Should you franchise 'everything'?

Geoff McDonnell, Owner and Managing Partner of Business Essentials, joined us for a brief chat to talk on the business at the Sydney Franchising Expo in May 2024.

Geoff highlighted a number of things around the way they operate, in particular a focus on not ‘franchising everything’, the enjoyment of helping people realise their dream or vision, and the future focus of AI and other applications in helping brands in the franchise recruitment process amongst other things.

"So we get called in for two reasons.

One is somebody's got a really good idea, or they think it's a great idea, want to build a franchise.

We help them decide whether they should and take them all the way to market.

Experience

AV Jennings, 25, 30 years ago, got an understanding of what franchising was.

Then State Manager, Mortgage Choice, worked with Comm Bank, built a franchise system inside the bank, and then from there realised that this is a passion of mine, to help people achieve what they want to achieve.

People should know

That we won't help you if we don't think we can.

We only take clients on where we genuinely think we can achieve the outcome that they're trying to achieve.

A lot of people will franchise everything and I don't think that's appropriate.

For us, it's about do we genuinely think we can teach you, and can we make the franchisees profitable?

What I love

The people, the camaraderie of the sector, events like this obviously are one of those things.

And helping people achieve something they may have thought about one day, but never really believed they could achieve, and helping bring that to fruition.

The future

 AI, how that might help in recruitment. 

Helping people who are thinking about buying a franchise really understand what that looks like, because I don't think there's enough information about that."