One in seven businesses worldwide is a franchise. This means there are over two million franchised companies, employing 19 million people and contributing $2.3 trillion to the global economy annually. With this information, what kind of business could we create?
The company we’re reviewing today recognized this significant opportunity and developed a practical, scalable solution to serve this large market.
The problem
If you plan to sell a franchise of your business, you need to prepare many important documents for your future franchisees. These include the franchise agreement, operations manual, business model documentation, operating standards, procedures, job descriptions, recruitment and training processes, supplier details, legal requirements, confidentiality notices, and more.
However, that’s only part of the issue. Franchisees often pose many specific questions, requiring franchise owners to invest considerable time responding to these often repetitive queries.
Isn’t this a great opportunity to create a product that addresses this problem?
The solution
EZee Assist (https://www.ezeeassist.com) has created an AI assistant for franchise owners that can answer questions from their franchisees.
The central concept is that many questions are repetitive and have already been answered at least once. EZee can use this stored information to independently respond to similar questions in the future.
EZee functions as a chatbot that franchisees can use to ask questions and receive immediate responses, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
This approach allows the franchise owner to decrease the workload and costs of the franchisee support team and save money by reducing franchisee training.
How it works
EZee integrates with your existing knowledge, training, and communication platforms. The AI model learns directly from the source content like SharePoint, Google Drive, YouTube videos, and more. There’s no need to reformat or migrate content to a new file management system.
On the other hand, platform connects to SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and other channels. This allows franchisees to ask questions to the AI assistant and receive answers. “Ask questions on SMS or WhatsApp or email, and we’re this invisible platform that’s an intermediary that gives you the information that you need”, says the company.
The platform records, examines, and summarizes all requests made to the AI assistant in a report. This ticketing workflow for secondary support allows the operations team to stay informed. The franchise owner can view a list of questions that pose challenges for franchisees and make necessary adjustments to their information materials and training programs.
The value
Franchise businesses often experience significant employee turnover, requiring frequent knowledge transfer. This information, including manuals, policies, recipes, and training materials, is usually provided by franchisors to franchisees. However, it can be challenging to make this knowledge readily accessible to all necessary parties.
Typically, a single franchise brand stores content needed by franchisees across an average of three to five platforms.
EZee can change this with its platform. “If it were as simple as sending a text message and getting an answer for whatever you’re looking for, would you care about how it’s organized?” the company asks.
At the same time, franchise owners and franchisees are experiencing the same problem as all other types of businesses – high staff turnover. As a result, new employees of franchise owners are not always able to answer all of the franchisees’ questions, and new employees of franchisees ask franchise owners the same questions that were asked by the employees who have already left.
Tools like EZee Assistant can effectively mitigate this problem.
The market
Did you know that a new franchise opens every 8 minutes during a single business day? Or that 15% of all businesses worldwide are franchises? Just imagine, EZee Assist has discovered a niche in 1/7 of all businesses!
The recipe of success
- The company has found a niche that is really unexpected at first glance.
- The market for such solutions is quite large.
- There is a concise and reasonable implementation of tuning the AI model with the human in the loop.
As Alex Norman from N49P Ventures said:
– “We decided to invest in EZee Assist due to a combination of world-class technical and business team, demonstrated ability to execute, and a large market hidden in plain sight.”
What to copy
- As we see, the franchise market is a huge and probably underestimated market. Therefore, it is possible to make good money by solving franchise-specific problems. And this market seems to be almost empty yet for products like EZee.
- What other franchise-specific problems exist? By analyzing this, we can find many opportunities. For instance, why can’t the Uber model be applied to the franchise market? Is there potential for specific banking or financial products, and so on?
- The second direction involves platforms for the preservation and transfer of corporate knowledge. This can be either within the company or between the company and its contractors.
The company
The company was founded just this year (2023) in Toronto, Canada.
In April EZee secured $150,000 and then raised another $1.35 million in pre-seed funding through a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) in July.
After securing its first six pilots within a couple of months, EZee Assist has since converted three into paying customers, developed its full beta product, and is now in the process of launching its platform across more than 175 franchisees, including BeaverTails Canada, Real Property Management, Spray-Net, Fresh Burger, and EverLine Coatings and Services.
The founders
Raphael Rajan (CEO)
Shray Mehra (COO)
Investors and funding
Pre-seed round – CA$1.9M (Dec 7, 2023)
Investors
If you are planning or already building a startup in similar fields and need expertise on your business model, marketing strategy or just need to strengthen your team, we are here to help: