Franchising a cleaning company
August 1st 2005

Peter Finlay, Managing Director, The Franchise Group and The Franchise Doctors is one of Britain’s leading specialists on the development of franchising strategies, and is the founder and coowner of the Tan City chain of franchises. Peter has over 25 years experience in the franchising industry.

Peter started one of the first direct cleaning franchises in the East Midlands, importing cleaning machines from Canada. He later went on to sell the company and ended up franchising the very company that bought it from him. The company boasted a number of household names as its clients including Comet, Currys and Whitbread.

“Franchising is growing rapidly as a way for successful small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to grow their business without speculatively investing substantial sums of money on more sales people or extra branches and cleaning companies wanting to take advantage of this are no exception.

“There has always been a want and need for cleaning companies to franchise their business. For the cleaning companies themselves it is popular business strategy for a number of reasons but mainly due to the relatively low set up costs and training required. Also, contrary to popular belief, franchising of cleaning companies isn’t a new phenomenon but rather is one that has been around for years and many companies have followed the trend and started franchising their businesses.

“We launched The Franchise Doctors just over six months ago and within days of starting operations, we had over 100 enquiries from companies wanting us to franchise their business and out of those several were cleaning companies.

“Too many companies think that franchising their business will ensure an easy route to get capital into the business. But these businesses fail to see how much support they will need to give to their franchises in order for the business to be a success. So many companies simply chase ‘the money’ (franchise fees) without supplying the franchisees with good support systems. It’s important that they have excellent training, help and support with lead generation and marketing collateral and so on.

“Here at The Franchise Doctors we only look at companies that share the same vision as ours. We are quite specific in the types of companies we help franchise and therefore are only interested in the franchise network that we have created for our clients. Therefore, when we select clients, we need to be 100% sure that they have a good support structure in place in their business, which we will then develop further on behalf of the franchisees we recruit for the client.

“We don’t just design the scheme, we manage it for the client, recruiting high quality franchisees, developing and training them, as well as running the sales and marketing and installing superb systems.

If a franchise operation is to be successful, the company must be professional in its approach at every stage and committed to long term development and support.”