The startup phase is where most companies either sink or swim. Which means that people that are running a startup, are frequently focused on making the things that matter, like sales expansion, or cash flow actually work. In short, you don’t always have the time to make adjustments to your business plan that could take it to the next level. Here are some options that can help you take a startup and turn it into a successful franchise.
Proof is in the pudding
If you are looking at moving towards creating franchises, one of the most important things for your business is to have experience with your main location or locations proving your model. If you can show profitability and differentiate yourself from the competition, you merely need to ensure that your work processes are perfect so that you can document precisely the technology and technique that you will train your franchisees on.
Proving your business and documenting it while you do will save you time because you can make measurements that you can include to help future franchisees more successful.
Look at an existing opportunity
If your dream is to take a startup into franchising, you don’t always need to create your own in order to move forward. It is possible for you to look at proven opportunities in order to move ahead. With a company like Zerorez, which helps you ‘start my own cleaning business’ in either a 100,000 person size metro area, or larger, you have built-in technology and processes that you can put to use right away. If you have the capital or ability to finance the equipment purchase, what you’ll end up with is a program that matches the size of the market that you would be franchising. The better that you are with customers, the more opportunity you will have to increase your market share- and eventually the number of franchises that you control.
Jumping in at the franchisee level to help an existing, proven system can reward those that like the business side of the opportunity.
Leverage technology if you can
Gone are the days when you need a lot of IT people to manage the care and feeding of your monolithic PC network. At the same time, technology is very much one the reasons that we have, well, more technology. It can also be a primary advantage for your firm. Think about it this way, it is possible to work with technology providers to put a centralized billing system online that scales with your business. Hosted in the cloud, you can easily add franchisees and then allow them to process payments and share clients while completely understanding how well your entire enterprise is running.
Surprisingly enough, this can be accomplished without writing a line of code. By finding the right online vendor, they will simply brand their product as you for a monthly fee. And when you go to sell features of your franchise to your franchisees, you will have yet another reason for them to get involved.
Another way that you can increase earnings if you have products that you sell is to add an ecommerce site that you can process orders through for delivery through your franchisees or by mail. Many companies that start out with a new online component soon scale up to 15 or 20 percent of sales online.
Taking a startup and making it into a successful franchise is something that takes hard work, insight, flexibility, and a commitment to ingenuity. If you follow some business best practices to get there, you can increase the chance that you will be very successful.