Dear Farillio member,

On 9th April 2021, you asked our fantastic expert Carl Reader on the Go Far Fast Show:

“Carl, can I ask you about franchising? I looked you up and I know that you wrote a book on it and I'm wondering whether this would be a good model for my business? I am a fitness coach and I have also been producing some nutrition products through working with another business. I can't scale my business on my own because I'm too busy to take on more clients. However, I'm getting lots of requests for training and I'm wondering whether it could be a good solution to keep the clients even if I'm not the one doing every training session. What do you think?”

And Carl said:

Be mighty always, Farillio

Transcript:

“ Well, that's a really good question. Again, there could be a really long answer to this! However, franchising very simply is a great model for some businesses but not all businesses. It consists of having an agreement, an operations manual, a culture and a way of doing things, and a strong brand. The problem that you've got as a new franchisor – and I'll be honest I love franchising as a model – is that it seems a lot easier than it is. To get to the stage where you've got a franchise that you can ethically sell to somebody else, and have the strength of the brand and the operations manual, you're going to be working two jobs to get to that stage. You're going to be doing the job of a personal trainer and you'll also be doing the job of the franchisor. It's not going to be cheap to do it and it's not going to be easy. I think the particularly challenging thing that you might also have here is that you need to understand what the hook is. What would stop the personal trainers from going off and doing it themselves? The likelihood is, and I don't know the ins and outs of your model, but it probably won't be anything too innovative when it comes to training. There might be some adaptations compared to what other trainers do, but it will probably be something down to technology in the way that you transact and relate with your customers. It might also be down to some amazing branding, however it's a really tough market to go into. Either way, it's probably going to cost you tens of thousands of pounds before you can even get into the game of franchising this. I would wait up and I'm more than happy to have a chat offline about the ins and outs and how it could work. I would also consider whether just employing a PT could be another option. It might not be your immediate choice however, in the early days, if we're just looking for overflow for one or two or three leads it will be far cheaper and a more sustainable way of doing it. For a personal training franchise to be successful, you would only really start getting payback at about franchisee number 25 or 30, based on my experience. There will be a lot of investment up to that point and it's depending on whether you want to go on that journey. Having said that, the capacity, if you do it properly, could be up to 600 in the UK, and then you could go overseas. There's a huge opportunity but it's a significantly different business from what you're running today. I guess you need to ask yourself if you want to be a personal trainer or a franchisor."

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