Case Studies – Hire a Hubby

Hire A Hubby is Australia’s largest handyman business. Franchisees provide handyman, repairs, maintenance and renovation services for individuals and companies throughout Australia, NZ and the UK. Hire A Hubby also has a commercial division which completes large scale and national jobs, utilising a distributed network of franchisees.

The idea for Hire A Hubby was born back in 1996, when the founder was doing some handyman work in his lounge room when his wife’s friend quipped, “gee he’s handy, can I hire your hubby?” 21 years later there are now 321 franchisees in Australia, 50 in NZ and 10 in the UK.

Historically, Hire A Hubby’s franchisees have relied heavily on manual processes for invoicing, quoting and financial management. Not only was this an inefficient process for franchisees, it also meant Hire A Hubby didn’t have real time access to quantifiable data on franchisees such as financial information, quote conversion rates, or how their time was being spent. Without this real time data, it was difficult for Hire A Hubby to best support the business of each franchisee or to benchmark the performance of franchisees.

Other franchisor processes such as compliance, recruitment and billing were either carried out manually or across multiple systems – leading to time, money and resource inefficiencies.

To address these issues, in 2011 Hire A Hubby embarked on a digital transformation process to develop a bespoke and customised all in one cloud-based solution to manage every part of their business digitally – now known as Franchise Cloud Solutions.

During the development and rollout, Hire A Hubby quickly realised that the system had much more potential than they had originally expected. This led to the incorporation of additional functions over the course of six years including Xero integration, an admin solution, a job calendar, a timesheet solution and various task management functions. Essentially, every time Hire A Hubby came across a manual process, they created the capability to automate the process within the system.

As a result, Hire A Hubby quickly realised the system’s potential as a flexible and scaleable industry wide solution – and in 2017 Franchise Cloud Solutions was born.

Franchise Cloud Solutions has transformed Hire A Hubby’s business. Hire A Hubby now benefits from:

• One location for all business activity – single source of truth
• Zero duplication of data entry
• A centralised recruitment platform
• Robust compliance management
• Reportable support activities across the processes of on-boarding, training, launch and ongoing franchisee management
• Benchmarking
• Meeting management solutions
• Access anywhere, anytime, via any device

Hire A Hubby has achieved 92% adoption of the system, well surpassing their expectations. The feedback from franchisees has been overwhelmingly positive, and as such, franchisee tenure has increased year on year.

Franchise Cloud Solutions has also improved Hire A Hubby’s conversion rates for franchisee recruitment. With the entire sales journey tracked through Salesforce, understanding where leads are in the sales process and converting them is far simpler.

There were also unexpected benefits to the recruitment process. System data revealed that 25% of Hire A Hubby’s franchising inquiries were actually tradespeople looking for work. This enabled Hire A Hubby to filter these people out of the franchisee recruitment process, improve the quality of leads and improve their conversion rate. It also opened up an opportunity for Hire A Hubby to add further value by helping franchisees recruit staff by building a pool of candidates to draw on at no extra cost for recruitment.

Franchise Cloud Solutions has also improved morale among operations staff. Previously, as data wasn’t available in real time, operations staff often could only identify an issue once it was too late to make a difference. Now, thanks to Franchise Cloud Solutions, operations staff have much better visibility of franchisee performance, enabling them to intervene earlier if there is an issue, stop behaviours which may contribute to a decline and identify growth opportunities.