Franchise and conquer

The Noodle House, DIFC: Multi-brand portfolio holder, Jumeirah Restaurants, already has its flagship brand The Noodle House in the Middle East and bey

 Karen Osman investigates why franchising is the chosen expansion route for home grown and international brands alike.

The crusade for consistency is a battle that every franchise owner must fight on a daily basis, with training, centralised operations, audits and aligned communication being the weapons of choice.

It’s these systems and processes that can make or break a venture. Understanding your business and documenting every single process is a time consuming but necessary endeavour.

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More Café, one of Dubai’s home grown franchise brands, has eight outlets in Dubai, three of which are owned and managed and the remainder franchised to Al Tayer, which holds the rights for the GCC market.

Marike Lap, managing director of More, emphasises the importance of this process, explaining how it supported the More expansion: “We set up two stores and then we set up our manuals and we used them to open our third store to test and then to adjust them.

You need to structure your business from A to Z before you franchise...everything from the drawings to the architectural specifications, so there’s no doubt between you and the franchisee as to exactly how you want to operate your brand”.

Just Falafel, another home grown brand, has big plans when it comes to expansion, aiming for 75 stores in the UAE in the next five years as well as targeting the GCC market in 2012 and Europe in 2013.

Consistency is the key aim and to support this, Mohamad Bitar, founder and managing director of the Just Falafel brand, was keen to put a solid infrastructure in place.

“We’ve invested in an 8000ft central production kitchen and a training facility so that we can train our franchisees and support them. You need the facilities — you can’t just open a franchise and not give franchisees the proper support.”

Joseph Tabet, regional director of the global sandwich brand, Subway agrees and explains their award-winning approach to franchise support: “The Subway franchise has been named the number one franchisee opportunity by Entrepreneur magazine for the 11th year, and this is because of the model and services we provide our franchisees.

Any franchisee is entitled to training, continuous online training, on-going business support in running the store properly and profitably, assessment of location and evaluation, [access to the] operation manual that compiles more than 48 years of experience, proven control systems that help manage the business better, sharing of best practices worldwide, marketing support to help improve sales, and monthly visits by our business consultant to help improve profitability of the store.”

At approximately US $100,000 to $250,000 for the business (depending on size of location) such a support system would be worth every cent to a potential franchisee and vital when it comes to achieving the master franchise target of 500 stores across the region by 2015.