About This Goddard School Analysis

Methodology

Our analysis is built on three categories of source material:

• Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs). The primary source for all financial figures, fee structures, territorial rights, and system statistics. FDDs are filed under the FTC Franchise Rule and are legal documents — the figures in them are audited and carry regulatory weight. Our Goddard School analysis uses the most recently available FDD filing.
• Public filings and regulatory records. State franchise registration filings, litigation records, and regulatory actions where publicly available. Court records and state attorney-general filings provide context on system-level disputes and franchisee litigation patterns.
• Industry data and benchmarks. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for staffing costs and early childhood educator wages, childcare industry reports for occupancy and operating benchmarks, SBA lending data for franchise financing terms, and franchise-data aggregators that compile FDD information across systems. Where we use industry estimates rather than Goddard-specific disclosures, we label them as such.

What we do not do

We do not conduct interviews with current or former franchisees for editorial content. We do not publish invented owner quotes, composite profiles, or personas presented as real people. Owner-experience analysis on this site describes patterns that recur across publicly available reviews, forum discussions, and FDD disclosures, and is written as analysis in our own voice rather than as testimony.

Financial figures are presented as reported in the source documents. Where we perform calculations — such as deriving fee load percentages from disclosed royalty, brand fund, and curriculum fees — we show the math. Where we use estimates, we bound them with ranges and cite the source of the estimate.

Editorial independence

Franchise Financing Guide is an independent publication. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or otherwise connected to Goddard Systems, LLC. We do not receive compensation from any franchisor discussed on this site, and no franchisor has editorial input into our analysis.

Our independence applies specifically to the franchise systems we cover. We are not franchise brokers. We do not sell franchises. We do not earn referral fees from franchisors. Our analysis is designed to serve the prospective buyer — the person writing the cheque — not the person selling the opportunity.

Lenders that specialise in franchise financing, such as Lendesca, can model the financial scenarios described in our analysis against specific capital structures. We mention financing resources where editorially relevant to the buyer’s decision process.

Updates

This analysis is updated when new FDD filings become available, typically annually. All content carries a date stamp indicating the FDD version and fiscal year used. Between annual updates, we may publish supplemental analysis articles when new public data — litigation filings, regulatory actions, or system-level changes — becomes available.