You should consider a couple of key points for whether you are ready to franchise your business:
1. Is your business proven and profitable?
Proven in the sense that you’ve been running for a period of time, successfully growing and showing a clear demand in your market. This might be anything from 18 – 24 months, ideally longer. The longer you have been trading the better as it shows the success over an extended period of time which both proves your business model works and also may appeal to potential franchisees. Anything less than 12 months isn’t likely to be long enough in terms of franchising your business, because it’s simply not enough time for you to demonstrate that you’ve been trading successfully over a period of time and can prove your concept works.
Profitable means not only will this make someone money, but good enough money for them to consider it a better option than employment and worth their time to invest in. If you’ve got a full-time franchise opportunity that will make the owner an entry-level wage then it’s probably not quite ready. If it can make or exceed what they’d receive in a job, then the freedom and flexibility of running their own business will be attractive along with the earning potential.
2. Is your business easily repeatable?
You’ll need to train someone to replicate your business services, products, programmes, customer service etc so ensuring it’s a relatively simple model is essential. If you have a complicated business model, use a large number of systems, onerous administration tasks and various complicated processes then it can become difficult very quickly. Simplify wherever possible.
One of the biggest reports of franchisee dissatisfaction is with the amount of time it takes to do simple tasks in their business (much like any business owner) so if you can automate tasks, create simple systems and processes and not burden the franchisee with too many time sapping things to run their business it will be well received and better in the long run.
There are a few other things to consider to ensure suitability to franchising, but the above two are non-negotiable.
If you need more advice on this area or would like to schedule a call to talk your business model through and assess it’s suitability to franchising, drop an email to hello@andygeorgiou.com for some free advice and guidance.
