Revive! Franchisees beating the recession

Here at Revive! UK, the professional SMART repair provider we find ourselves in great shape as the UK comes out of recession.

Not only has the company seen continued success with the addition of a number of prestigious national contracts but the franchise network has seen internal growth with franchisees adding technicians to their own fleets.
Hear below from some of the Revive! franchisees to learn about the issues and challenges of taking on and growing a business in a recession and the success that they have had:-

Adam Smith started his Revive! franchise in the depth of the recent recession. Despite the economic climate Adam has found immediate success and is now adding to his fleet.
Adam comments - with the work available we need to grow to a 3 van operation by the end of the summer and that won't be a bad achievement given the time we started and the fact that we will have only been trading for a year!

Russell Hudson has been involved in SMART repairs for a couple of years now and saw 2009 as a tricky year. Nevertheless Russell was still able to grow his business and took on a further employee last year to build his business to a 3 van operation. The business has grown over 20% in 2009 and Russell explains that he believes that much of this is down to excellent customer service and customer retention.
A comment from Russell - We expected the year to be tricky so to be up by 20% is great. We initially worked hard to get an increase from existing customers - working with them to develop strategies that would give both us and the car dealership more income. To be honest the first 4 or 5 months were really good and the customer retention was excellent - and so we needed to find another employee as we were really busy. This proved to be interesting as there are a number of people on the job market but finding the right one is vital to our success. The trickiest thing about last year was the difficulty in planning ahead. Because of the speculation in the press and inconsistent sales patterns it was sometimes difficult to judge how much work we had for the oncoming weeks. However we are delighted to have hit our target and look forward to further growth in 2010. The plans are to get a further couple of employees to allow me to come out of a van on a daily basis to really drive the sales forward and to manage the business. We hope to top £200,000 this year!

Byron Lindsay also took on an employee in the first year of business and has doubled the sales income. A 50% increase in a year of economic recession has been impressive and Byron points out that his hard work, coupled with some strong help from Head Office allowed him to grow in this way
Says Byron - I got to the stage where I was fairly maxed out with work and so needed to employ. On top of this Head Office was filling my diary with national work so it became clear that if I didn't employ I wouldn't get round all the work! The first employee I interviewed decided that he liked the idea so much he bought his own franchise! I then found an ex-body shop technician who really liked the structure - could see that given sales results could earn a good living and who has really enjoyed the freedom and responsibility. The structure of the employment model really works. It also really helped that when I employed we had a surge of National account work which really kept us busy for the first month. I really don't know what I would have done without an employee! Having the additional resource of an employee has also allowed me to step back a little and reflect on how we are going to grow the business. I can spend more time with existing customers when necessary and more time actively marketing. As for plans for 2010, well while the snow in January made it a tough start, we are already full with work and so the process of putting the next van on the road is underway.

Managing Director Mark Llewellyn sums up - The UK has suffered recently and but I am delighted with the continued progress we have made. There are no substitutes for a great system and hard work and these results represent what you can achieve, even in difficult times, when you put these together.