While some franchise opportunities in the building sector are insistent on building knowledge and experience, it’s also possible to enter the industry with no technical skills and soon be running your own business.
That’s the beauty of franchising, where a willingness to learn, a good customer services approach, and the ability to follow the system can bring success to a novice in the industry.
At BathroomWerx franchisees are offered support in technical training, admin support and mentoring. CEO George Yammouni explains “Bathroom Werx offers new franchisees a four week training course at our head office facility in Melbourne. The training course also includes airfares and accommodation.”
There’s technical and hands-on training on the many aspects of bathroom makeovers.
“We find that it takes a technician to have done about 20 bathrooms before he becomes competent and confident at doing the work,” says Yammouni.
“Sales and admin training covers the face to face conversations that our franchisees have with their customers and the knowledge required to be able to provide a solution for a customers bathroom as well as pricing the work.”
Further training on-site occurs two weeks after the business is started. “This gives them time to settle in and do a few jobs on their own. We have found this to be the most effective time to return which provides them with the most benefits. Sometimes they forgot some of the things that we did during the training and this time is spent reviewing a lot of training.
“After that we visit them again six months later. Telephone support is provided immediately and they have access to three different people who will provide technical, sales and admin support and backup.”
Bathroom Werx has a call centre team which provides customers with prices, can book jobs and quotes and send out further information.
Says Yammouni [pictured left], “With over 27 years’ experience, we have learnt the best way to run this business which makes the most amount of money for our franchisees. In the capital cities we even go out and do the quotes for our franchisees. This leaves them free to do the work and concentrate on providing the customer with the best possible quality finish.”
It also means that franchisees don’t need an expensive infrastructure to support their business because franchisees simply log onto the network to find out what they are doing next.
The company also implements the marketing plan in each of the franchisee’s territories and keeps track of the results.
“We are in business with our franchisees – we have to convert the leads we get into sales or they do not have jobs to do. We are both truly dependent on each other for survival – we get the jobs for them and they do the work,” says Yammouni.