During the
1990's some of the first ever grooming franchises were
offered. Fortunately in the 2000's we are seeing more
successful franchise grooming
opportunities. You can learn
more about today's franchises in
the new
Franchise Info Main Menu.
So
why aren't there more?
Franchising takes a great
commitment by the franchisor. Problems which lead to the
decline in grooming franchises were rarely the quality of
the franchise offering, but more centered on operations
required of
franchisor. We respect today's franchisors in grooming for
their commitment.
Early in the
1990's the owners of PetGroomer.com offered a franchise
grooming business for a short time. It took over 3 years to
preparing business and grooming training materials for
franchisees. In fact, the latter was a real problem.
Grooming training and franchising are a bit at odds with
each other. Most franchise consultants advise you that you
need to train the franchise in 2 weeks or less to operate
their new franchise business. Well, many of the potential
franchisees we spoke with did not know how to groom, and
therefore required grooming training. You simply cannot
train someone to groom in 2 weeks, even 4 weeks, and even 8
weeks is a bit shaky.
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Most franchisees
need to get working to earn some income from their business
long before 8 weeks, and so grooming franchises are far
better suited to franchisees with the time to learn grooming
before they purchase a franchise. Sounds good, but it can be
a major limitation. Keep in mind that the franchisor needs
business income too, and significant royalty payments don't
come for some time. Yes, franchisees pay a franchise fee,
but for new franchisors, most of the franchise fee is
invested back in franchisee training and results in little
or no profit for the franchisor. Therefore, franchisors must
have substantial savings to draw upon until they have quite
a few mature franchises in operation. Unfortunately, most
grooming franchisors simply are unprepared for these
obstacles, and they could probably make much more business
income by owning a chain of company-owned grooming
businesses instead.

As a one time
registered grooming franchisor we can also share something
else we learned from experience. We worked diligently since
the early 1960's to development truly professional grooming
operations, and then worked another 3 years documenting it
for franchisees. We came to learn that although we had done
so much work, you really cannot enforce franchisees to
follow your system to the letter. In fact, litigation
between franchisors and franchisees clearly show that
franchisees have a lot leeway in procedures. Therefore, we
could enforce how they used our logo licensed to them, but
could we make them follow our service marked "humane
bath procedure?" No. Could we enforce their correct use
of our clients relation program. No. It goes on and on.
When
you consider that our franchisees would not be working on
pizzas, yogurt, signs, or hamburgers, but on living pets
beloved by pet owners, we became very concerned about the
leeway we had to give franchisees to groom just about any
way they wanted under our corporate logo, and well, we bowed
out at great expense. In 40 years we never hurt or badly
handled a client, and we didn't want that to happen by
someone essentially licensing only our logo and possibly
sullying it by their lack of regard for our proven system.
The day we dropped out of grooming franchising was one we
will never forget, but now years later much of what we
prepared for franchisees is being used to train
extraordinary students in select grooming schools, and some
of it is right here at PetGroomer.com. In the long run it
was worth it.
We believe that
many other successful grooming business owners have also
considered franchising and discovered many of the same
problems we did. Perhaps many of them have also not chosen
to franchise for these and other reasons too. Several of the
1990's grooming franchises are now gone. Though the idea
is good, we don't project you will see many more grooming franchises.
We do see chains of company-owned grooming centers in the
future. Certainly a successful grooming business
can make a far quicker financial return by opening up
additional successful locations instead of franchising.
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