The general advice when someone is setting up part of their business overseas is to initially set up a branch and then to create a separate entity once established.
I think that you should look at that approach with your franchise operation.
The idea of regional branches with employees sounds a good option as you will have more control until the branches are established. The last thing that you want when you are just starting with a national brand is to have each area working slightly differently and client experiences varying from area to area.
Maybe look on the employee approach as hit teams to hit an area and then if successful sell the area as a franchise with the hit team moving on to another area after training the franchisee your way of doing things.
Of course, you are going to be going up directly against Certax and Taxassist so I'm not imagining that you are going to have an easy brand rollout but as least it should make for an interesting and exciting next five to ten years for you.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
so you won't be offering book-keeping and statutory filing?
I thought that those would remain even whilst offering other services.
So, if thats the case you are actually offering Accenture / KPMG / PWC / E&Y / EDS, etc type services to the smaller / micro entity and will not actually be in competition with us for the bread and butter work.
Thats a very litigous playground that you're off to work in. All of those companies employ in house full time legal teams.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Shaun - no to bookkeeping (clients will do this using MORE/Xero or they will use Receipt Bank or a local bookkeeper managed/sourced by us) but yes to statutory accounts and tax. If management accounts are needed we'd expect the bookkeeper to these and we would review the work and meet with the client.
However, we do not need to do those services to work with a business owner. Some clients have good accountants, some have family members who do this, so they can keep the accounts/tax and the client can work with us on the business development. This can be seminars/Webinars, online knowledge base, software and local seminars/business club.
The business development we do is mainly training/coaching business owners on areas of business they are weak. We start with finance so they can understand and interpret/use (get value from) financial statement. We then move into strategy, marketing, sales, pricing and management. In effect it is a MBA for a micro business.
I have a friend who is a senior partner with Accenture in France. He deals with Outsourcing and they actually take out whole sections of a business. This is not what we will do so I think what we are going to do is less risky than tax.
