The A-Z of Business (E and F)

Ok so I’ve already given you A,B,C and D…so here’s the next (hopefully!) insightful instalment into my A-Z of business.

Experts. So you’ve set up in business and your probably producing a widget or providing a great service and that’s the thing you will be an expert in your given area. That does not necessarily mean you will be an expert in all areas of business, especially if you are just starting out by yourself for the first time. Still not sure what I’m talking about…? Ok when you set up a business it will be something like this – you have a business idea, maybe it’ll be to sell art work that you produce…but that means you need premises, you need to buy in art supplies to produce your work, you have to sell and market your work, you have to bill your customers, and then if you’re really smart you’ll follow those customers up and start to build up a database of clients – probably using a computer system. Ok so let’s look at it closely.

You will have be good at the following:

art to start with

negoiating – to get the best deal on art supplies

real estate – to get the best gallery and work studio you can afford

marketing – to get the word out about your work

accounts and invoicing – to keep on top of your paper work

Computers – in order to keep an eye on your client base and people you invite to your exhibitions

So…that little gallery that you wanted to run, it suddenly turns into a major task to make it a viable business! But don’t panic! You can still run a company and be good at what you do, the key is to become an expert in finding good experts to fill the roles you can’t or don’t want to do. In the world of commerce it’s called “out sourcing” and it’s frankly a God send!

Here’s what we at Homefinder UK out source, our invoicing, all of our accountancy work such as book keeping and money payments for the franchisees, our IT work, and up until recently all of our copy and design work as well as the marketing. But as we’ve grown we’ve found that whilst we are excellent at the actual job of homefinding we’re also actually pretty good at marketing ourselves…so we’ve started to bring that in house too…but don’t forget we’ve been going for 5 years now and we only did this in our 4th year. Up until now we concentrated on our core business – homefinding – as we are the experts in that! 😉 So my advice when you start out…get the experts in and that’ll leave you free to get on with what you are good at! Yes it’ll cost you, but trust me…you’ll make more moeny concentrating on what you are good at rather than trying to do everything and ending up doing it all poorly!

Franchising. Is it for you and your company? There’s definately two heads to this coin. Franchising your company out and buying a franchise system off someone else. So lets start with dispelling a small myth here.

The BFA say if you are a potential franchisee looking to buy a franchise off someone then you must insist on being given access to ANY one of their current franchisees to speak to. (see Step 5 on this page of their website.) All very admirable, but let’s look at it realisitically! You cannot really expect to be able to go charging into a business of any sort and demand to be able to interupt someone’s working day and discuss at length their business! It’s just not acceptable, you wouldn’t expect to do it in a non franchised business so why you’d expect this be acceptable with a franchise is beyond me! I can see how the BFA may be thinking that you don’t want to be fobbed off with a “droid” of a franchisee who’s been feed all the answers by the franchisor, but realisitically different franchisees are at different stages of their business and lets face it…they are there to do a job, which in our case is Homefinding, not selling Homefinder UK franchises to all and sundry who decide to call out of the blue! It’s not fair to exepect that our franchisees will field these sorts of enquiries! So that’s the story from the franchisors point of view…basically please don’t interupt and distract my franchisees from their daily business for which they are paying for the privialge of being able to do! 🙂

But as a potential franchisee, know that as your franchisor I would extend the same protection to you as a franchisee if you were to join us…you too would be allowed to get on with your business free from “FAQ” phonecalls/visits…they should afterall and despite what the BFA think be fielded by the Head Office sales staff. We do allow potential franchisees that we have placed into our selection process the opportunity to “shadow” a current franchisee should they wish to find out more about the franchise…but yes we choose the franchisee that they will be shadowing…again because some of our franchisees are still getting started on their franchise journey, so wouldn’t make for very interesting franchises to shadow quite frankly! But at the end of the day we are running a business as are our franchisees…so I don’t think we are out of line in wanting to protect our business and that of the franchisees from random folk wanting a “guided tour of the factory”!!

There has to be a balance…whilst we are open and honest about our business, that’s exactly what we’re doing here… running a business…please allow us to get on with the job in hand! 🙂 Besides which…let’s face it…you might be the sort of person that we’d say we’d NEVER in a million years have as a franchisee…so why would we not want to vet your suitability for our network first too before allowing to free access to our franchisees? It works both ways and that is the crux of a franchise system…it’s a definate two way street!