Five minutes with the Eagle Boys franchise

Let’s start with how many Eagle Boys stores you have in Australia and in New Zealand.

The Eagle Boys franchise has now got about 190 stores across Australia. We also have quite a few of our kiosk operations around Australia but we don’t actually count them in our store chain actual numbers.

Why is that?

Mainly because they’re a moving target. Some of them trade two hours a day and some of them trade twice a week and some of them trade seven days a week, so we decided not to class them as fully blown stores. We’ve got so many of these little operations opening up in everything from schools through to truck stops and sporting stadiums. So we’re up and over the 200 mark all up and of course we built up just over 60 stores in New Zealand but we did sell that business off a few years back.

Of the local franchises here in Australia how many are franchisee owned?

We’re about 98 per cent franchised now.

How has the franchise been received in metropolitan Australia compared to your regional outlets?

Getting them started initially in some of the metro areas was probably a little more difficult just because of the cost of marketing but now that we’re established, we’ve got electronic media, we’re on TV with those markets and so forth, we’re doing very well. So they’re comparable definitely to the country markets.

You mentioned you have your drive-throughs, your micro stores, your retail outlets. Which of these have proven more successful for your franchise in terms of profit?

The drive through is the most successful. The solution stores are very, very successful but they’ve only been going for just over two years.

What do you mean by solution stores?

The particular model that we call solution stores are the ones that we’re putting into small high volume markets like the airports and sport stadiums and this is where we only sell six inch pizzas. We’ve basically named it a solution store because when looking at this particular product we’ve said this has a dozen different applications that can certainly give an answer to what we’ve never been able to supply before and that is fast fresh pizza in markets that weren’t available before. I mean you always go to the footy but you can never get a pizza or if you did it was dreadful.

The same situation at the airport, so we named that particular model which is basically a six inch pizza model a solution store and that particular model is giving in some cases an outstanding return on investment but overall I believe our drive through model is going to be the one that’s going to continue to drive the profitability in the business.

What kind of information do you disclose to your prospective franchisees with respect to the potential revenue/profit they stand to earn?

Let me first say that nothing has changed in 15 years. It’s been the same policy, the same procedure and the same attitude in this industry and that is you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. We used to give everybody as much information as we could. The minute it was slightly out or the franchisee who wasn’t performing irrespective of whether he was or wasn’t performing could come back and take the opportunity to cop out and use a lawyer to sue us. On the other hand if you get into a court of law and you say we gave no projections and no future earnings, the first thing that happens is the judge turns to you and says ‘well why didn’t you?, you’re experts in this field’.

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