Wide format franchise Signwave Australia has grown sales 13.3 per cent in the year since a trio of Aussies took over running the local network.
The results come after several years of low to no growth for the 17 store group before Linda Sultman, Dean Rowland and Leo Baker bought the Australian master franchise rights a year ago.
And the company is now predicting growth of 15 per cent for 2015, following 24.4 per cent growth last quarter.
Two centres – Hawthorn, Melbourne and Ryde, Sydney – outperformed the other 17 franchisees with a whopping 60 per cent growth in sales, with another six stores achieving a more than 20 per cent increase during 2014.
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General manager Sultmann says the growth is due to a focus on rebranding, all of which was done online.
“We brought the franchise and used the digital platform such as pay per click, search engine optimisation, social media advertising and electronic mailing to increase our brand marketing, which dramatically increased our market contact,” she says.
“We could see the results immediately with the number of customer visits to our website and our social media pages.”
Sultmann says understanding how the digital platform works is crucial to get brand awareness, and ‘things like Facebook are very important and a cheap way of getting growth in sales and exposure’.
“I definitely had to educate myself first though, and I am 53-years-old so it did not come naturally to me. But I knew that the demographic of this channel was young and so to communicate with them I had to figure it out,” she says.
“By strengthening and improving individual areas of performance – such as systems utilisation, client service and staff management – not only do you achieve higher sales and greater profitability, you build a commercial enterprise that is an attractive proposition for future buyers.”
The trio had four key strategies in 2014: increasing centre volumes; improving owners’ discretionary profit and lifestyle; increasing brand value and improving franchise partner satisfaction.
“As former store owners, we really understand the importance of franchise partner satisfaction and have worked hard to provide knowledgeable and responsive support to the group as well as focusing on some centres that have required extra input and training,” franchise operations manager Baker says.
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