Expanding Your Franchise Concept

5 key strategies to attract bank financing and franchisees.

QSR Magazine:

With many franchise concepts looking to expand, banks will be selective about which business models to finance. And potential franchise buyers will be attracted to franchisors who offer the best opportunity to operate a profitable business. For the franchisor looking to expand, this five-point checklist provides strategies that determine the success of his growth plans.

Profile Your Customers
The first priority when planning expansion to new markets is to profile your customers. Understanding your customers is the basis and driver for the other strategies presented here. An accurate customer profile allows you to target markets that have high concentrations of consumers with a similar profile.

If you have a customer address list, it’s easy to profile customers. Customer addresses are the foundation for a profile.

Commercially available demographic, lifestyle, and buying behavior data can be correlated to a customer address and used to develop a composite profile of your customer. Retail POS data, if available, can also be part of the profile.

If you don’t have a customer address list, you can still develop a customer profile. Quick-serve restaurants, for example, can collect survey and customer address data on site. In addition, commercial survey data from MRI and other sources can be used in developing customer profiles.

The most important point is that you must know your target customer. Your bank will ask. Your potential franchisees will ask. The better you can define and profile your customer, the easier it is to find more of them.

Find Successful Markets… read on.