Proven networks, built one right franchisee at a time

Our relationship with Kitchen Makeovers runs deeper than most. The brand came to us through the business we acquired, and members of our team had been involved from its early days, through the original franchise setup and recruitment and every stage since. The business does exactly what the name suggests, transforming existing kitchens without the cost and disruption of a full replacement, and it has always had a strong model and real market demand. What it needed was a partner who could keep finding and placing the right franchisees, consistently, year after year.

That is what we have delivered. Twelve new franchisees in one year, twelve again the next, holding output steady in a market that had not become any easier. When economic uncertainty in 2023 and 2024 stalled recruitment programmes across the industry, ours kept moving. Across the full span of our involvement we have recruited close to fifty franchisees into the network.

Not every one of those franchisees is still trading. People come and go, and a degree of turnover is simply the nature of franchising. But the network today is stronger, healthier, and better supported than it has ever been, built incrementally and durably rather than rapidly and fragilely, with each new cohort teaching us more about the candidates and the support that make the model work.

Puzzle Piece Law is one of the most unusual success stories in our history. The business is a paralegal and McKenzie Friend service, supporting people through family law matters, primarily divorce and separation, in a sector where traditional legal costs are out of reach for most of the people who need help. The founder had built a model that was practically effective, ethically grounded, and genuinely valued by its clients.

The challenge was distinctive: how do you find franchisees credible and capable enough to deliver a legal support service, without requiring the full qualifications that make traditional practice so expensive to enter? Once again, the answer lay in adjacent expertise. Former police officers who understood court processes and the language of legal proceedings, and who wanted to keep contributing to justice. People from legal administration, social work, and family support, who brought real understanding of the human side of the situations the business handled.

By the end of the first year we had recruited eight new franchisees, well beyond what the founder had expected. And then she made a remarkable choice. Not because anything had gone wrong, the network was functioning, growing, and generating real income, but because building it had given her the conviction to formalise her own contribution to the law at the highest level. She decided to train for the barrister's licence, and paused the programme to do it. The network she built continues to operate, serving clients across the country, ready to grow again whenever she returns to it.