Should I Invest in a Home Improvement Franchise or Start One From Scratch?

The pandemic has certainly been bad news for several sectors but it has put the housing and home improvement markets on an upward trend in an already surging industry. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, home improvement is undoubtedly one of the best sectors to get into. But should you invest in a home improvement franchise or start an independent business from scratch? 

Before we get into that, it’s good to understand why these are good times for home improvement. The first reason has to do with the amount of time people are spending at their homes. With more and more people working from home, there’s an increasing need for renovating residences. As folks spend more time at home, it’s only natural that they’d think about improving their surroundings. Although companies may start functioning again as before once a significant proportion of people are vaccinated, numerous organizations are likely to move to a hybrid model of remote and on-site work to accommodate employees with a newfound taste for work-from-home life. 

The second reason is that although the pandemic brought several sectors to a halt, there are signs of improvement. Experts believe that the economy could add up to a million jobs just in March 2021. With this expected uptick in employment, people will have more income to be able to afford home improvement projects. Thirdly, with people staying home and not going to stores, restaurants, movie theaters, or on vacation, household savings are also at unprecedented heights. Money that previously may have been spent on entertainment activities or dining out is now being used to make home improvements or repairs, since this where we’re still spending the bulk of our leisure time. The economic stimulus package will put trillions in the hands of consumers, enabling them to spend on a scale seldom seen before. With most people still wary of travel, home improvement is one of the likeliest sectors to witness consumer spending.

Finally, peer pressure on social media is also encouraging homeowners to renovate their residences. So, as an entrepreneur, it’s the right time to get into the market. You primarily have two routes to establish a home improvement business. The first is to start on your own while the second is to become an Owner of a successful home improvement franchise like Footprints. If you decide to start from scratch, it’s good to have a realistic understanding of what you’ll have to do and the challenges you’ll face. 

Challenges of starting a home improvement business from scratch

Building a Reputation

If you’re known in your locality for your home improvement skills, then it’d be better for you. People will only hire a professional who has proven expertise in their field. This means that you should have years of experience in home improvement under your belt before you venture on your own.  So, if you’re planning to enter the industry, it’ll take years to build your reputation. It’ll also take a considerable amount of time for you to build a network that’ll refer your services to their friends and family.

Initial Investment

If you say no to being a Franchise Owner and decide to do it on your own, there are some unavoidable initial investments that you’ll have to make. To begin with, you’d need a showroom somewhere in the center of your prospective market as it should be easily accessible to your target audience. For this, you’ll have to spend some time looking for the right spot, then spend on the lease, rent, renovation, utility bills, signages, etc. The build-out costs will add up to a significant amount of money. 

Hiring Employees

Now it’s time to hire the right employees. If you’re inexperienced and on your own, it would be difficult to attract experienced people. It would also take some time for you to meet the candidates, screen them, and get them on board. Then you’ve to pay their salaries consistently irrespective of how many projects you get. While it may take some time for your business to take off, HR costs will kick in from the beginning. 

Marketing

Unless you’re renowned for your home improvement skills or come from a family that’s been in the business for a long time, you need to get the word out. Effective marketing is how you ensure lead generation. From hoardings to pamphlets to radio spots, you’ll have to consistently invest in marketing to build brand awareness. Even with the best of efforts, social media marketing will take to deliver results. 

Building a Process

Entrepreneurship is less about passion and more about the systems you create to effectively grow. You’ve got your showroom and your employees. But who’ll take customer calls when you’re busy with a project? Who’ll schedule appointments? Will you have dedicated staff to give project estimates when you’re away? What about invoicing? If you don’t have dedicated resources for these jobs, you’ll be losing out on potential projects. All these cumulatively add up to customer satisfaction. Even if a homeowner is satisfied with how you delivered the project, if they can’t connect with you on the phone, or if they can’t schedule an appointment at the right time, it will affect their perception of your business. Customer service is crucial to not just acquiring more projects but also increasing the satisfaction of existing customers. Any dip in customer satisfaction will generate negative word-of-mouth publicity for you. 

The Advantages of Owning a Home Improvement Franchise

Now that you’ve got a realistic view of the problems with starting on your own, you should consider being a Franchise Owner with an established and proven home improvement brand. Footprints Floors is renowned for our affordable, home-based Christian Franchise. We’ve been consistently empowering entrepreneurs like you to grow with a credible and proven business model. Here are six reasons to consider being a home improvement Franchise Owner with Footprints Floors.

 1. Excellent returns

The number one reason entrepreneurs prefer Footprints Floors is the consistently high returns the business provides. With an average investment of $81K, a Franchise Owner averages around $747K in gross annual sales.  The reason we deliver high returns is due to our exceptionally cost-effective, efficient, and simpler model. In other words, this isn’t just an opportunity to be financially independent. This is an unparalleled opportunity to be prosperous and thriving. 

2.  No prior experience needed

With Footprints Floors, you don’t need any experience in the home improvement industry to get started. You don’t need any background or expertise in carpentry or flooring. You could come from an entirely unrelated industry and become a successful home entrepreneur in months.  All you need is to be motivated, eager to reach out, customer-oriented, and a great communicator. That’s why you’ll find military veterans, high school teachers, and Fortune 200 managers among our Franchise Owners. 

 3. No unnecessary investments

With Footprints Floors, you’ll be a home-based entrepreneur. So, you don’t have to invest in setting up a showroom. This means you don’t have to spend time looking for the right location, negotiate with the landlord, pay the lease, rent, utility bills, renovation costs, etc.  Getting to keep overhead costs low can add up to massive savings for a Footprints Floors Franchise Owner, which is why it is the cornerstone of our business model: Low investment, high returns. 

 4. Minimal need for employees

You don’t have to hire employees as the Owner of a Footprints Floors home improvement franchise- but this doesn’t mean you have to actually do the flooring work yourself either! You can manage your home improvement franchise by hiring subcontractors. This means few to no employees on your payroll, and no need to pay salaries or deal with any HR headaches.  It also means that you don’t have to spend time managing a workforce that you don’t need. All that’s left to the subcontractors.

5.  Easy lead generation and backend support

As a home improvement Franchise Owner with Footprints Floors, you will have a credible system to lean on. Our proprietary system is unmatched in the flooring franchise industry. It’s designed to make it simple and easy for you to concentrate on the core business. Our system will take care of your lead generation, customer service, marketing, and on-going functional support. That means no time-consuming managerial tasks for Franchise Owners and a better quality of life. 

6. Brand equity

With the national presence of our home improvement franchise and high scores on customer satisfaction, you’ll be joining a brand with tremendous equity in the market. You don’t have to worry about building a brand from scratch. Homeowners who have availed themselves of our services have helped grow the word-of-mouth awareness and reputation of our home improvement franchise. You won’t have to worry about establishing your name in your territory. When someone makes a call, they’re already assured of the services of a credible brand name.

Get on board

Starting a business shouldn’t mean spending the next few years of your life struggling to build it with heavy investments and 18-hour workdays. What every entrepreneur wants is financial stability and a better life. With faith-based, Christian Franchise Footprints Floors, you get all that and much more. As a home improvement Franchise Owner, you’ll be assured of exclusivity in your franchise territory, high returns on investment, fewer operational headaches, and a smooth functioning system to back you all the way. With each new project, you’ll also be assured of future business coming your way.  Most importantly, you’ll have the freedom to take a break when you want it. That’s what our Franchise Owners are most excited about, other than the financial prosperity. So, take the right decision and join the Footprints Floors home improvement franchise family by clicking here. It’s one of the best financial and personal development decisions you’ll ever make!

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We’re offering an affordable, Christian Franchise opportunity in a SURGING industry, so it’s not surprising that our growth shows no signs of stopping! Footprints Floors has a new owner, Chico Negual. He was so confident in our franchise that he didn’t just buy one, but three territories in West Houston, Texas!  We got the chance to talk to Chico and see what his experience was, learn more about him, his background, and what led him to become a Franchise Owner.

From Finance to Flooring

Chico has an impressive list of qualifications. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the University of Arkansas, a Master’s Degree in Finance and Economics from West Texas University, a certification in Quantitative Finance, and also has Project Management Professional PMP certification.

Both Chico and his wife were originally from Jacksonville, Arkansas, and relocated to Houston in 2014. He’s owned a lab testing franchise in the past, from 2009-2014, but this didn’t suit him as he was trying to run it as an absentee owner, which didn’t work out. 

Funnily enough, Chico actually came across our faith-based franchise by accident! He had been looking for a business that was unique, simple, flexible, and profitable. In his words, “I was looking for a unicorn and I’ve been looking for it for years.”

Chico stumbled on an ad for Footprints Floors and was interested in our declaration of a reasonably-priced highly profitable flooring business opportunity. He submitted his info and didn’t think much of it, but in a few days, he got a call from us to chat about the franchise. He started the conversation without high expectations but came out of it hooked. 

This isn’t the first time that this has happened, of course. Our model is unique because we took the standard idea of a flooring company and reinvented it to be a simpler, more efficient, and extremely affordable franchise model.

An Affordable Franchise in a SURGING Industry

The average investment is between just $68,130 – $95,580 for a single franchise territory. You don’t need employees or a showroom because it’s all home-based. This means that you can manage your business and hire subcontractors to do every single job for you. You don’t pay rent, there isn’t any build-out and no HR costs.

Best of all, the low overhead required for starting a Footprints Floors franchise means high potential for profitability, with many of our Franchise Owners reporting a breakeven period of just several months on the job! On top of that, we have outstanding economics – we reach and service more customers than any of our competitors. Our average system-wide revenues are $747,401.*

Perhaps best of all, we have unmatched backend support, with a corporate call center that handles everything from lead generation to appointment scheduling to customer service! Our support system is industry-leading, and no other private flooring franchise has replicated our proprietary system.

In addition, our flooring franchise support team covers customer service, lead generation and marketing, and all ongoing support functions. All this and more has meant that Footprints Floors ranked #463 on 2021’s Entrepreneur 500 list – a prestigious honor for franchise brands of all sizes.

Chico has said that he feels Footprints Floors is the right fit for him because of its unique business model, but also because he’s always been attracted to the service industry and providing people a service. Besides these aspects of our affordable franchise, Chico also said: “Many things attracted me to this business model, but the centralized call center made all the sense in the world to me. Having a call center schedule appointments for you lowers your overhead and allows you the additional time to do estimates and check on jobs. I also like the flexibility of the business as well as the family-friendly schedule.”

It’s easy to see why Chico feels this way because we love making sure that our Franchise Owners have a good work/life balance. As a Franchise Owner, Chico is able to spend quality time with his wonderful wife of 6 years and his three children, who are 4, 2, and 7 months old, respectively.

Chico enjoys learning new things, expanding his knowledge through courses, books, and interactive lessons. Achieving new goals and renewing the bar to a higher setting keep him challenged continuously and leave him with a deep sense of accomplishment. He also enjoys golfing and trading.

Chico’s Franchise Journey

Chico’s attention may have been caught by our affordable franchise business model and how we’re built around a centralized call center, but when he learned about our commitment to customer satisfaction and outstanding service, he was even more intrigued. 

“I learned about how they market and advertise online with the ability to scale up or down as necessary,” he recalls. “Then I considered the current industry standards and the great potential for improvement and it began to make more and more sense.”

Chico’s personal experience with contracting services for home improvement projects also played a key role in his decision to franchise with faith-based Footprints Floors. He recalls, “Earlier this year my wife and I hired a contractor to build a deck and extend our patio in our back yard, and just a month ago we had our roof replaced by a contractor. We’ve had a lot of recent experiences with independent contractors, some have been good, others have been horrible. Our recent experience with a contractor ultimately sold me on the idea that residential contractors need to be held to a higher standard. The proven system that this company provides, plus the revenue potential is a winning combination.”

Chico also liked the idea that he could start out in the booming home service industry with minimal overhead and resources. Our affordable franchise is also easier to control and scale, unlike restaurants where you generally require significant initial investments and many more key employees to start.  We love hearing it, Chico!

After attending Discovery Day at our headquarters in Colorado, Chico was able to see firsthand what our affordable franchise offers in terms of support and to get to know Founder Bryan Park and the rest of the corporate team. He says, “Discovery Day was unique and very insightful. We had the opportunity to meet the owner, go out on some jobs, and go out on a couple of estimates. I feel like we got the chance to see what a ‘day in the life’ felt like. Additionally, we got to see the home office and meet the corporate team.” 

We do Discovery Day for precisely this reason, because we want our prospective Franchise Owners to know what they can expect when they join us. We don’t want them to have any surprises, in line with what our Founder had in mind when he started Footprints Floors. 

Chico enjoyed meeting the whole crew, describing them as “very personable and down to earth. They were very knowledgeable and easy to work with.”  As for the best part of his experience with the Footprints Floors corporate team so far, Chico says that that would be his franchise development coordinator, Brian Knuth. “Brian Knuth has been outstanding,” he says. “He was never pushy or rude, always very professional and very knowledgeable about both the business and franchising in general. I didn’t feel as if I was being sold to or deceived by the numbers. He also made himself very available to me and was very transparent, which are attributes I greatly appreciate.”

Looking Ahead to Flooring Franchise Success

Chico believes that proper planning and execution are the key to succeeding in this business. Following the proven system, having the skill set to help customers and providing excellent customer service is how he plans on success.  On advice to potential Franchise Owners, Chico says to do your homework. Not just on the business, but also potential territories available. 

When looking ahead to his future as a Footprints Floors Frachise Owner, Chico has this to say: “I look forward to the freedom and flexibility of my workday. I also look forward to having control over my income, expenses, retirement planning, and vacation scheduling.”

Footprints Floors is a home-based, affordable, Christian Franchise that puts the focus on a quality customer experience. With no inventory, showrooms, or payroll staff to worry about, and a corporate call center handling lead generation, appointment scheduling, and customer service queries, Franchise Owners can concentrate on growing their business and enjoying a flexible, healthy work-life balance.  If you’d like to follow in Chico’s “Footprints” and open an affordable franchise in the surging home improvement industry, now’s the time to act!

Territories are selling out fast- visit our franchise website for more info!

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