The Dog Wizard Buys Back Its Stock
At The Franchise Funding Group, we are always looking for the next exciting opportunity to help a small business owner turn their successful small business into a franchise or grow their existing small franchise. When the chance to work with The Dog Wizard Franchise® came up, we jumped at the opportunity.
FFG is an investment and franchise-development company located in Cincinnati that helps entrepreneurs to scale their existing, proven and profitable businesses nationwide as new franchise systems. We also help existing franchise systems, like The Dog Wizard, to position themselves for expansion. For their investment of money, expertise, and on-going strategic guidance, FFG earns a minority interest in the franchise system, typically 25 percent or more, but allows the Founders to buy back their stock whenever they are ready at a pre-established pricing formula. In those cases where FFG assumes the major responsibility for risks and costs to launch a new franchise system, FFG will typically take on a majority ownership position since those investments could easily run $200,000-$300,000 or more in the first few years.
In 2017, we became strategic partners, funded and put franchise development systems in place to help Dog Wizard accelerate their franchise growth starting in 2018. Already, The Dog Wizard is up to 20 franchises in 2018 with dozens of candidates in the pipeline and The Dog Wizard team is looking for more qualified franchise candidates who love dogs, who are looking for the freedom and responsibility of being a business owner, and who want to make a positive contribution to dogs and dog families throughout their communities.
Working closely with the Founder and CEO of Dog Wizard, Gretchen Hollifield, was a pleasure. We were proud to lay a strong foundation for Dog Wizard’s franchise expansion in 2018 and beyond with franchise development strategy, systems and training. This franchise system, with successful franchise owners and a proven home-based operating model and brand, now has everything in place to grow substantially. With over 77 million dogs in the U.S. in over 54 million households, dog training has huge growth potential for years to come. We could not be more excited for Gretchen and her company’s bright future.
As such, we are not surprised that Gretchen decided to exercise her option to buy back her shares sooner than later. She had the means and opportunity to regain 100 percent ownership of her franchise at the pre-established pricing formula before her expansion really takes off. It was a smart decision on her part and we wish her continued success.
Gretchen recently said in a press release: “Franchise Funding Group helped me put the franchise development mindset, systems and tools that we needed into place. I’m grateful they decided to invest in me, my franchise and my future. They invested significant money, substantial time and expertise, and had real skin in the game. My success and their success were tied together. They were very accessible and worked hard on my behalf. It was a great partnership and everything was managed on a win-win basis.”
For The Dog Wizard, FFG helped to modify the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD), greatly reduce franchise owner training, refine the franchise website, create a franchise information packet, install a franchise recruiting/CRM system with rich content to properly tell the brand story, align social media channels, create franchise ads, hire a social media management company for lead generation, install a new territory mapping system, and launch a national PR program among other efforts.
