Encouraging Women Into Franchising Puts A Spotlight On Opportunities For Women

EWIF continues to celebrate the success of women in business

The week of October 15-21 is a nationwide celebration of women in business. The UK is seeing an increase in inspirational women, who are breaking through the glass ceiling.

Women such as entrepreneur Michelle Mone, who told Huffington Post earlier this year: “I want women to push forward, push through the barriers like I did and make no excuses.

“There are so many strong women in every industry and I hope we can all bounce off each other, lift each other up and continue to achieve great things.”

Focus features

Encouraging Women into Franchising is passionate about seeing women in business become more the norm than the exception and has been celebrating women in franchising for almost 10 years.

Joining in with celebrating National Business Women’s Week, EWIF will be releasing focus features on some of the 2017 winners of its annual awards event, held in London.

The EWIF awards are a way for women and businesses to recognise the success of both franchisors and franchisees over the past year. Nominations for next year’s event will be open in January 2018.

Successful business expansion can be achieved through franchising, as many entrepreneurs are realising, none more so than Mary Perkins, co-founder of Specsavers.

Along with her husband, Mary built the brand and used the model to encourage others to buy into the franchise.

“The trick of the trade for entrepreneurs is to have a passion,” she says. “Unless you’ve got that passion and knowledge of your customers and what they want, you might as well not do it.

“You have to think about that from the moment you wake up every morning, until the moment you go to bed.”

Dina Dwyer-Owens, co-chair of the Dwyer Group board of directors, attributes a successful franchise to the people who are involved in the business.

“Franchising is about being in business for yourself, but not by yourself,” she says. “It’s important for me to always surround myself with the right people.

“I’m only good at a few things. I’m just smart enough to be running this business and the rest of the folks I have around me are so good at the things I’m terrible at or that I don’t want to spend my energy on.

Working together, we can achieve what we’re doing here at the Dwyer Group.”

One of the elements of women in the franchising industry is the drive to empower one another. Such as the vision of people like Mary and Dina, who as well as running successful businesses, are doing all they can to support other women and inspiring them to find ways of progressing their franchises.

Foundational ethos

This is very much the foundational ethos of EWIF.

Clive Sawyer, CEO and founder of EWIF, says: “From the inception of EWIF in 2008, we have been passionately driven to inspire women to consider franchising as a route into business.

“Now, 10 years on, we’re seeing more of our members motivating each other, mentoring each other, spurring each other on and then actively celebrating each other’s successes.

“This is the heart of who we are as a not-for-profit organisation and is an honour for us at EWIF to see this camaraderie among women who are in franchising - a kind of ‘we’re in this together’ attitude, which emanates throughout our regional meetings, awards event and annual conference.”