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Mad Mex innovation, expansion and franchisee support

Sarah Stowe

Mad Mex has been franchising for 12 years. Here Founder Clovis Young talks about innovation, expansion and franchisee support

Q: What innovations are helping franchisees’ businesses?

A: We’ve completed a major aesthetic design refresh to our restaurants to align them with our “fresh fuel for life” brand positioning. We want to support and inspire our customers to live a big life and to eat healthy and tasty Mexican food as part of these big life ambitions. Our restaurants provide a beachy, relaxed environment that suits the “Mexicana” theme, and is decluttered, clean and bright. 

With delivery growing, we’ve also partnered with delivery providers to extend the reach of our stores and deliver the Mad Mex brand experience into people’s homes. Our  app reflects the FFFL design and makes it faster and easier for customers to place orders and get cool loyalty member benefits. 

Our digital marketing has evolved to be more metric and ROI oriented and when combined with grassroots local area marketing is helping franchisees reach their community beyond the bounds of their restaurant, resulting in greater engagement and more customers.

Q: What is your expansion plan for the next 12 months?

A: We have some big goals and a clear vision to grow our network across the country to build on the regions where we have a solid restaurant footprint. 

To bolster our growth plans, we brought in new development experts who are veterans and leaders in their respective fields. Our franchising, leasing store design and construction team will support our franchisees to get them set up for success from the first day of operation.

We have also completed a full network development plan to better understand what drives success in our locations and we are applying that to future locations, helping us to better drive performance and profitability for our franchisees.

Q. How do you support franchisees in their businesses?

A: Every franchisee has a dedicated regional operations manager (ROM) who shepherds the franchisee through the challenges of business. Their ROM provides advice, guidance, best practice and experience in best in class operations to give our franchisees every possible success to run a profitable business.

From a store level, our ROMs drive performance, with transparency to our franchisees of restaurant performance and incentivising them and their teams to reach new heights. We create competitions for restaurants to challenge each other and outperform their own expectations. We like to have fun while getting awesome results.

Performance targets for our stores are derived from where we see franchisees getting the most bang for their buck and encouraging sales and operational behaviours in the restaurant teams to continually raise the bar.

As a franchisor, we obsess over the details as we too have skin in the game through our corporate restaurants. We continually monitor supplier agreements and market pricing for improvements in our costs of goods sold, and maintain key relationships with our landlords to make sure we are the Mexican brand of choice in their future dining precincts. 

Rental discussions are always ongoing with landlords as we continue to build symbiotic relationships.

This Q&A is an edited extract from Inside Franchise Business magazine MayJuly 2021.