What is LearningRx (Learning RX)

LearningRx is a franchise system based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is run by the Gibson family headed by Ken Gibson who is the founder, his son-in law Dean Tenpas, his daughters Tanya Mitchell and Kim Hanson, Ken's brothers, as well as others.

Dr. Gibson is an eye doctor, not a neuroscientist or a medical doctor. He was an eye doctor who expanded into vision therapy and then expanded into brain training and reading training and so forth.

Franchisees pay about $50K to lease the rights to a LearningRx in their local market for 10 years. These fees have been going up over the years, so the costs may have gone up. The total cost of opening a center is upwards of $100K and could be as high as $200K depending on the location of the center and the frugality (or lack thereof) of the franchisee. The initial marketing campaign of each franchisee can be as much as $40,000 or $50,000 to get initial clients.

The local businesses that franchisees establish are most commonly referred to as "brain training centers" or "reading centers" or just "centers".

After the franchisee opens his/her doors, he/she pays 10% of cash revenues to the home office as a franchise fee and about 2.5% of cash revenues to the home office for marketing and infrastructure fees. These fees can change and really are best found out through the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD).

Over the past five years, the number of centers has fluctuated as franchisees have opened and closed. It may seem like things are pretty stable, but quite a few centers have closed while others have opened. At the moment, there seem to be between about 70 to 80 centers open across the country per the map on the company website, but it is hard to know exactly because things are often in flux.

The product of the company is an intangible service called brain training. The local centers sell one-on-one brain training services to clients in 12-week, 24-week, and 36-week programs.

Like all franchises, the home office trains its franchisees in how to run their business to be as much like the other franchises as possible. This includes training in all of the following:

* Sales
* Marketing (advertising, networking, developing professional referrals)
* Operations
* Assessments (Woodcock-Johnson III)
* Training (ThinkRx, ReadRx, MathRx, LiftOff, ComprehendRx, etc...)

Interestingly, the home office training includes very little (almost nothing) about brain anatomy or about reading pedagogy or anything technical.

In the process of opening each center, the franchisee establishes prices with guidelines from the home office. Training costs vary from market to market but a good rule of thumb is that training costs $5,000 for each 12 weeks of training. As you'd expect, a 24-week program would be roughly $10,000 and a 36-week program would be roughly $15,000.

The home office also sells a product called PACE. I never fully understood this program, but it is said to be a limited product, it is sold in smaller markets not big enough for a LearningRx center.