Not Food was her answer – ok Phones it is – seemed like a good idea at the time. We were doing well in our marketing endeavours and moving into phones in Shopping Malls seemed like a great idea. (we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into)
The search began to find a suitable franchisor to join with and start our new life – home every night making plenty of money in a rapidly expanding marketplace mobile phones. Makes good sense – Right??
We settled on a Franchisor – seemed to know what they were talking about at this point and wow the director whom I spoke briefly to on the phone and the state manager sung some very profitable songs about how much money we were going to make. State manager was saying we were going to be buying a second house in Brisbane in twelve months as well as expanding into more stores. Woo Hoo this is what we are talking about so we signed the dotted line.
We did do our due diligence by contacting franchisees whom we new prior due to working in so many shopping malls and they were happy and making ok money.
FIRST WARNING SIGN: Vendor finance – certainly made it easy for us at the time didn’t have to mortgage our home in Rockhampton. Only had to come up with a deposit – easy enough.
Easy to say in retrospect – the fact that they were offering Vendor finance should have rung alarm bells
SECOND WARNING SIGN: They didn’t seem to care that we had no experience in the industry………At this stage nor did we but, the difference was, we had no idea what a complex industry, mobile phones is and what we were about to get ourselves into, and they did…….. We came from a hairdressing, furniture, hardware and kitchen implements to Mobile phones with 200 new and old plans, handsets that did a myriad of things and at the time that was changing rapidly every month there were several new phones and new plans to go with them. This was in times where internet was just starting on mobile devices.
We spoke with the State manager on the phone a few times and I came to Brisbane to have a look at a store and meet with said state manager – looks like a slick operation especially when you compare it to our fold up tables with fitted covers which was our normal set up in shopping centres.
Long story short – we paid our deposit – signed the dotted lines and we were in business. Next part will be the training
