Some of Australia’s most enduring brands didn’t start with a grand plan and V.I.P. Home Services is a perfect example. In fact, it was only through necessity that it became a business at all.
Back in the 1970s, when Bill Vis, the son of Dutch immigrants, couldn’t get his dream job in car sales he took a commission-only role with Electrolux. When selling vacuum cleaners proved harder than he expected, he decided to supplement his income by asking the people he was trying to sell to if he could mow their lawns.
And so the seed of V.I.P. Lawn Mowing was sown – although it took a few attempts before the roots of the business took hold.
“I built up a business and made more money in a week than I could selling vacuums. So I decided to buy existing lawn mowing rounds and put subcontractors on,” Bill says.
Working with subcontractors proved challenging so Bill and his wife Rose took a different approach.
“I ended up buying every lawn mowing round on the market in Adelaide and started buying and selling the businesses,” he says.
Lawn mowing as a franchise
When the buyers started asking for assistance with insurance and other aspects of the business Bill decided to start charging a fee.
A conversation with his lawyer introduced him to the concept of franchising.
“This was in 1979, and I didn’t know what a franchise was. Anyway, we set up the franchise system, and I sold 60 franchises in the first 12 months,” Bill says.
“We learned quickly that we’d grown faster than our systems, so we slowed down and put proper training and operations manuals in place to support our franchisees. Once that was done, we started adding more franchises.”
It didn’t take long for the business to get to 100 franchises across South Australia. And then, when the footprint got to 130, they realised the concept might work nationally. They started with expansion into Melbourne.
“I took five franchisees with me for a short time and we rented a house and did 10,000 letter drops every week around the area. That’s how we built up our first 10 franchises in Victoria. And we just went on from there,” Bill says.
Rose and Bill employed the strategy of sending existing franchisees interstate for a while to set up the brand in New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand.
Innovating with new services
However, expanding overseas so quickly was a challenge. So the focus changed to doubling down on existing regions like Melbourne and introducing other services such as home cleaning, window cleaning and carpet cleaning to areas where the lawn mowing was already operating.
It proved another learning experience.
“V.I.P. grew rapidly and, at one stage, expanded into 13 different services, with master franchises operating across the various services in individual states.” Bill says.
“It taught me an important lesson: franchisees need clarity and focus if they are going to build a successful business. Today, we are very deliberate about the services we offer, the support we provide and the systems we put around our franchisees.”
The solution was to refocus on the core services which attract repeat business – lawn mowing/gardening and cleaning.
And the success of that format is evident in the brand’s national footprint – more than 750 franchises across Australia, and New Zealand.
“I think that probably the most encouraging, the most exciting element is seeing the successes of franchisees. We’ve got franchisees who have been with us 40 years,” Rose says.
A legacy business for entrepreneurs
Over nearly 50 years, the business has remained family-owned, with now-separated Bill and Rose still at the helm.
“We’ve been divorced 30 years. But we’re still married to the business!” Rose says.
It’s a business that was built on the local newspaper, the Yellow Pages phone directory, leaflets and a little TV advertising.
“We used to advertise the franchise phone numbers in the Yellow Pages directed to the latest technology at the time, the answering machine,” Bill says.
Franchisees would check the answer phone at night and ring the client back and say ‘we can’t get there till next week’.
“And that was no problem. Now speed is of the essence for customers,” Bill says.
Today there is a more entrepreneurial attitude among Australians generally, so V.I.P. has innovated again, to offer even more opportunities for franchisees.
“We’re giving our franchises the opportunity to recruit their own franchisees. As the franchisor, we’ve got the IT, the disclosure documents – we can deal with all that,” Bill says.
“They’re building up their businesses and bringing new people into V.I.P. They have the opportunity to sell work to the new franchisees and make passive income as well.
Future-focused and potential-packed
And it’s a way for franchisees to be able to meet the demand for services.
One of the biggest opportunities for V.I.P. today is the level of demand already sitting within the business. V.I.P. receives more work than its existing franchisees can service, so a significant volume of potential business is turned away each year.
“That is a very different challenge from having to convince customers to use our services. The demand is there; we need more franchisees with the capacity to service it. For people considering joining V.I.P. that creates a genuine opportunity.
“We want to be able to put a lead out to somebody and whoever grabs it goes and gets it. It’s about it’s about servicing the client first and foremost,” Bill explains.
V.I.P. Home Services is a legacy brand built on a forward-looking mindset.
“We’ve been around for a long time, but we are innovative and we’re evolving all the time. We’re not resting on our laurels. We’re evolving and moving with the time to meet the market,” Bill says.
That’s the thinking behind V.I.P.’s new Area Master program, which lets existing and new franchisees recruit and train franchisees of their own. They get the systems, training and brand that took Bill and Rose decades to build, without the cost of starting from scratch.
“This is a 12 billion dollar industry; the business potential is there. There’s an opportunity for franchisees to learn from our 47 years of experience.”