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Business View Australia - March-April 2016 145
HISING
purchase Sushi Ginza, the wholesale
arm of the business. Now, there are
opportunities to provide sushi to
new, untapped markets such
as schools, Defence Force
mess halls and cruise
ships.
“I’m a mother of a
four year old and
a two year old,”
says
Mills.
“This is an
i n t e r e s t
for me,
because I’m starting to pack lunches
and send them off to preschool; I’m
still packing sandwiches and I want to
be packing sushi. One of the growing
areas is kids, youth is the biggest
market, and they see it just as an
Australian food, they don’t see it as
a special Japanese food or Korean
food. They just see it as an everyday
food and they love eating it. So that’s
a big area for us that we’re getting
into. So we are basically now retail and
wholesale sushi, we have kitchens in
Queensland, Victoria and Sydney for
the wholesale side.”
Starting a Wasabi Warriors franchise
works a bit differently in the initial
phase. Rather than paying an upfront
fee, franchisees are funded into the
business through the ‘manage to own
programme’ initiative, where the
franchisee pays back the initial
franchise fee with a portion of
the profits they make. This
model was so successful
that the number of stores
rocketed from 22 to 50
very quickly.
“The
only
problem with
that,
of
c o u r s e ,
is that
t h e r e
i
s
only so much that we can fund, and so
we’re asking more from the franchises
to help do that. It’s a programme
that we will keep running and keep
encouraging people to do and I do
hope that the banks get behind it a bit
more, so that’s our biggest growth.”
When it comes to qualities in a
potential franchise owner, Mills
certainly knows what to look for.
“They’ve got to have passion for the
brand, or they have to have passion
for owning their business, supportive
family and friends. And then, where we
can, we assist in the ‘manage to own
programme’. People with energy and
passion succeed, because you can
have people who have the money, but
just no passion and so a business is
always going to do better if you have