Case Studies

Case Studies – Hire a Hubby

Hire A Hubby is Australia’s largest handyman business. Franchisees provide handyman, repairs, maintenance and renovation services for individuals and companies throughout Australia, NZ and the UK. Hire A Hubby also has a commercial division which completes large scale and national jobs, utilising a distributed network of franchisees.

The idea for Hire A Hubby was born back in 1996, when the founder was doing some handyman work in his lounge room when his wife’s friend quipped, “gee he’s handy, can I hire your hubby?” 21 years later there are now 321 franchisees in Australia, 50 in NZ and 10 in the UK.

Historically, Hire A Hubby’s franchisees have relied heavily on manual processes for invoicing, quoting and financial management. Not only was this an inefficient process for franchisees, it also meant Hire A Hubby didn’t have real time access to quantifiable data on franchisees such as financial information, quote conversion rates, or how their time was being spent. Without this real time data, it was difficult for Hire A Hubby to best support the business of each franchisee or to benchmark the performance of franchisees.

Other franchisor processes such as compliance, recruitment and billing were either carried out manually or across multiple systems – leading to time, money and resource inefficiencies.

To address these issues, in 2011 Hire A Hubby embarked on a digital transformation process to develop a bespoke and customised all in one cloud-based solution to manage every part of their business digitally – now known as Franchise Cloud Solutions.

During the development and rollout, Hire A Hubby quickly realised that the system had much more potential than they had originally expected. This led to the incorporation of additional functions over the course of six years including Xero integration, an admin solution, a job calendar, a timesheet solution and various task management functions. Essentially, every time Hire A Hubby came across a manual process, they created the capability to automate the process within the system.

As a result, Hire A Hubby quickly realised the system’s potential as a flexible and scaleable industry wide solution – and in 2017 Franchise Cloud Solutions was born.

Franchise Cloud Solutions has transformed Hire A Hubby’s business. Hire A Hubby now benefits from:

• One location for all business activity – single source of truth
• Zero duplication of data entry
• A centralised recruitment platform
• Robust compliance management
• Reportable support activities across the processes of on-boarding, training, launch and ongoing franchisee management
• Benchmarking
• Meeting management solutions
• Access anywhere, anytime, via any device

Hire A Hubby has achieved 92% adoption of the system, well surpassing their expectations. The feedback from franchisees has been overwhelmingly positive, and as such, franchisee tenure has increased year on year.

Franchise Cloud Solutions has also improved Hire A Hubby’s conversion rates for franchisee recruitment. With the entire sales journey tracked through Salesforce, understanding where leads are in the sales process and converting them is far simpler.

There were also unexpected benefits to the recruitment process. System data revealed that 25% of Hire A Hubby’s franchising inquiries were actually tradespeople looking for work. This enabled Hire A Hubby to filter these people out of the franchisee recruitment process, improve the quality of leads and improve their conversion rate. It also opened up an opportunity for Hire A Hubby to add further value by helping franchisees recruit staff by building a pool of candidates to draw on at no extra cost for recruitment.

Franchise Cloud Solutions has also improved morale among operations staff. Previously, as data wasn’t available in real time, operations staff often could only identify an issue once it was too late to make a difference. Now, thanks to Franchise Cloud Solutions, operations staff have much better visibility of franchisee performance, enabling them to intervene earlier if there is an issue, stop behaviours which may contribute to a decline and identify growth opportunities.

Case Study – Tile Rescue

Tile Rescue has been providing professional tile and grout cleaning and maintenance services for a decade and has over 40 franchises Australia wide.

With the wider franchise industry under scrutiny and many franchisors struggling, Tile Rescue is an example of a franchisor which is finding success through investing in best practice, with the help of Franchise Cloud Solutions, an initiative of award winning franchisor Hire a Hubby.

Tile Rescue has ambitious growth goals – the aim is to double the number of franchises within three years. To enable this growth strategy, Tile Rescue partnered with Franchise Cloud Solutions in October 2017 to bolster its franchisee recruitment efforts. The team engaged Franchise Cloud Solutions on a consulting basis to employ their best practice recruitment methodology and also adopted their FranchiseRecruiter software which manages franchisee recruitment end-to-end from the initial enquiry through to the finalisation of the disclosure documents and franchise agreement.

After auditing Tile Rescue’s approach, Franchise Cloud Solutions recognised that Tile Rescue was undervaluing their franchise opportunities. The team recommended that Tile Rescue create a tiered system of bronze, silver and gold franchises rated according to the value of the opportunity and initial cost. This would more clearly demonstrate the value proposition of each opportunity.

The result was that the next two franchises sold were high value gold franchises. Tile Rescue was able to earn an additional $40,000 through these sales, helping cover the costs of their initial investment, and demonstrating a strong return on their investment in Franchise Cloud Solutions in less than six months.

Additionally, Franchise Cloud Solutions recommended that Tile Rescue adjust their recruitment sales process. One aspect of this was the launch of information nights to better engage prospects and move them more seamlessly through the sales process from initial interest to sale. The first information night was held in March 2018 which helped convert the two gold franchise sales.

Bill Hyde, Founder and Director of Tile Rescue, is thrilled with the results.

“Working with Franchise Cloud Solutions has been a fantastic experience. Their methodology and technology has been developed and tested by the very successful Hire A Hubby, so we know its best practice and that it actually works.

“Working with a team that actually walks the talk makes a big difference. Compared to other consultants in the space, Franchise Cloud Solutions genuinely understand the challenges and opportunities facing franchisors, because they’ve faced them themselves.

“Our outcomes in less than six months have well and truly exceeded our expectations and made a difference to our bottom line results. We couldn’t be happier.”