First Franchisee Part 1

First Franchisee Part 1

Hi there and welcome to our first case study which is all about Simon Hopkins who became our first official Franchisee. Simon was in a similar position to Damien the founder in the fact he worked in a call center in Bedfordshire which was boring, tiring and not stimulating at all. Read on to find out about how a simple pint of coke in a pub turned out to be the start of the franchise.  

Simon joined the Lgb Vision Window Cleaning Franchise in 2016 and signed up on May 4th with his starting date being July 4th! Now Damien and Simon are both big movie buffs so with "May the force be with you and Independence day" on our sides we knew they couldn't go far wrong. Damien has personally known Simon since primary school but they took very different paths when starting out in their working life. Simon was interested in how sucessful the business seemed to be doing. Starting off with a car, then a small van, then a second larger van, then a new van and so on. We sat down in one of local pubs and he asked about emloyment prospects. Damien explained he looked into this route twice and both times had been burnt quite badly. 

A seed had already been planted from another window cleaner who mentioned about franchising the business. It seemed to be really easy and was the perfect plan for Damien but boy was he wrong, the plan was perfect the easy bit was not. We would consider franchising to be harder than employment as essentially you're trying to recreate yourself but in someone else. An employee won't care that Mrs Jones likes her front step washing or that Mr Pipe works evenings so not to clean in the morning. Lets face it as well if an employee doesn't pan out you can hopefully terminate the contract, with a franchisee that's the last thing you want to do!

Damien started all the work involved to franchise his business which was nothing less than a small mountain to climb. Nearly a year later the business was ready and the first franchisee was waiting to start. It's been a bumpy road from the start but Simon has always been put first where possible. We learnt a lot from Simon so the problems will not be repeated with the second or third Franchisee. Part 2 is coming soon!

Part 2 can be found here