Why Did Bernard Huang's Dickey's Franchise Fail?

Bernard Huang says poker had warped his picture of money. He thought buying a franchise was like financing a McDonald's and that the cash would start arriving. He had never managed people and had never run a business. Four co-owners shared the Dickey's Barbecue Pit, and he names the failure least-common-denominator syndrome. Equal, inexperienced partners watch one another's effort. Someone covering nights and weekends looks at a quieter partner and asks why a twenty-percent owner should be carried. Huang says that at twenty he did not have the words to fix that, so he pulled back from a business he only partly owned.