3 Good Reasons Not to Franchise Your Business

Everyone knows ‘a guy.’ You drop your phone, or it just stops working, and in an effort to avoid paying hundreds of dollars for a new one, you go to your ‘guy’ to get it fixed. But “it’s not a great experience,” says Donna Custance. “The word we hear most often to describe those places is ‘sketchy.’”

Custance is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Fixt Wireless Repair, which aims to supplant those ‘guys.’ The company has six locations in the Greater Toronto Area, with two more currently being built. Custance and her partners—all veterans of the wireless industry—see a big opportunity in standardizing and improving the mobile device-fixing process. “There’s over 40 million devices in this country if you combine cellphones and tablets, and at any given time it’s estimated that about 25% of them are either broken and in need of repair or replacement,” she explains.

Fixt aims to have 20 locations in the Golden Horseshoe by the end of 2017, and more than 80 across the country within the next five years. “We really believe that any market can sustain a number of these locations,” says Custance, noting that most Canadians have a device that might need to be fixed at some point.

Most service businesses looking to grow at such a rapid pace adopt a franchise model. Not Fixt. “There’s pros and cons to both approaches, corporate-only stores and franchises,” says Custance. “We felt strongly that corporate was the right approach.”

Here’s why Fixt isn’t franchising, and why similar businesses might want to consider doing likewise.

1. Keeping control of the experience

Custance marvels at how reliant most people are on their mobile devices. “I don’t know about you, but if I leave home in the morning and I’ve forgotten my wallet, I just keep going,” she says. “But if I leave without my phone, I definitely go back.” There’s even a word for it: Nomophobia, the anxiety that comes with not having your mobile phone.