WE ARE FAMILIA

Martin has recruited over 100 franchise partners across Familia’s client networks. The number matters less than what it taught him: franchisee recruitment is a sales and investment process, not a hiring one. Treat a prospective franchisee like a job candidate and you either lose them or sign a resentful partner.

He came to franchising from running creative agencies, and that shapes how Familia approaches the whole recruitment journey. The prospectus, the brand identity, the recruitment landing pages, the video that introduces your founders – none of it is decoration. It is what a serious investor uses to judge whether your opportunity is credible, long before they ever speak to you.

Martin built Familia IQ around that thinking. Behaviour-based lead scoring and qualification that tracks what a prospect actually does rather than what they claim on a form, so your time goes to the people genuinely capable of investing, not the ones collecting brochures.

Julie has done what most franchise consultants only advise on. She built and ran a UK franchise network from the first franchisee to over 50 operational locations, which means she has lived every stage of franchise development rather than read about it.

That includes the unglamorous work that decides whether a network holds together. The operations manual that makes a business genuinely replicable. The territory mapping that stops franchisees competing with each other. The onboarding and training programmes that get a new partner trading properly instead of guessing. The network management that keeps fifty owners pulling in the same direction. She also engineered a recurring monthly subscription model in a sector that ran on term-by-term block bookings, protecting unit cash flow straight through the summer months that flatten most children’s activity businesses.

Julie is a recognised franchise mentor and works directly with founders through the decisions that matter most. When she tells you something will work, or won’t – it comes from having been there herself.

Steve has held senior positions inside franchise organisations, which means he understands what a network needs its marketing to do before a brief is even written. That perspective is rare in production. Most studios make things that look good; Steve makes things that work for a franchise audience.

He leads production at Familia – brand films, franchisee stories, motion graphics and the campaign assets that carry a recruitment drive. AI-assisted production has changed what a growing network can afford to put on screen, and Steve has built our process around that shift. The crews, the locations, the long post-production schedules – much of that cost has gone. The craft has not. The brief, the story and the judgement about what actually lands still come from someone who has sat on the franchisor side of the table.

Jon builds brands that survive being handed to new franchisees. That is a different discipline from ordinary brand design, and it is the one franchise networks most often get wrong.

Most identity work never has to hold together across dozens of locations, each with a local owner making their own decisions. Franchise brand does. Jon creates the identity systems, guidelines and design frameworks built for that reality – consistent enough to protect the network, flexible enough to work locally. He also leads how a franchise communicates: The messaging that tells a prospective franchisee what your opportunity actually is, and the language that keeps a growing network sounding like one brand rather than fifty.