If you’ve been exploring the idea of franchising your business, chances are you’ve already encountered a firm offering to do it for a set package price. A defined cost, a defined timeline, a tidy franchising-in-a-box arrangement. You pay, you become a franchise, and success beckons.
On the surface, it sounds reassuring, especially when the price tag is much lower than you feared and it all comes wrapped up in a shiny marketing package.
In practice, it should give you pause.
Imagine you’re having an extension put on your house, and an architect or builder gives you a fixed price before they’ve even visited the property, understood what you wanted, checked the structure of the existing building, or looked into planning requirements… and that price was a lot less than your friends and neighbours had paid.
You’d be concerned, right? Or at least expect the work to be substandard and end up costing you more in the long run, or leaving you sorting through the ruins of your home thanks to the tender care of a “cowboy builder”….
Apply this same common sense to franchising your business: how can anyone who has just met you, spent twenty minutes learning about your business, and hasn’t yet understood your team, your capacity, your operations, or your market give you a fixed price?
The honest answer is that they can’t – not really. What they can do is give you their fixed price, the one they give everyone, and hope that your business happens to fit inside it.
Franchising is a process, not a product.
No two businesses that come to us are the same.. Some are genuinely ready to franchise today, whereas others aren’t quite there yet and need help setting out the path forward. Some already have extensive resources and infrastructure in place, and others are just starting to scale up.
The right support for each of those businesses looks completely different, and so does the amount of time and resources which need to go into it. Going back to the house analogy, the survey comes first, and the quote follows. Anything other than that is just guesswork. There is no magical, “just-add-water” formula which can work every time for every business.
This is exactly why we developed our Franchise Ready Review, a free assessment that helps both you and us understand exactly where you are in your franchising journey before any development work begins. It means that when we do propose a scope of work and a cost, it’s built around your business specifically, not a template dressed up to look like one.
At TFC, we won’t put a price on your full development until we properly understand what that development involves. We’ll guide you through every aspect of our process, from intial analysis using a Franchise Ready Review – an analysis tool based on our extensive experience working with dozens of franchisors – right through to a detailed blueprint to help you map out your future should you wish to take the next step.
We can even offer you a wide range of services to help you franchise, including augmenting your existing team, completely outsourcing your requirements to us, or anything and everything in between.
At every stage of the process, every aspect of what we do for you – the scope, the timeline, the costs – is laid out transparently, because by that point, we actually know your business, and anything we suggest is shaped by what you actually need, not by what a package happens to include.
So, what should you be asking of any consultancy firm?
If you’re comparing your options, here are a few questions worth putting to any firm you’re considering:
- How do you determine your pricing, and what happens if my business turns out to be more complex than anticipated?
- What does your process look like for understanding my business before you begin?
- Will I understand my own franchise model by the time we’re finished, or will I be reliant on you to interpret it?
- What support is available to help me achieve my goals?
- Are you a solo operation, or is there a pool of experts I can draw on to help me achieve my goals?
The answers will tell you a great deal.
If you’d like to start with an honest conversation about where your business is right now and what franchising it might actually involve, our Franchise Ready Review is the right place to begin. No one-size-fits-all package, and no fixed price before we’ve done the work of understanding you. Just a clear picture of what’s possible, and what it would genuinely take to get there.
Click the button below to schedule a call if you’d like to learn more.
Best regards,
Steve Eastaugh
Partner & Director
