Colin Ongley, General Manager ANZ, at Express Employment Professionals, joined us for a brief chat at the Sydney Franchising and Business Opportunities Expo, August 2023.

Colin gave us some insights into the Express Pros brand and approach, and some of the key attributes they look for to be a successful franchise owner in the business.

What is your business?

Our business is Express Employment Professionals, which is effectively a recruitment firm. We help good companies find good people and good people find good jobs.

What do you love about the business and what you do?

Well, I love the fact that we can help people, that's the ultimate game is get people jobs, but to help franchisees make connections with their community.

Ultimately, we're a community business.

So if we can get franchisees to connect with companies in their community and help them connect individuals in their community with jobs, everybody wins.

What type of person is a good fit for the franchise?

Ultimately, we want somebody who's engaged in doing something on behalf of their community.

We're a people business after all, so we want to get outcomes for employees and for employers. The truth is though, you also need to be able to connect with people.

And on that level we're looking for people who are good at talking to people. Effectively, you’ve got to be good at sales.

What would you like people to know about your franchise offer?

Well, the franchise offer at the moment for Express is that we're a 40 year old firm offering a 40% discount on our franchise fee up until May 2024.

That's a significant saving and shouldn't be sneezed at. We're offering it because we know that we've got a good thing and after 40 years, we've got a proven recipe.

So we just want to get more people interested in the opportunity to take on an Express franchise.

What’s a misconception you think people could have about the business?

One of the misconceptions is that people don't think they're good at sales, so they're never going to be able to create opportunities for themselves because they don't consider themselves salespeople.

Ultimately, when you're talking to a person, you're selling. When you're talking to your children you're selling.

Everybody can sell.

You've just have the confidence to get out there and have a conversation.

Your key focus for the next 12-18 months?

Well, our focus is always on franchisees first, so our focus at Express is to continue to innovate. We're always looking at what things are doing to the market.

There's a lot of talk about the likes of AI and Chat GPT at the moment, for instance, replacing people's jobs. That obviously has an impact on the recruitment business.

So what are we doing?

We're making sure we're providing tools to our franchisees so they can always stay ahead of the curve and stay relevant.