Tereza Murray
Residing in Queenslands Gold Coast, Tereza Murray is a leading Franchise and Business Consultant with over 27 years of experience in the franchising industry as both a consultant and franchisor, along with a track record of success running some of Australia and New Zealand's most well-known brands (franchised and independent). With a background spanning over 30 years in business development across B2B and B2C, Tereza works with businesses ranging from start-ups to established companies ready for serious growth.
Tereza and her team work with between 40 – 50 small business leaders each year across a diverse range of industries to help them achieve their business goals. Highly skilled at designing and implementing robust growth models, systems and strategies, Tereza and her team can help you achieve your business growth objectives.
Read on
My franchising journey began in 2006 when I discovered I was expecting twins! At that time, we had around 60 employees in our property services business; we were working 16-hour days and would routinely have between 4 – 6 staff call in sick most days. In short, we were constantly putting out fires and dealing with performance issues that weren’t sustainable even before the news of the twins.
Franchising was one of three options we considered to enable us to be less hands-on, along with using contractors for our larger contracts or selling the business outright. Both options had their limitations, as using contractors meant we were putting our competition in charge of our clients, and selling outright meant we need to start again at some stage with a new venture.
Franchising was a clear choice as it meant we had people servicing our clients who had a vested interest in doing a good job, didn’t call in sick and had responsibility for the day-to-day running costs of servicing the client.
The franchise model we started with was fairly basic and lacked many systems and structures to manage compliance effectively. As each new franchisee came on board, our systems and processes improved, our documentation became more robust, and our transition from employers to franchisors started delivering the benefits we hoped for.
Having experienced first-hand the challenges of scaling our business with employees and then the solutions franchising provided when done right left me with absolutely no doubt as to which is the better model. In today’s post-Covid market, with the economic challenges business face, that has never been truer as small business owners battle against large employers with bigger budgets to find good staff and keep them.