, and the risk of loss. Read the agreement for reserved powers, then describe the authority that genuinely remains. Nationality, a substantial at-risk investment, and non-marginality are assessed alongside that question, not instead of it.
Write the control comparison before signing
Produce a two-column note: on one side the franchisor's approval rights and mandated suppliers, on the other the franchisee's own decisions and financial exposure. If the second column is thin, that is a finding worth having before the franchise fee is paid rather than afterwards. Where the entity signing the agreement is a company, confirm that treaty nationals hold the ownership, since the enterprise's nationality is examined as well as the applicant's.
Two additional elements deserve their own place in that note. The investment must be substantial in relation to the total cost of the enterprise and irrevocably committed and at risk, so money still sitting in an account, or recoverable at the applicant's option, has not yet met the requirement however large the figure. And the enterprise must not be marginal: it needs the present or future capacity to generate more than a minimal living for the investor and family.
Franchise arithmetic makes the second point concrete, because a unit's economics after royalties either support that or do not. Hypothetical example: a prospective franchisee of a bakery-café concept builds the control comparison and the post-royalty model on the same page, and finds the two findings point in opposite directions, which is exactly the disagreement worth having before the fee is paid.