Special Feature
How did you expand to eight restaurants? For the first couple of years, I ran the five restaurants myself as a supervisor. When in 2009, McDonald’s came to me and offered the Blackpool restaurants for me to buy, I took on a supervisor to look after the Preston restaurants. It was a calculated risk but if I was to get the best out of the Blackpool restaurants, I needed that structure.
What are you plans? My goal is grow to eight to 14 restaurants in the next five to 10 years. I think that’s achievable from my end.
Any tips? Don’t become so big that you become a mini- corporation and lose the benefits of franchising.
Granite Transformations
After running his own IT recruitment business, Peter Morrison opened his first Granite Transformations showroom in Cambridge in 2004 and now runs a second in Brentwood.
Will you open another store? In current trading conditions, we need to run a tight ship in terms of costs. There is the opportunity to open a third showroom, but for the moment I am happy consolidating my current businesses.
Any tips?
Identify the right location at the right price and don’t get tied up in a ridiculous long-term lease. Be comfortable with delegation: things will happen once you have the right people there.
Domino’s Pizza
After 20 years in IT, Richard Johnson decided to go into business for himself. After buying his first store in Stockport nearly three years ago, he’s gone on to acquire four others.
you need to have good store managers. You can’t grow without the team below you to take over.
Any tips? It’s absolutely vital to choose the franchisor correctly. A tremendous amount hinges on having a great franchisor that lets you grow to the level you want to.
What skills do you need? You have to be a very all-round person, with lots of drive, lots of enthusiasm. But if you’ve got a great product and you believe in it, you get an awful lot of support in franchising, which you wouldn’t get on your own.
Cash Generator
After running Spar stores and creating an exhaust franchise, Mal Elwood is about to open his 11th Cash Generator store this month.
What is the attraction of owning so many businesses? It’s quite an easy business to replicate, being a franchise, but it’s just what I do. I enjoy the challenge of growing something.
What are the skills needed to run multiple stores?
Why did you open the second store? To be a credible business, you need to have retail premises within reasonably close distance to your customers, even though probably the majority never come into the showroom. Also, Brentwood was always part of our patch, but it was undeveloped so the thinking was to increase revenue and profit by better use of our territory.
How has it affected things? There’s now a 50/50 split in our business between the two showrooms. You get more stability from the point of view of sales. Everyone has poor runs in terms of sales, but it usually coincides with the other store doing better so it balances out.
Do you have to split your time? I have a sales person who works with the other showroom so it’s fairly self-sufficient.
Did you have any experience of retail or catering before you started? None at all, which was one of the things I discussed with Domino’s. But I had a wide range of experience, capability in growing business and I had led teams.
What are the advantages to owning more than one store? You can make more money, you can promote staff because it’s a larger group and move them from one store to another to gain experience.
How different is it managing more than one shop? In general, it’s slightly less hands-on. I’m not in each store as much so I rely more on processes to make sure everything’s working properly. But
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Businessfranchise.com | December/January 2012
The biggest thing is a team of good people. Without good people you can’t grow like that. I also tend to be very analytical, systemise things and replicate it in all my stores.
Are you as hands-on as when you had one store?
When you get over a certain number, you have to be a little bit more remote, so you have to manage the business through other people. If you’re very hands-on, you can’t grow.
How does opening new stores affect finance? As you grow beyond five stores, costs increase because you’ve got extra overheads. You carry the extra burden of what you would have done if you’d been in the store the whole time. But although individual profits fall off, total profitability rises significantly. n
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