Recently we have seen a lot of jobs coming to the franchisees that cross their territory boundaries. Each franchisee has an exclusive territory for them to work in, but many have been signing up work for companies with multiple buildings that cross that franchisees territory boundaries.
Because our franchisees each work for themselves, but also work as a nationwide team, the franchisees ‘share’ the work with their neighbours. If they sign up work, they enlist the franchisees in the other territories where work needs to be completed and so a single job discovered by one franchisee can sometimes lead to work for multiple franchisees.
I really believe that this is what larger companies are looking for. They want a nation-wide company to work with, but they want local operators to complete the work. To me it shows the community of franchisees we have that are willing to share the work with other franchisees. Even though they can’t work out of territory, it is never an issue because they work together to help the customer.
It is this customer focus that Gutter-Vac was built on. Franchisees even go to meetings together and work together to quote the work across territories to give the customer the best possible service.
I hear a lot of stories of other franchises where franchisees act as if they are in competition with each other. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see that our franchisees naturally just want to share and work together to get a result as a true team would.
We also have some clients that are major national or state companies that come via head office and we major the contract on behalf of our franchisees so that the customer has one point of contact, but again local operators.
Recently, we have even had neighbouring franchisees helping each other to get jobs completed faster for the customer. One franchisee will enlist the help of their neighbouring franchisee on large jobs so that they can have multiple machines and multiple ‘hands on deck’ (I should say roof!) to get the job completed for the customer in a shorter time frame which the customers love when a job needs to be completed for a short deadline.
When I started this business 20 years ago, I really wanted to make customer service the priority. Never would I have dreamed that the franchisees would work together as they do today. I had hoped they would, but to see it happening now, I can’t tell you how great that makes me feel that our franchisees can work together to get the best result for our customers.
Got a big job of gutter cleaning? We can help you out! No job is too big for us.
