Franchise Coaches Insights
Conversations with franchise leaders and CEOs, and the lessons every franchisor can take from them.
When I sat down with Savvas Themistocleous, Managing Director of Smack Pizza, I expected to talk about pizza. Instead, we talked about leadership — supplier relationships, disciplined operations, and protecting margins without cutting corners.
Smack Pizza has stayed premium: 48-hour fermented dough, quality local ingredients, suppliers chosen for consistency rather than the lowest price.
Rather than chasing large-format restaurants, the brand has leaned into smaller, high-throughput stores that carry less overhead and less risk.
Savvas reviews supplier contracts constantly and tracks small cost creep before it becomes a real problem — a R150 increase on a weekly order can add up to a salary over a year.
Savvas has been a franchisee himself, and it shows in how present he stays — visiting stores, listening, helping before problems escalate.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Price is easy for competitors to copy. Value is much harder — but when customers experience the difference consistently, they become far less price-sensitive.
Smack Pizza’s story isn’t really about pizza. It’s about making hundreds of good decisions, every single day.
There’s often pressure to franchise the moment a business gains momentum. Sebastian Schneider, CEO of Motherland Coffee, resisted that pressure — choosing to prove the model through company-owned stores first.
One good store proves you’re a good operator. It doesn’t prove someone else can replicate your success.
Consistency isn’t created by an operations manual — it’s created by testing, refining and solving problems long before a franchisee ever joins.
No to unsuitable franchisees, poor locations, or expanding before the systems are ready.
Motherland isn’t just selling franchises — they’re selecting partners who share their values.
Franchise Coaches Insight
By the time a franchisee joins your network, most operational problems should already have been solved. Operations manuals document consistent systems — they don’t create them.
Take the time to refine. Take the time to test. Every improvement made before franchising becomes a gift to every franchisee who joins afterwards.
Grant Brady, founder of Car Service City, didn’t talk about store count. He talked about trust — from customers handing over their vehicles, from franchisees investing their savings, from staff expected to uphold the same standard every day.
Customers can’t judge a repair — they judge the experience around it. Every branch has to deliver the same standard, every time.
Was the quote honest? Was the work done on time? Trust is earned one ordinary interaction at a time — not through one dramatic gesture.
Every new location should strengthen the brand, not stretch it thin.
Franchise Coaches Insight
The best field consultants combine operational expertise with coaching skills. Compliance is important — but coaching creates commitment.
Growth matters. Profitability matters. But none of it can replace trust.
Chicken Bar’s story doesn’t start with rapid growth. It starts with failure — franchising too early, expensive mistakes, and a founder, Asanda Maqabuka, willing to talk about it openly.
If the model isn’t profitable or consistent, franchising just multiplies the weaknesses.
Every mistake revealed another gap. The manual should follow the experience, not replace it.
Franchisees don’t expect perfection. They expect transparency.
The question isn’t whether challenges will come. It’s what you choose to do with them.
Franchise Coaches Insight
People trust leaders who are honest enough to admit what they don’t know, and confident enough to keep improving. Transparency isn’t weakness — it’s leadership.
Tony Da Fonseca, CEO of OBC, doesn’t want franchisees who think like managers. He wants franchisees who think like owners.
The shift from “what should I do?” to “what opportunities am I missing?” changes everything.
Good systems remove uncertainty, freeing franchisees to focus on customers and growth instead of routine problem-solving.
A franchise network is simply a collection of individually successful businesses.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Franchising provides the systems. Entrepreneurship provides the drive. The most successful franchisees combine both.
It’s not about creating followers. It’s about building confident, capable business owners.
Richard Mukheibir, CEO of Cash Converters Southern Africa, expected our conversation to focus on retail trends. Instead, we spoke about ownership — and why engaged owner-operators still outperform absentee ones.
An owner notices details, sees opportunities, and takes personal responsibility in a way employees rarely do.
In an industry built on buying, selling and lending, every interaction has to reinforce that customers are being treated fairly.
Every franchisee shapes the culture of the brand. Skills can be taught — values are much harder to change.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Brand trust is built through thousands of small interactions. Lose it once, and it’s incredibly difficult to recover.
Businesses perform best when they’re led by people who think and act like owners.
Paul Christie, Founder of Doppio Collection, doesn’t see restaurants as places that serve food. He sees them as experiences — and the challenge, he says, is scaling that feeling without losing it.
Every new location represents everything the brand stands for — the menu, the coffee, the service, the atmosphere.
Innovation should strengthen consistency, not replace it — the best systems give franchisees a safe foundation to improve within.
Beautiful interiors attract customers once. Great people bring them back.
Creativity and consistency aren’t opposing forces.
Franchise Coaches Insight
The best systems provide a safe foundation for innovation. Great brands evolve — they don’t reinvent themselves every six months.
Hein Scheffer, CEO of Auto Magic, spent years refining systems before he ever franchised — not exciting systems, just the kind that quietly make a business exceptional.
Electronic job-management systems help make outcomes predictable for customers — not replace the people delivering them.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Whatever leaders consistently recognise eventually becomes part of the organisation’s culture. Great leaders don’t just manage operations — they shape expectations.
Operational excellence doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because leaders build systems that let ordinary people deliver extraordinary consistency.
Pierre du Toit, Head of Franchising at PNA, didn’t want to talk about retail strategy. He wanted to talk about people — how you keep more than 130 franchisees feeling like partners, not numbers.
Products can be copied. Culture is far harder to replicate — and it’s built in everyday conversations, not annual conferences.
Communication can’t become less personal just because the organisation gets bigger.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Support doesn’t mean removing accountability. It means ensuring franchisees know they have someone to call when challenges arise.
The strongest franchise brands don’t just build successful stores.
Stephen Walters, Founder of Galaxy Retail, doesn’t choose sites by looking for the busiest shopping centre. He starts with the customer.
People visit centres with a purpose — groceries, a quick errand, collecting kids. A location only works if enough of those missions overlap with your product.
Sit in the centre. Watch where people park, which entrances they use, who walks past your door. Data tells you what’s happening — observation tells you why.
Larger stores mean higher rent, more staff, more stock — unless revenue rises to match, profitability shrinks.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Sometimes what you observe completely changes what the data appears to suggest. The best decisions combine analysis with curiosity.
Franchises don’t succeed because of great real estate. They succeed because they’re in the right place for the right customer at the right time.
Joe Boyle, Managing Director of FreshStop, kept returning to one idea throughout our conversation: successful retailers don’t ask what they want to sell. They ask what problem the customer is trying to solve.
No two neighbourhoods behave the same way — the best franchisees combine national systems with local knowledge.
Success isn’t measured by how many stores you open. It’s measured by how many franchisees succeed.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Customers don’t reward occasional excellence. They reward dependable excellence.
Successful franchising doesn’t begin with the franchise.
Linda Sinclair, CEO of Sorbet Group, didn’t want to talk about treatments or store counts. She wanted to talk about culture — and why it’s the real reason a business built on massages and manicures has grown to 200 stores across five brands in under two decades.
Sorbet doesn’t have a mission statement — it has a purpose. Every franchise partner and every staff member is called a “citizen,” not an employee.
Rather than diluting the Sorbet name, Linda leveraged its halo effect to launch Sorbet Man, hair bars, nail bars, and a hybrid format combining services under one roof — each speaking to a different guest, without losing the culture that built the original brand.
Franchise partners don’t need to be therapists or stylists. They need business acumen, a genuine love of people, and the willingness to work in the business full-time, not just own it.
Franchise Coaches Insight
The strongest franchise cultures aren’t written on a wall. They’re trained, lived and repeated every single month until they become instinct.
Every Sorbet salon carries the same guarantee, painted on the wall: if you’re not happy with the service, you don’t have to pay.
Through the Sorbet Foundation and the SorbetPreneur programme with Bidvest, the group funds training and store ownership for people who’d otherwise never access either — including a “dragon’s den”-style pitch process for citizens applying to become franchise owners themselves.
We are not successful as a franchisor if our franchise partners aren’t successful.
Trudi van Niekerk, who led Nando’s franchise strategy across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, doesn’t talk about franchising in these markets as risky. She talks about it as a different discipline entirely — one where the fundamentals of running a franchise system have to flex to survive regulatory, currency and cultural shifts that can arrive with no warning at all.
Nando’s runs different business models, pricing and even menus market to market — a leaner GP model across Africa, a premium dine-in model in the Middle East, and in Kenya, a hybrid menu built specifically around the market’s unique demographics.
Nando’s stopped allowing sub-franchising because it left partners without enough margin to properly represent the brand. Master license holders now run company-owned-and-operated restaurants themselves, with full accountability for the standard on the ground.
Import embargoes on bread, vinegar and dairy, or sudden new labelling requirements, have appeared without warning across African and South Asian markets. Nando’s builds flexibility into its supply chain and legal due diligence from day one — understanding a country’s IP protections and commercial law before it ever enters.
Selling a master license purely to raise cash rarely pays off long term. Nando’s now avoids markets that can’t sustain at least ten restaurants, and vets partners for commitment, not just capital.
Franchise Coaches Insight
Selling a master license for quick cash, without the commitment to support it properly, can turn a $200,000 deal into the most expensive $200,000 a franchisor ever earns.
Nando’s calls its franchisees “partners,” not sub-franchisees — and treats disagreements as part of an ongoing relationship rather than grounds to shut someone down.
As a franchisor, the onus is as much on you to make the business model work in that market as it is on your partner.
Mimi Masala spent 20 years at McDonald’s — rising through operations, recruitment and franchise management — before becoming a multi-unit franchisee herself. As a former franchisor and franchisee who has since moved on to lead operations elsewhere, she brings a rare, unusually honest view of what actually makes franchising work.
In corporate, there’s a department for everything. As a franchisee, Mimi had to build all of that herself — payroll, marketing, operations — and found it a completely different ballgame from anything her franchise-manager years had prepared her for.
When things go well, franchisees credit themselves. When things go badly, they blame the franchisor. Both sides need to plan — a franchisor’s strategy only works if franchisees translate it into their own business goals.
Mimi cautions corporate professionals against assuming a single outlet will replicate their old salary — there’s no guarantee, regardless of the brand, and cash flow in the early days is not profit.
Every franchise needs its own psychometric profile, not a generic test — someone who scores brilliantly elsewhere might simply not fit your culture. Working a shift on the floor remains one of the best screening tools there is.
Franchise Coaches Insight
The businesses hardest for a franchisee to walk away from are the ones built to be hardest to copy in the first place — proprietary equipment, owned point-of-sale systems, and trademarks locked down in every class.
Auditing supply chains — matching what franchisees buy against what they actually sell — protects the brand and every other franchisee in the system.
Ask Mimi what matters most in the end, and she comes back to one word every time: training.
Let’s talk through where your business is today, and what building a franchisable system would actually take.
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