We had been considering starting our own business for a few years and thought that a franchise was the best option.
Jo was not enjoying work and wanted to find something that would fit around a young family. We both worked in education so little things like not being able to take kids to school can become frustrating.
I noticed Time For You online. It immediately struck me how confident Freddie was in his product. What made Time For You stand out for us was that Freddie and Ruth were happy for us to contact anyone.
Being generally quite cautious I did just that. I got a map of the UK and contacted many franchisees. In total about 40 altogether. Speaking to existing franchisees was priceless. Not only was it reassuring but it allowed me to build up a picture of success across the country.
It was quite evident that all the franchisees we spoke to were doing a lot better, financially, than Jo was at her job as a teacher.
Once we purchased TFY we were very committed from the off. I was determined for Jo to be able to leave work asap. Therefore we chased every possible client that we could.
We started in June 2017 and by November at the AGM we had just under 80 clients. Jo had already handed her notice in and left work at Christmas time. After Christmas, we quickly passed the 100 clients mark which was a real positive as that meant all our initial goals had been achieved.
We built up the client base pretty quickly from basically just following the marketing wheelset out at the training. We used:
- Leaflets
- Google PPC
- bark and magazine advertising.
It seems to me in this business that if you put the hard work in then you get the rewards. That suits me as I am happy to work hard. Especially if my family benefit directly from it.
TFY has certainly changed us from a financial point of view, We have just come back from a holiday in the sun over New Year. We have never done that before. We have spent over £15000 on the house in the last year. Again that was not financially possible before.
I have just agreed to go part-time in my job teaching next school year (September). This will allow us to grow TFY further but also make my life so much better. I will be able to take the kids to school as well.
We now have new goals and objectives. To go past 200 clients and kick on towards 300. At the beginning this seemed like a pipe dream. I was worried that people would not want cleaners. That has not been the case though. The winning formula is to find good reliable cleaners. If you get that it all falls into place. The clients are most definitely out there.
