From Friendship to Franchise Ownership
At Franchise Solutions, we believe that everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit inside them. To encourage people to get out there and explore franchise opportunities, we have sat down to talk with Debbie Shwetz, who along with her friend Dena Tripp, started Nothing Bundt Cakes. Nothing Bundt Cakes is an incredible franchise whose beginnings literally started around the dinner table. We asked Debbie to share how she and Dena started their franchise. Hearing from franchise owners is an excellent opportunity for potential franchisees to learn more about this exciting industry straight from the people who are out there doing it.
Bundt Beginnings
By Debbie Shwetz
Dena and I have been friends for 23 years. We were those friends who always wanted to go into business together but were waiting to come up with a great idea. One night around the dinner table, the idea of a bundt cake business was born! Our husbands thought we were crazy but we could not get the idea out of our heads or hearts. We wrote a business plan, developed our recipes and spent a year marketing from my kitchen before we felt certain we had a market for our boutique bundt cakes.
For 5 years we worked our business, ultimately opening a second location in Las Vegas and then a third in Phoenix. We chose to open in Phoenix because we wanted to grow and needed to understand how a remote location would work and what we would need to do to support such a location. Debbie moved to Phoenix to build and open that store and she worked with the manager who had been hired for about 6 months, and then moved back to Las Vegas. The idea was to grow corporately one store at a time.
It didn’t take us long for us to consider franchising. We realized that the idea of working with people as invested in our concept would be better for our business. Unfortunately, we found this out the hard way when on an unannounced visit to our Phoenix location, we found the entire staffing watching a movie on the store manager’s computer! This solidified it for us; we wanted people who were as devoted to the business as we were.
We went to the Franchise Expo in Washington, D.C. with our husbands and attended every single seminar we could on the concept of franchising. We walked the entire show and stopped at every booth and talked with all of the sales people. We also had appointments to interview two franchise consulting companies.
Fortunately one of the companies thought we had a unique concept so we flew to Chicago a few weeks later to meet and gain a better understanding of the process. We worked with them to solidify our strategy, franchise structure, financial projections for the franchise, legal documentation and sales. They were invaluable to us as we were so green to franchising. Many of the do’s and do not’s they shared with us we still use every day 5 years later.
In addition, we re-branded our concept and really thought through who we were and what messaging we wanted to send out to our guests. We streamlined all of our processes, developed the look and feel of our store front and re-developed all of our collateral material with new photography and copy. This was a year long process but so incredibly worth doing BEFORE we sold a franchise. I cannot imagine selling several franchises and then shortly after trying to convert them to our new brand – YIKES!! 
So, the gist of this long missive is:
- Evaluate your brand – what do you need to streamline and systematize BEFORE you sell a single franchise?
- Learn everything you can about franchising and ask yourself hard questions about the time and effort you are willing to give this growth model.
- If you don’t know anything about franchising, find a good consulting company to work with and take the time necessary to set up a great franchise system.
- Work with an excellent franchise attorney (we work with Harold Kestenbaum) and follow his advice. We put our attorney on retainer and contacted him on an almost daily basis in those early days.
- Be well capitalized as the franchise fee is not a way to fund your franchise system. Have some extra funds set aside just in case your franchise sales don’t happen as quickly as you anticipate.
- Do not create huge overhead in offices and staff. Keep these costs to a minimum as you will need every dollar to pay good people to sell your concept.
- Sell by market areas rather than across the entire US. Franchisees in a big city by themselves have a gigantic job to create brand awareness and if they are not absolutely amazing, can get lost and lonely.
- Consider profiling to choose candidates – you need all the help you can get to choose the right people no matter how much of a people person you are. You will be tempted to allow your judgement to be clouded because you need a sale!
- Join the IFA – this is an amazing organization and will help you in every aspect of franchising.
And, finally, be sure you are willing to work 12-14 hours a day and be completely consumed by franchising. There is so much to do, there literally is not enough time in the day, and people who have given you a great compliment by investing in your concept deserve your time and assistance when they NEED it, not when it is convenient for you. Remind yourself that nothing worth having comes easy, put your nose to the grindstone and love and hate what you do!! It will be worth it in the end.