In late 2003, together with my wife and four colleagues we established The Franchise Institute in Sydney, Australia. Years prior to that I had been involved in distributorships, licensing and franchising at the small end of town. During that time I had some great successes and some failures too, but my overriding memory of that period was the lack of assistance that was available at an affordable
price. I had been to see a number of franchise ‘experts’ who had worked with well known names, but I was shocked at the high prices they were quoting to me and the open ended nature of the preparation for franchising phase. It never seemed to end and each step of the way I was presented with yet another invoice. It occurred to me that there was a gap in the market place and that no one was providing good quality information on franchising to small and medium sized businesses at prices they could afford. So I teamed up with a group of franchise and business specialists and together we developed the Franchise For Success Software and Mentoring Program. The program was groundbreaking in that for the first time business owners were able franchise their business by working through an interactive software program that guided them step-by-step through the process of franchising their business. It allowed them to build a franchise system from the ground up and produce customised franchise documents as an end product. The software program was backed up by a comprehensive mentoring program which involved a number of on-site, face-to-face meetings with a franchise specialist, who was assigned to the business owner for the duration of the franchising process. The Franchise For Success Program offered a simple and yet comprehensive step by step process to franchising and could be broken down into bite size chunks of work for business owners who wanted to franchise their business while still actively working IN their business day by day. To date we have worked with more than 150 companies Australia wide to help them franchise their business. For more information, visit http://www.thefranchiseinstitute.com.au/
