One company, two names
The Franchise Consultant is the trading name of UK Franchise Consultants Ltd, company number 14295331, registered in England and Wales with its office in York. Same team, same advisers, same work. If you arrived here having searched for the company name rather than the brand, you are in the right place.
We are a bfa Advisor Member, which is an assessed membership category of the British Franchise Association rather than a badge you can buy. Between us we have placed more than 500 franchisees across upwards of 40 brands, and we keep a franchise lawyer in house rather than sending clients out to find one.
Consultant, broker, lawyer: which one do you actually need?
Four different jobs get described as franchise help, and business owners regularly hire the wrong one. The distinction is mostly about who pays, because that determines whose interests the adviser is holding.
- A franchise consultant is paid by you, the business owner. The job is to work out whether your business can be replicated at all, then design the model, the economics and the documentation that lets someone else run it. If the honest answer is that your business is not franchisable, a consultant who is paid by you can afford to say so.
- A franchise broker is paid by franchisors, usually a commission for each buyer introduced. Brokers serve people who want to buy into an existing brand. Useful for that, but a broker is not the person to tell you whether your own business should be franchised.
- A franchise lawyer drafts and negotiates the agreement, and advises on intellectual property and enforceability. Essential, and not the same as commercial design. A perfectly drafted agreement will not rescue a fee structure that does not work.
- A franchise manager is the operational role that runs a network once it exists, in house or outsourced. That comes after the model is built, not instead of building it.
We do the first of those, and we recruit franchisees for networks that are already trading. Our lawyer sits inside the business. We are not brokers, and we are not paid commission by franchisors to place buyers with them. If you want the detail on the individual services, the franchise your business section sets each one out, and the franchise agreement review is the usual starting point if a document has already landed on your desk.
What franchising asks of you, not just what it costs
Cost is the question everyone asks first. The one that catches owners out is time, specifically their own. Franchising cannot be fully delegated, because most of what makes a business work is still sitting in the founder’s head and has to be extracted before it can be written down.
In practice, over a typical pre-launch project, expect to give up the following.
- Two to three days in the first month. Discovery sessions, usually recorded, where we take apart how the business actually runs rather than how the website says it runs.
- Access to real numbers. Management accounts, unit economics, staff costs, marketing spend against results. The financial model is only as good as what goes into it, and optimistic inputs produce a franchise that fails on the franchisee’s side.
- Decisions that are yours alone. Territory size, fee levels, and who your ideal franchisee actually is. We will advise and we will argue, but these are owner decisions and they cannot be outsourced.
- A few hours a month once recruitment starts. Mostly final meetings with shortlisted candidates. Most owners want to meet everyone at the start and then stop, which is the wrong way round.
If you want a rough read on where your business currently sits before committing to any of that, the franchise readiness scorecard takes about five minutes and returns a score with a breakdown by area.
The three decisions that decide whether it works
Franchise systems rarely fail because of the manual or the marketing. In our experience they fail on three early decisions that are difficult to reverse once franchisees are signed.
The fee structure. There is a persistent temptation to set the initial franchise fee high, because it looks premium and it pays for the setup, and to keep the ongoing management service fee low, because it makes the pitch easier. That combination funds year one and starves the support function from year two onwards. The ongoing fee is what pays for the thing franchisees are actually buying.
Territory size. Generous territories sell quickly and then leave you with a map you cannot fill and franchisees who never work their whole patch. Tight territories are a harder sell and produce franchisees who cannot reach the earnings you promised. Getting this wrong is close to impossible to fix later without buying territory back.
The first three franchisees. They become the reference customers, the case studies and the template every later recruit is measured against. Taking a marginal candidate to fill a gap in the plan is the single most expensive shortcut in franchising, and it usually costs two or three years. Our case studies cover what this looks like in practice across three very different networks.
Company details
| Registered company name | UK Franchise Consultants Ltd |
| Trading as | The Franchise Consultant |
| Company number | 14295331 |
| VAT number | GB425954279 |
| Registered office | Unit 15 Kettlestring Lane, York, North Yorkshire, YO30 4XF |
| Telephone | 0808 281 4727 |
| Membership | bfa Advisor Member |
| Managing Director | Steve Lee |
Reading the company’s own site
We publish a separate site under the registered company name at ukfranchiseconsultants.co.uk. It covers ground this page deliberately does not: the full five stage process, indicative costs for pre-launch and expansion work, current UK market data, the regional consultant team, and a checklist for assessing any consultancy you are considering. If you are still comparing firms, that is the more useful read, and the UK Franchise Consultants FAQ answers most of the questions owners ask before a first call.
Common questions
Can I franchise a business that trades from a single location?
Often yes, but a single site makes the viability work harder rather than easier. What a franchisee buys is evidence that the model transfers, and one location run by the founder is not yet evidence of that. Some owners open a second site themselves first, precisely to prove the system works without them standing in it.
Do I need a registered trade mark before I franchise?
You are licensing a brand, so it is usually sensible to own the thing you are licensing before anyone pays for it, and an unregistered mark is a weaker position if a franchisee or a competitor challenges it. Whether it is essential in your particular case is a legal question rather than a commercial one, and it is worth putting to a solicitor early because applications take months.
Should I franchise, or just open my own second site?
Franchising is a way of growing with someone else’s capital and someone else’s day to day commitment, not a way of avoiding the work of systemising the business. If you have the funding and the management capacity to open sites yourself, and you want to keep the whole margin, that is frequently the better route. Franchising earns its keep when capital or local management is the constraint.
What happens if a franchisee fails?
It happens in every network, and a well built system plans for it rather than pretending otherwise. The agreement should set out what happens to the territory, the customers and the assets, and the model should be able to absorb a failure without the whole network noticing. Networks that have never lost a franchisee are usually either very young or not being honest.
Talk to someone
The first conversation costs nothing and is not a sales call. If franchising is the wrong route for your business we would rather tell you at that point than take a project fee. Call 0808 281 4727, or use the contact page and we will come back to you within a business day.