In 2016 we decided that we needed to expand our business and bring our retail offer to a wider customer base and believed that developing a franchise model was a great opportunity for us. After speaking to a number of different companies we decided to work with The Franchise Company as they really took time to understand our business and explain their franchising process to us. They didn’t use jargon and their development system was easy to understand and just seemed to be logical and make sense. Right from the first discussion they were professional and friendly and really knowledgeable about franchising and this gave us complete confidence in their ability to help us develop what has proven to be a really successful franchise business both for us and our franchisees.
Julie Waites was our lead consultant and she helped us assess our options for growth and decide that franchising was the right move for us. Julie worked closely with us throughout the process from our very first meeting to the end of the franchising process, so we really built up a relationship and she developed an in-depth understanding of what we wanted to do. This also meant that whenever we had any questions, queries or concerns, we knew exactly who to speak to and were able to contact her directly, which made the whole process so easy and stress-free for us.
The first stage in the process was to help us relook at the core business and develop a franchise model that had real benefits for both parties (franchisor and our franchisees) and this involved a very detailed business review and then some in-depth re-modelling of our core business to develop a successful and viable franchise model that would have long term benefits for both parties.
Once the system had been developed The Franchise Company wrote and put together our documentation, including the franchise agreement, operations manuals, franchise brochure and marketing materials and also helped us to launch the franchise and start to recruit our first franchisees. Access to finance is a key part of the process for our franchisees and The Franchise Company have contacts with the Franchise Units of the banks and introduced us to them and supported us through the process of applying for and obtaining BFA membership
We’d been thinking about franchising for a couple of years and were going to try and do the work ourselves. We just didn’t realise the level of detail of work and the skills that are required to develop a commercially viable and attractive franchise model. The investment we made getting the work carried out by The Franchise Company has really paid off and when we started to recruit franchisees we saw the immediate benefits of the work that had been put into the development process. Without this support we would have made many mistakes and it would have ended up costing us more in the long term to try and put it right. We agreed staged payments through the process which helped our cash flow and meant that we could focus on running our core business whilst the experts focused on developing the Little Dessert Shop franchise model.
