I love franchising! Both as an ex-franchisee and also as a franchisor.
I started my journey into Franchising in 2014 with a new Franchise, EweMove Sales & Lettings. I launched into a tough and competitive market in a business discipline I had no previous experience in. But with the framework, brand, product proposition, marketing plan and training provided by the franchisor, I got started pretty quickly and avoided the dreaded ‘failure’ that so many self-employed people, who have great ideas and aspirations, are struck down by. I even went on to become the Managing Director of EweMove!!
So why does a franchise work when ‘going it alone’ is fraught with risk.
My view on this is simple and it applies equally to any franchise. When you go it alone, you’ve got way more to think about than any well thought through business plan would at first suggest. You’ve got leases to review, suppliers to select and contracts to negotiate, websites to build, develop a marketing and social media strategy, build and implement your marketing, sales and operational plan. Write a complaints policy, register with the trade bodies and other legally required entities such as VAT, HMRC (Anti-Money Laundering), The ICO and so it goes on.
But if you do go it alone, how do you know you’ll get everything ship-shape and ready to go so that you won’t be caught out with fines for making simple mistakes.
Well, you have to spend many days and weeks attending to these issues, both before, during and after launching your business. So the best way to work out the ‘cost’ of these activities is to first work out the revenue you can earn from a single full ‘sales day’.
If you can reserve 5 days a week to sales activity in a franchise, versus 2 days a week when going it alone (as the rest of the time is attending to all those other issues), and you can earn say £750 on average for a good sales day, then the cost of going it alone is £2,250 a week, or £117,000 per year. So if the cost of your franchise is less than £117k per year, it makes cash sense to join a franchise on that basis alone. But what other benefits do you get from your franchisor?
Training – so you can get started more quickly – more productive sales days straight away
The Product – it’s been tested and refined over time, so you know customers will want it, which saves all the time associated with market research and making costly mistakes
The Brand – people prefer to deal with trusted brands, if they are represented by nice, competent and confident people, the kind of folks you’ll find in EweMove and many other franchise networks
Know-How – and this is not to be overlooked. Compliance know-how, tradecraft know-how, sales know-how and so on, all of these attributes will fast-track you to success and save you weeks, months or even years, trying to get there yourself. Now just imagine what that might save you over the first 5 years of trading?
So I would urge you if you’re an entrepreneurial person, who wants to work for themselves and run their own business, but realises trying to reinvent the wheel is unnecessary, then investigate and start your own franchise.
And everyone in the EweMove network, at the Sheep Pen Head Office or any one of our network members, will be more than happy to tell you their own story and answer your franchising related questions. We’ve got individual men and women operating, husband and wife teams, business partner teams and larger employed teams working in our network, so whatever your personal situation and aspiration, there’s someone just like you who’s already been there and done it. You can check us out at www.ewemove.com or http://www.ewefranchise.com/
If you do take the plunge into Franchising, I look forward to reading your success story on these pages in the near future.
