Three franchise brands on why harnessing technology is the future for growing and sustaining a profitable franchised business
By Joelle Kidd
From increased hybridity of in-person and digital spaces to the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, we live in a fast-paced era of new digital tech. What does all this change mean for franchised businesses?
For those willing to embrace new technology solutions, it can mean a world of possibility: lower costs, simpler systems, and more streamlined operations. While business owners know the importance of the human touch, many businesses are finding ways to incorporate digital technology that supports their brand’s unique strengths.
Franchise Canada spoke to three such brands in three different sectors to see how franchise systems are leaning into the tech revolution.
Fibrenew
Despite its status as a well-established restoration brand, Fibrenew keeps on the leading edge of adopting technology to make it easier for franchisees to find business success.
“We’re very tech-savvy,” says Jesse Johnstone, president of Fibrenew. “We’re always pushing the envelope and doing anything we can do to help the business grow, anything we can do to help franchisees run their business more efficiently.”
Founded in 1987, Fibrenew is a mobile franchised business that specializes in restoring leather, plastic, and vinyl “on furniture, on vehicles, in restaurants, medical clinics, offices, airplanes, boats, or trains, wherever it happens to be,” says Johnstone. Teams visit clients’ homes and businesses to do the restoration work. Today the brand has more than 300 locations in six countries and is on track to surpass 325 locations next year.
Fibrenew provides franchisees with their own website and support in SEO and online ad optimization. The brand has also built its own intranet platform, called Hive, that houses training content and allows franchisees to connect with each other, communicate with the brand’s support team, and more. Franchisees can access Hive on any device, to “look up technical information if they’re working on something in the field, ask a question of the support staff, or whatever their needs happen to be,” says Johnstone.
They’ve also partnered with a company called Jobber to manage client requests and help franchisees organize follow-up communication, from scheduling visits to creating estimates and invoices.
“It’s been a huge win for us,” says Johnstone. “Our franchisees are much more organized, and they’re able to do more jobs because of how organized they are. And then on the professional front, the customer side is elevated as well, because everything is seamless.”
Also helping franchisees streamline their efficiency is the Colour Eye colour-matching device and app. Developed over three years, the device is a reader about the size of a cell phone which can be held up to any material the technician is working on. “It reads the colour, and then sends the colour through Bluetooth to an app that digs into a database we developed that uses our colour system,” Johnstone explains. A Fibrenew technician only needs to scan the item they are repairing and the device breaks down the precise colour blend of the fabric. “In training, franchisees used to have to take an entire week to learn how to match colour; now they do it in one day,” Johnstone says.
Ultimately, Fibrenew’s excitement about quickly adapting and adopting new technologies is in service of franchisees, who enjoy the flexibility and efficiency of this mobile business. The brand looks for franchisees who like working with their hands, provide great customer service, and can pass a colour identification test.
Pierogi House
As a brand both family-run and forward-thinking, the newly franchised Pierogi House is bringing a passion for Polish food and cutting-edge technology into the fast casual restaurant space.
Since opening in 2012, Pierogi House has grown to three locations in the Ontario market and is now developing new units with its first franchisees, says Mike Hejmej, president/CEO.
“My dad brought the concept: he built the first one by hand, because he’s an architect and a handyman. My mom brought all the personality, the love, and the experience with customers from her previous career,” says Hejmej. “And then I came in and I just brought in some of the business acumen for standardizing processes […] as well as all the tech experience to build something that is really, really scalable.”
The concept serves fast-casual Polish food including pierogies, kielbasa (smoked sausage), and schnitzel, and has a small takeaway market with frozen items for guests to take home, such as cabbage rolls, borscht, and their famous pierogies. This market component makes the brand unique in the QSR space, Hejmej notes.
Hejmej’s background in tech and consulting has helped transform the family business into an innovation-driven franchise system. While most small- and mid-sized franchise systems partner with a variety of services and applications to run their backend operations, Pierogi House’s backend system is entirely custom built. Hejmej says the bespoke, integrated system saves franchisees time and reduces their costs.
For instance, estimating how many staff members a location will need in any given coming week is typically a complicated process involving comparing data from several different systems. “You would have to see both the payroll hours of previous weeks, then tie that to the sales data for previous weeks and see how much payroll you’d have per hour of sales,” Hejmej explains. “Unless you’ve built all your systems from scratch […] you’re just doing it by pen and paper, and that’s not really that accurate.”
With Pierogi House’s integrated system, a code runs every week to compare previous weeks, using machine learning to optimize labour costs. Similarly, the brand’s system can monitor inventory levels and compare against a trend line of sales to suggest the most efficient weekly ordering for the franchisee.
While vendors like Square and Toast make adopting technology on the front-end easy, integrating back-end systems is difficult because of the variance in each franchise’s needs. This kind of integration is rare outside of a massive system with hundreds of units, Hejmej says, but he believes smaller, newer franchises with the tech know-how can capitalize on newly available tools like ChatGPT to stand out in the coming years as they build their own back-end systems. In an economic climate where budgets are tight and every percentage point counts, Pierogi House’s integrated system gives it a competitive edge.
While the brand might be focused on efficiency, it also has a lot of heart; the goal is still to “delight customers,” Hejmej says. Franchisees who join the brand receive full training and opening support from the family business. “My mom is the head trainer,” Hejmej notes. “She has served, we estimated, five million pierogies! She’s got experience. You get the training with the family. Family brand, family support.”
When looking for franchisees, the brand seeks capable, hard-working operators with a passion for Eastern European cuisine. “The best quality that a franchisee brings is passion.”
Studio Pilates International
“There’s nothing worse than going to a workout and standing there scratching your head for half of it because you don’t know what to do,” says Jade Winter, cofounder of Studio Pilates International. That’s why Winter and his wife started a system of Pilates studios that harness technology to give customers a personal training-style experience at a group workout class price.
The brand’s SPTV—Studio Pilates Television—is an ever-changing series of videos that play in studio classes, along with an audio track to show and explain how to do each exercise. Each day brings a new daily workout, played in the brand’s 91 locations across five countries.
“My wife and I instructed for a decade in our business before we went on to franchise it, and we’ve been franchising for 10 years,” says Winter. “We took all those learnings from those 10 years of mastering the business and the delivery, and we made it into something that’s easily consumable, easily digestible, for someone who is at a [high] level all the way through to someone who has never exercised a day in their life.”
For franchisees in the system, this high-tech method offers many benefits. While independent exercise studios struggle to find consistent, talented instructors and train staff, Studio Pilates International’s system means it’s easy to get up to speed. “Instructors come, graduate our training course, and they’re great from day one,” says Winter.
Along with SPTV, the brand is continually adapting to use the latest technology to streamline processes for franchisees, including cloud-based bookkeeping and accounting, an app and online system for booking clients, and a dashboard that shows franchisees data from across the system, worldwide. “I think that transparency has really helped our franchisees to know who are the leaders in the pack, and gain advice from others as well,” says Winter.
The brand has also begun adopting AI tools for projects like generating training videos and is looking at ways to use this new technology to a greater degree in the future.
Franchisee training takes place online, while instructor training is done in person, often within the instructor’s own studio. The brand now has around 1,500 instructors across its network, Winter says. “That’s one of our key sustainable competitive advantages, I believe, to be able to train world-class instructors rapidly.”
While Studio Pilates International franchisees come from a wide range of career backgrounds, Winter says the most common are “corporate refugees,” who have left their corporate roles to find something more fulfilling. “It’s not a cliché we are blessed to be able to change people’s lives on a daily basis,” Winter says. “The journey will always be worthwhile when a customer comes up to you and says, ‘Thank you for being here, thank you for opening this business and changing my life.’”
Read about more franchisees using novel technology in their systems: