For better or for worse, Australians are less handy around the house than ever before. This has enabled Brendan Green to grow Hire a Hubby from one franchisee to 301 franchisees with $50 million annual turnover in Australia.
Green talks to SmartCompany about how the business operates as a one-stop-shop for clients, the importance of happy franchisees and how his own wife is Hire a Hubby’s number one client.
Company: Hire a Hubby
Age: 41
Based: Kingsgrove, Sydney
Position: chief executive and owner of Hire a Hubby
I started up a lawn mowing business when I was about 19. More and more customers were saying, “While you’re here, can you cut my tree down, can you clean my gutters, can you take the rubbish to the tip?” It just really highlighted that people were becoming more service orientated.
I was introduced to the founder of Hire a Hubby when I lived in Melbourne and having seen the natural evolution of what I was doing into this brand and concept called Hire a Hubby, I bought the master franchise for New South Wales.
The gap between your builder, carpenter-type person and the average homeowner is quite a big one.
We were always getting challenged on price with lawns and gardens, so we just put a distance between ourselves and those types of services and focused more on the niche, which was the handyman work, which goes from putting up a picture hook to assisting customers with bathroom and kitchen renovations.
The founder got to a point where it was time to move on, so it was an opportunity that was just freakishly good fortune for us, we were able to be Johnny-on-the-spot.
If you are planning on expanding, then you really need to be thinking about where it is you’re going to access capital, and sometimes on short notice.
Some of the competitors in the home service space had a division for lawns, a division for home cleaning, a division for this and a division for that. We just said, “We’re one stop. Call us and we’ll do all of it for you.”
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Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
