Many describe franchising as “the best of both worlds”, and in a recent article from Radfield, the franchise detailed exactly why it’s become such a popular business model.
The home care franchise began its aforementioned (and highly informative) article by letting readers know that for start-ups, 2020 had been a record-breaking year, with over 400,000 businesses formed in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Becoming your own boss, with all its various pros and cons, has become increasingly popular since this time, and as Radfield Home Care put it, doing this “can take many different shapes and take you down multiple different [routes]”. One such route is franchising, and many are asking right now: Should I invest in a franchise, or should I go it alone?
After sharing some key stats about franchising - including the fact that as of 2018, 93% of franchise partners reported profitability [British Franchise Association] - Radfield Home Care shared a quote from Matt Barnes, a franchisee in Wycombe, Beaconsfield and South Bucks. In Matt’s words, explaining what led him to franchising, “I had been looking to start my own business for a little while. [...] For just over a decade, I was helping to grow and launch small businesses, and I loved it. It reached a time though when I thought I’d like to do that for myself rather than working my socks off for someone else.”
Matt continued, “Franchising was always on my radar, but I made the conscious decision that I didn’t want to stay in financial services, so I knew I would be going into an industry that I didn’t really have experience with. With that in mind, I was always pretty likely to go down the franchising route. We needed the expertise of a company like Radfield that had the knowledge. Having the network, support, policies and procedures to help really smooths the process of moving forward.”
Finally, Radfield touched on what is, in its eyes, one of the biggest pros of franchising - the power of the network. In the words of Alex Green, Radfield Home Care Co-Founder, “Even before COVID was classed as an epidemic in China, we [as a franchisor] had highlighted the virus as a potential risk and took it upon ourselves to set up a task force and order large stocks of PPE for the network. This was well before independent business owners were thinking about how it may impact their local businesses in Yorkshire or Surrey, for example.”
Alex continued, “As lockdowns took hold, we then took full responsibility for keeping abreast of the ever-changing government legislation, developing that into our policies and procedures and communicating what this meant to franchise partners and their teams on the ground. Some of these updates were being released at 21:00 on a Friday evening and had to be in place by midnight. If you were an independent business just trying to look after your clients, you probably wouldn’t even have seen the update until the next morning, let alone [been able to] digest it, update policies and roll it out.”
Alex concluded, “For me, it is this collaborative approach and strategic planning of franchising that really makes the difference both during times of crisis and day to day running of your business. Without this, it must have been extremely difficult to remain compliant and safe during the pandemic.” If you’d like to find out more about Radfield’s collaborative approach and competitive franchise offering, you can visit the franchise’s profile page (linked above).
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