People don’t want to mess around and try to find two or three people if they can find one they can rely upon.
Our customers wanted somebody they could trust, because we’ve all seen A Current Affair and Today Tonight, when the rogue tradesman comes and rips off the little old lady. So we countered that by having all of our guys police checked.
Total convenience for the customer has been the cornerstone to getting a bigger volume of work, and therefore requiring a bigger number of franchisees.
I think the key with any franchise business is there’s got to be value in it for everybody.
The franchisor is in business to make money, and he’s selling the concept to franchisees who in turn are expecting to make money.
Invest in the people that you need to support your franchisees ahead of the curve, not behind. By giving them better service they’ll stay profitable and upbeat.
The more our franchisees earn, the more we earn. So our focus at the moment is to make sure that the franchisees are continually making as much as they possibly can, hitting their financial targets.
Because franchising has a code of conduct that governs how we have to conduct ourselves, we have to use every new prospect, name and number of every franchisee in our business, and if they’re in any way disgruntled, we can’t control what they say to the next candidate.
We’re living in an instant world, and we keep saying to our franchisees, “The way people expect to be treated now is instantly.”
The correlation between a quick call-back and winning business is absolute.
We’re taking our guys on the journey to a business model that we call “you and two” which is they have two workers as a minimum. That creates the first level of real flexibility, for them to run the business rather than the business run them.
Our most successful marketing is definitely web based. Reach Local is a very productive source of opportunities for us.
My wife is one of the more regular users of the Hire a Hubby service in Australia. She keeps Hire a Hubby very busy.
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.
