The benefits of being the first franchisee of a system can be
summarized in three words: ground floor opportunity. Yet being a
system's pioneer often means being a guinea pig, too.
You're buying into a system before anyone else even hears of
the opportunity, but you're taking on the risks of the unknown
that, say, a McDonald's franchisee doesn't necessarily
face.
It was a risk Laurie
Radloff was willing to bear. Radloff was a 24-year-old branch
manager of a small travel agency in Cranbrook, British Columbia,
with seven years' travel agency experience when Uniglobe Travel
approached her in 1981 about being the first franchisee of its
fledgling chain. Though she had no entrepreneurial intentions,
Radloff was attracted by the idea of being part of a travel chain
with global aspirations. "One of the concerns I had, being in
a rather rural community, was access to things like training and
supplier programs, and we'd gone from being part of a 17-branch
chain to a three-branch chain," she says of her employer at
the time of the Uniglobe offer. "At the time I met with
Uniglobe, the fundamental things they planned on building were the
very things I saw a need for."
Franchise Zone spoke with Radloff, who has been president of
Vancouver-based Uniglobe Travel Western Canada since 1986, about
whether it's a good idea to become a system's first
franchisee.
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