How Much Does a Pro Image Sports Franchise Owner Make?

Officially, Item 19 discloses 2025 Gross Sales—not owner earnings—for 138 full-year franchised stores in traditional enclosed malls and urban shopping centers. The median was $628,010, the average was $732,925, and the reported range was $103,564 to $2,337,857. Those figures cover revenue before merchandise cost, payroll, rent, royalty, other operating expenses, debt and taxes.

Item 20 reports 154 franchised outlets at December 31, 2025, up from 149 at the start of the year after 14 openings and nine outlets that ceased operations. It reports no company-owned outlets. The 18 principal-partially-owned stores in Item 19 are therefore franchised units, not a company-operated comparison group. See the brand’s official U.S. franchise overview for the operating concept, but use the current FDD—not marketing copy—for financial definitions and cohort boundaries.

FDD source: 2026 Pro Image Franchise, L.C. Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 19, pp. 35–37; Item 20, pp. 38–43.

The $41,000–$106,000 manager-run range is an independent estimate for one full-year traditional store, calculated by applying transparent operating-margin sensitivities to revenue anchors centered on the FDD median. It is not the franchisor’s forecast and the three cases are analytical scenarios, not probabilities.

What does the government margin proxy measure?

The 11.1% base margin is a derived industry operating residual, not a Pro Image Sports margin. For 2022 NAICS 4511, Sporting Goods, Hobby, and Musical Instrument Stores, Census reported $94.022 billion of sales, $42.319 billion of gross margin and $31.900 billion of total operating expenses. The calculation is ($42.319 billion − $31.900 billion) ÷ $94.022 billion = 11.1%.

The Census ARTS definitions specify that gross margin is sales minus cost of goods sold. Total operating expenses include payroll, fringe benefits, rent, advertising, depreciation and many other operating costs; they exclude cost of goods sold, interest, capital expenditures and income, sales and excise taxes. The ARTS methodology covers U.S. employer retail firms and is much broader than this franchise system.

An owner who works as the full-time store manager may create estimated owner-operator benefit of roughly $87,000 to $153,000, compared with $41,000 to $106,000 of manager-run residual earnings. This is an estimated 2025-format scenario for one traditional store; the difference is the $46,680 market value assigned to labor the owner performs, not additional passive profit.

The FDD permits either structure. Item 15 highly recommends—but does not require—the operating principal to supervise on premises. A trained designated manager must supervise the store unless the operating principal serves as full-time manager. Even in a manager-run structure, the operating principal remains responsible for financial oversight, training, personnel decisions, site and remodel involvement, and frequent inspections. The franchise therefore should not be modeled as fully passive.

FDD source: 2026 Pro Image Franchise, L.C. Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 15, pp. 31–32.

Merchandise margin, occupancy and staffing are likely to move annual owner earnings more than any single disclosed fixed fee, while the 5% royalty creates a direct variable claim on every sales dollar. This is an estimated interpretation for the traditional retail cohort; the FDD does not publish a unit-level expense statement that ranks these costs.

• Licensed merchandise and inventory: almost all inventory must be sports-related licensed products bought from authorized licensees. The FDD requires at least $60,000 of minimum inventory and highlights at least $60,000 of annual inventory and supply purchases. Purchases are not automatically a same-year expense; earnings depend on sell-through, markdowns, shrink and ending inventory.
• Occupancy: the Item 19 cohort is concentrated in traditional malls and urban shopping centers, and the FDD describes high occupancy rates for traditional enclosed-mall leases. Item 7 shows one month of base rent can range from $1,000 to $40,000, so location economics can overwhelm the central scenario.
• Royalty: 5% of Gross Sales is due monthly. The dollar burden scales from about $25,120 in the conservative scenario to $37,681 in the upside scenario before considering any other sales-linked cost.
• Online orders: the FDD states a 10% order-management fee on online sales processed through the franchisor’s e-commerce site, and royalties also apply. The scenario does not separately model this fee because the online-sales mix is undisclosed.
• Technology and events: the technology fee is currently $0 but may change under the Item 6 limits. A convention or seminar fee is currently $2,500 per franchisee when charged, plus travel and lodging. Neither is treated as a universal annual amount in the scenarios.
• Advertising: the FDD does not state a mandatory ongoing advertising-fund percentage. Ordinary local promotion is assumed to sit within the broad Census operating-expense proxy, but actual spending may be higher or lower.

FDD sources: 2026 Pro Image Franchise, L.C. Franchise Disclosure Document, Items 6–8, pp. 10–18.

The largest unresolved uncertainty is the absence of same-brand store-level expenses matched to Item 19 Gross Sales. The scenario is Limited-confidence because a national 2022 employer-retail benchmark cannot establish Pro Image merchandise margins, mall rent, staffing or royalty-adjusted profitability for a specific 2025 store.

Format mismatch

Item 19 excludes the small-town concept. The estimate should not be applied to the brand’s officially described small-town format without separate operating evidence.

Cohort selection

Stores that opened after January 1, 2025, nine stores that closed during 2025 and one nontraditional small-town store are excluded. The disclosure therefore does not measure a new-store ramp or closure-year economics.

Affiliate participation

Eighteen of the 138 stores were partially owned by a company principal. Item 19 says there were no material operating differences, but buyers should review substantiation for any purchasing, staffing or overhead differences.

Broad NAICS proxy

NAICS 4511 includes sporting-goods, hobby and musical-instrument retailers, not only licensed sports-apparel stores. National employer-firm economics may not resemble an individual mall franchise.

Owner compensation

Census payroll includes salaries of corporate officers but excludes payments to proprietors and partners of unincorporated firms. The aggregate residual therefore does not cleanly separate owner labor from business profit.

Accounting versus cash

Census operating expenses include depreciation and amortization but exclude capital expenditures and interest. The modeled result is an operating-earnings proxy, not EBITDA, free cash flow or guaranteed owner distributions.

Taxes

No after-tax estimate is presented. Entity structure, state and local rules, deductions and personal circumstances determine tax outcomes.

• Request Item 19 written substantiation and confirm why 51 stores, or 37%, are shown as attaining or surpassing the “stated result” when the table includes both an average and a median.
• Ask for anonymized profit-and-loss statements for stores near the $628,010 median, separated by mall versus urban shopping-center format and by store age.
• Verify gross merchandise margin, markdowns, shrink, freight, inventory turns and required annual purchases for the exact licensed-product mix.
• Obtain the full lease economics: base rent, percentage rent, common-area maintenance, taxes, utilities, marketing assessments and renewal escalators.
• Compare payroll for manager-run and owner-operated stores, including manager salary, payroll tax, benefits, overtime and minimum staffing by trading hours.
• Confirm the percentage of sales processed through the franchisor’s e-commerce channel and the interaction between the 10% order-management fee and the 5% royalty.
• Interview current and former franchisees listed in Item 20 about normalized owner compensation, distributions, retained cash, capital spending and debt service—not only sales.

The strongest defensible planning range is approximately $41,000 to $106,000 of estimated annual manager-run pre-tax owner earnings per full-year traditional store, with a $69,600 base scenario. It is scenario-based, not official. An active owner who fully replaces a paid retail supervisor may realize approximately $87,000 to $153,000 of estimated owner-operator benefit, but the added $46,680 is compensation for work performed.

The most important earnings driver is the combined effect of Gross Sales and store-level margin—especially merchandise cost, mall occupancy and labor. The largest unresolved uncertainty is that Item 19 provides no same-brand expense or profit data. Before relying on the range, a buyer should reconcile the Item 19 substantiation to actual P&Ls, verify fee and lease treatment, and test the assumptions through structured interviews with current and former franchisees.