WHAT I WOULD DO AS A FRANCHISEE

My name is Amrit Dhaliwal. I'm the CEO and founder of Walfinch. And today I'm going to talk about how I would buy a franchise if I was buying a franchise. I've been a franchisee and now I'm a franchisor.

And so if I was buying a franchise in any space, I would do a couple of different things. I would make sure that I have either spoken to five different companies, at very least within that one sector that I'm looking at, whether that's home care, grass care, restaurants, anything.

I would look at their unit level economics, you know, really think about the numbers and think, well, is it a profitable business? Is a core business profitable? Are the franchisees profitable on hold? Not just revenue, but actual profitability. Is a franchise or interested in that profitability? I would look at the support level and the people that I'm being supported by within the franchise.

So not just who's leading it and CEO and the founders, because that is super important and thinking about their direction, but also about who they employ. What calibre of people do they have working with you? Because when that Tuesday afternoon problem kicks in, you're going to be picking up with that support team, not with that CEO in variable. So I think it's super important to think about, can I speak to the support team?

The other thing that I don't get asked enough, and I always push really heavily onto anyone looking at buying the franchise is speak to franchisees of your choice, not people that I've curated and said, you can only speak to these three, speak to anyone and really go far and wide. Spend your time, figure it out. Because as a franchisor you're always going to say the great things. But the franchisees that are receiving that support and working with that franchisor day in, day out are the ones that will always give you the real juice and tell you what's what. And that's the important part.

Now what I would always say to a franchisor is give me a mixed bag, give me a top performer, someone average and someone struggling. Don't tell me who they are, bung them up and give me, let me pick up the phone for them. Invariably you might find that the top performers are people that are really out there driving. And maybe the reverse is true for those are not performing. And sometimes it's a franchisor issue and support level issue and so on. But it allows you to ask the right questions, get a gut feeling on what's going on and get out there.

The other thing I would do is make sure that I have got a franchise lawyer, that you can go to the British Franchise Association's panel of law firms and speak to a franchising lawyer. Not an off the shelf kind of high street lawyer, specifically a franchising lawyer, ideally someone vetted by the BFA, the British Franchise Association. And I would really pick up with them and say, please look at these agreements and tell me what I'm signing and really what are the questions I need to ask.

And in fact, if you're going down that journey with a couple of franchisors and you've spoken to the franchisees, you've looked at their profitability, you've spoken to the support team, you've spoken to the CEO and founder, you've looked at their franchise agreement, you've got a BFA lawyer that has looked at the franchise agreement. You'll really get a sense of what it is.

The other thing I would really love to do if I was buying a business, especially from the industry that I've not been in, is going to sit in an office for a little while, or retail premises or whatever the business might be, get in there, get a vibe of it and see what it's like, maybe even mystery shop and say, hey, look, you know, I want to go and buy a burger and see what their service is like and really get a sense of the business from both sides of it, as a consumer, as a business owner and so on. I think take it slowly, think about the whole process, make sure you speak to a few people so you've got something to compare. I hope that's been useful and that's how I would do it as a former franchisee.

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