Fantastic Services: Rising demand during pandemic causes boom in franchise home services sector

Demand has risen by as much as 71% in some areas of the UK 

Fantastic Services, the UK’s leading home services franchise, has revealed that rising demand during the pandemic has caused a boom in the home services sector, with some areas seeing demand grow by as much as 71%. 

Rune Sovndahl, chief executive and co-founder, who recently made the bold promise to a create 1,000 millionaire franchisees over the next decade, has revealed that demand for services such as cleaning, gardening and other property services, has soared. The highest growing areas in the UK are Oxford which is seeing 71% growth quarter on quarter, then Bristol (67%) and Reading (20%). 

He explains: “Covid-19 has changed the business landscape across the UK, with many people and businesses struggling to recover. However, demand for property maintenance has boomed and several of our area developer franchisees, particularly in the Oxford, Bristol and Reading regions, have enjoyed a tremendous expansion with more than 20 new areas launched across the whole country over the past twelve months.

“We have seen a real spike in entrepreneurial people wanting to open franchises with us rather than starting a new business completely on their own. This makes sense in that new franchisees get the benefits of running their own business, while being protected from a lot of costs, risks and uncertainty. We also conducted a recent survey of 2000 UK adults, where we found that approximately 3.5million Brits have opened up a second business since the beginning of lockdown. This trend is particularly prominent among millennials aged 24-34 with one in six claiming to have started a side business. This obviously lends itself very well with the Fantastic Services business model. There is real demand to join our network.” 

An example of an area developer franchisee team which has boomed during lockdown is husband-and-wife team Julian and Lucy Fernando, who operate in Reading, Slough and Hemel Hempstead. The Fernandos were Fantastic Services’ most successful Area Development franchisee in 2020, with ten-times higher turnover compared to 2019. They have now increased the number of delivered services 14 times since launching, and now have a network of six working franchisees.

Lucy Fernando explains: “Since launching things couldn’t really have gone better, there is real demand for our services and also a real demand from tradespeople or technicians in our area to join our growing franchise network. The investment in technology from Fantastic Services is one of the keys behind our success. The app, which enables franchisees to see jobs in real-time and the fastest route they can take to their next customer, makes it so straight-forward to manage. The full back-end system, that helps us to manage teams and keep track of everyone’s performance, is also very important.” 

Fantastic Services launched in 2009 and now has over 530 franchisees, stretching over three continents, with thousands of professionals delivering 100-plus services to over 50,000 clients each month. Unlike many franchises, Fantastic Services has a team of 500 experts at HQ who constantly generate sales leads for the franchisees so they can focus on delivering great customer service rather than worrying about sales. All franchisees follow a proven business model that grew Fantastic Services from a small cleaning company into a global franchisor.