Case Study - Friedel de Beer and James Hope-Lang

Franchise area covers: Horsham – Haywards Heath - Billingshurst – Littlehampton – Worthing – Brighton and Hove

James and I have worked in the City for various investment banks, we also ran a South East London triathlon club and James is a qualified triathlon coach and RYA Yacht Master.

We moved out of London in 2007 as our hobbies and our dogs meant we always spent time in the countryside at weekends. At this point I stopped working in the City but after a couple of years decided I wanted to work again and the flexibility of swim teaching suited my hours and South African ocean based upbringing. I started working for a local leisure centre as a swimming teacher and completed my STA (Swimming Teacher Association) qualifications.

We have always been ambitious and starting up a swimming school seemed the obvious next step but as we had no previous experience, taking on a franchise appeared to be the sensible solution.

There were several options available in Sussex but initial research narrowed this down to a couple of organisations. After further research, it became clear that Seriously FUN’s inclusive family orientated approach suited us better than some of the more established, less personal alternatives. 

We spent a lot of time on the internet reading up on franchising and attended a BFA Franchisee Day which further reinforced our belief that franchising was right for us. This combination provided us with numerous questions for the Seriously FUN team and their franchise advisor, which they always succeeded in answering to our satisfaction.

Once we were committed the real work began. Seriously FUN provided several weeks of comprehensive training covering their unique learn to swim programme for babies and children, the business processes to manage the school and shadow teaching to put everything into practice. In addition they helped us find our initial venues and came with us to visit and review them. They have also responded quickly to our many emails or phone calls.

Our biggest challenge to date has been keeping on top of the myriad tasks required to get everything in place including choosing venues, distributing leaflets and contacting numerous outlets for suitable advertising. However, the support team at Seriously FUN have been on hand to help whenever we’ve had an issue or just needed a steer on what to do next.

Our goal in the next year is to fully cover our current territory and after that hopefully expand to the neighbouring territories. Seriously FUN has given us the opportunity to build a viable alternative to City work!