Exclusive Interview
“We cover the cost of the fit-out and then say to the franchisee: ‘Here’s the keys, it’s your business’ from day one”
the relationship is key with the regional manager that that works together. More importantly, what can they learn from our internals and what can our internals learn from the externals? And what can our retail estate of company-owned Vodafone stores learn from them and each other? It’s a kind of information gathering – what can they bring to the party that we can implement in the main estate as well?
What does the future hold for Vodafone? Jon: We’re now looking to open in another 50 to 60 locations next year. The franchise model has made us realise that in a lot of smaller towns where before we wouldn’t have considered opening, well, now we can! So we’ll cover the cost of the fit-out and then, to the franchisee, we say straight away: “Here’s the keys, it’s your business” from day one. We’re trying to launch entrepreneurs
onto the ladder, so I’m not going to ask someone to invest loads of capital into it, we’ll do that, that’s what we’re here for. We’re a global brand, we should be supporting you. We can be that supporting partner for you to get on your way in the world of entrepreneurship... become a franchisee for the first time and then use us to scale up and do other things. There’s bigger, wide-reaching plans, too!
Next year, we’ve got more stores coming, which is great news. We’re sitting here in our new London digital HQ, we’ve got a thousand people now based in London driving our digital platforms – and that should be great news to our franchisees out there, because a lot of those people are working on improving the app so that customers aren’t coming in for low-level queries, they’re coming in for genuine acquisition. They’re working on lots of improvements to make things faster, make it easier to buy from us.
34 | The Franchise Magazine 2020
In terms of Vodafone as a global brand,
we’re investing a huge amount of money in the UK – £500million a year on a new 5G network, which will revolutionise the UK economy. With 5G, no one really knows what’s going to happen next, but we all know it’s going to totally change how people work and live. So our partners are brilliantly placed
to work with a global corporation that’s going to continue to invest in a key market and enjoy the footfall and the customer base that’s going to come with that.
Lee: Speaking personally, I’m about to go into my 39th year in retail. When I look at
the last 40 years, it’s unbelievable what the sector has gone through... What’s the next 10 going to bring? Who knows? I think all we can do is be real, good and true agents of change and respond to whatever the market wants us to do – and part of that is that all the stores we’re opening now are franchise partner agent stores.
Mark: For me, the more people I can make business owners that I personally brought to the business – and this is certainly a personal ambition – the more people we can do that with, the better! And, of course, put a bit more money in their pocket at the end of the day, too!
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