“The support we offer to our franchise business owners is the key differentiator between us and the rest of the industry. And in times like these, being part of a franchise network can actually increase turnover if they take on board all the help and support that is available to them.

That’s because anyone who is a franchise owner has bought into a proven business model. They have effectively bought a licence to replicate a particular business model and come under the umbrella of a brand and can take advantage of the benefit that offers.

In our case, our franchise business owners become part of a group which has been franchising for more than 35 years and was one of the founder members of the industry’s governing body, the British Franchise Association.

During those 35 years, Apollo Blinds has developed and refined its business model in order to help new and existing franchise business owners maximise every opportunity to generate sales. In this day and age it’s not merely enough to give our network the commercial advantage of offering the UK’s widest choice of window blinds, shutters and awnings and the best quality products, and expect them to get on with it.

People become franchise business owners because they want to run their own company using an established brand and no matter how good their business acumen they can’t be great at everything.

That’s where support comes in.

Apollo Blinds offers four key areas of support: business support, training, resources and incentives.

Right from day one we work with potential franchise business owners to identify their strengths and weaknesses so we can assess where they might need business support. Great salespeople are notorious for loathing admin and some people who excel at the hands-on aspects of measuring and fitting blinds aren’t necessarily the best at business planning. Like everything in life, it takes all sorts and the role of our franchise support team is to identify areas where there are skills or knowledge gaps.

The team is a dedicated group with some based at our head office providing telephone advice and assistance, and others are on the road visiting franchise business owners to provide one-to-one support. This kind of support is valuable to our franchise owners because they can receive advice which helps their business stay on track and share knowledge from elsewhere in the network. A simple example of this was when one of our team went out with a franchise business owner to an appointment where the customer wanted Venetian blinds. Our Business Development Manager suggested taking our new Roman collection book in as well as the Venetian range the customer had initially requested. The franchise owner ended up increasing his order value three-fold on what he was expecting because the customer was offered the choice and plumped for the more expensive Romans.

The business support also encompasses the buying power of a large brand. We have the muscle to negotiate preferential rates on everything from advertising in directories such as Yellow Pages to business insurance and public liability cover. We’ve also just negotiated a reduced rate for our network to become members of the Forum of Private Business – a UK-wide trade organisation that specialises in providing information on such things as risk assessments for commercial contracts and updates in employment and health & safety legislation.

A lot of our energy in 2008 was focused on improving the training and resources available to our network.

We laid on free courses on new products, marketing and finance initiatives. We have more planned for 2009 with courses on PR and a raft of sales training. As a result of attending the marketing course one of our franchise owners in Glasgow has increased recall and response rates to advertising in her local newspapers and generated a £6,000 return from a £600 investment in a local leafleting campaign.

The reason she was able to react quickly to the distribution company’s offer was that she logged onto our Intranet and was able to select the leaflet she wanted and pass it straight to the mailing house.

Our Intranet is a veritable treasure trove of resources for our network. It contains a plethora of different adverts and leaflets and a variety of business support tools covering advice guides on managing a customer database to telephone scripts. There’s also a raft of letter templates that can be downloaded and used to write to customers. The same Glasgow franchise owner has been able to increase her conversion rate by 20 per cent because she now uses one of the follow-up quote letters stored on the Intranet for the exclusive use of our network.

Akin to this is the support of our marketing department which coordinates all our promotional activity. We have a different offer every month and they are responsible for designing all the artwork and distributing the window banners to all our stores.
And last but by no means least, there’s our incentive scheme. This February we are taking our top eight performing franchise businesses to Dubai to enjoy the sunshine and the fruits of their labour in increasing sales for themselves and Apollo Blinds.
Where else can anyone running a window blinds company get business support, training, resources and incentives? That’s why I believe franchise businesses are best placed to weather the storm in the bad times and fill their boots in the good times.”

• Appollo Blinds