Some expense spared: how ERA UK’s Robert Allison uses industry experts to save companies cash

Having helped grow Expense Reduction Analysts UK into a thriving franchise saving British businesses money on a combined spend of £500m, Robert Allison, the company’s managing director, is no stranger to going the distance for financial reward. Born in the UK, his parents emigrated out to Perth in Western Australia when he was just four years old, eager to pursue opportunities they felt were beyond them in Britain. “When they emigrated 40 years ago, the economy and the opportunities here were more limited,” Allison says. “They were looking for new horizons and new opportunities.” In contrast, at the time Australia had a much more entrepreneurial culture, giving his parents the opportunity to start their own trophy factory, something that undoubtedly rubbed off on an impressionable young Allison. “I remember living and growing up in a household surrounded by self-employment,” he says. “That’s the nature of a growing country: there were a lot more people over there starting their own businesses.””

The nature of his parents work meant that the family moved around quite a lot: Allison ended up attending seven different schools during his 12 years of education. However, one thing remained consistent throughout. “If you were to go back and pick through most of my reports, they’d all probably tell you something similar,” Allison says. “‘Shows fantastic potential: if only he spent as much time on his work as he does on entertaining the class.'” Fortunately, there was one area in which he did apply himself: thanks to the example his parents had set, Allison wasn’t afraid of rolling up his sleeves and taking on part-time jobs, including working his summer holidays when he was 14 in the local brake-bonding factory. And he wasn’t averse to the odd entrepreneurial money spinner: he recalls a plan he and a friend came up with to make a little moolah one Valentine’s Day. “We went down to the local fresh flower market and bought flowers early in the morning and set up a roadside stall selling them,” he says. “That was the trading entrepreneurship coming through at a young age.”

But even with this tenacity, Allison’s first full-time role actually came about by accident. Having secured a place at the University of Western Australia to study business accounting, he decided to defer for a year to go travelling around the country until, ironically, a slight budgetary miscalculation saw the trip grind to a halt. “That resulted in me at 17 being stuck on the far side of Australia where I’d run out of money,” says Allison. Fortunately, the father of a friend of his owned a small print factory nearby; when the business’s minority shareholder and head of day-to-day operations left suddenly, Allison was offered his job. “He basically upped sticks and left the operation, leaving the real owner high-and-dry so I stepped into the void,” says Allison. “At a fairly tender age that got me straight into working and earning good money, given the responsibilities I’d taken on and the work I was doing.”

Without this happy accident, Allison would have never found his way into the world of franchising. “The owner gave me the seed capital, if you like, to buy my first franchise, which was a pilot for an American dry-cleaning franchise called Pressed for Time that was trying to get into the Australian market,” he says. “I was 19 by the time I’d started that and that was my first foray into franchising.” Despite his tender years, Allison quickly took to the model and before long he had added a small stationery business and a franchise trying to modernise milk delivery to his portfolio. Without a doubt this has stood him in good stead: even now he feels that spending time as a franchisee taught him invaluable skills for when he eventually found himself sat on the other side of the desk. “It has helped me to understand the psyche of many of the franchisees I’ve worked with over the years,” he says. “While it was 20 years ago now, I have a degree of empathy and understanding for the view the franchisee holds of the franchisor.”

Having cut his teeth in franchising, Allison’s next move was into a consulting role at the Franchise Alliance, which at the time was one of Australia’s premier franchise consultancy groups. “I was still only about 20 or 21; I was only taken on really to be an office junior within that environment but they believed very strongly in just dropping you in at the deep end,” he says. “Very quickly I ended up actually managing a number of franchisor accounts, helping them to plan the growth of their network, their franchise sales within Western Australia and helping them to write systems.” Working both with home-grown brands like Brumby’s Bakeries and major international players like Subway, for Allison the next four years were a masterclass, giving him insight into a wide array of franchise systems. “There were a range of different franchisors from a massive variety of sectors,” he says. “I was very hands on in half a dozen different franchise systems at any one time.”