Over the past 18 months, we’ve enjoyed sharing diary entries from our franchisees as they embark on their own various personal journeys into business ownership, growth and expansion.
Over the next six months however, we’ll be following a slightly different journey as we track Gregg Hinchcliffe’s progress as centre manager at Signs Express Dartford, as they become the first centre in our roll-out programme to trial our new internal software platform CoreBridge which will underpin the backbone of the whole business, aiming to boost efficiency, accuracy, and streamline operations, by unifying business functions across our entire network.
As a company owned centre of Signs Express Limited (the franchisor), Gregg and his team were the lucky recipients/guinea pigs, as we embed the new system, push it to its limits, trial new functionality, custom build components, and test the system in a live environment. Having worked with our legacy system for the past 20+ years and now with a network of over 60 locations, we felt now was the right time to invest (quite significantly) to create an improved, forward-thinking system to allow us to keep the business in a progressive state.
As we speak with Gregg, we’re keen to hear how the centre is progressing generally, but also, we’re keen to hear first-hand how the implementation has been going, any bumps in the road along the way, improvements, benefits and overall, the dynamic effect we hope it is to have on the business as we start to roll it out to the wider network.
Catching up with Gregg, we hear how the first six months of the year has been performing overall and how the first four weeks of CoreBridge implementation has gone!
“Moving into the centre manager position part-way through last year, means 2024 has felt like the first time I’ve been able to really put a stamp on the business and work with Jon, Aaron and the team (at the Franchise Support Centre) to put together a robust sales strategy and really make a difference.
We’ve had a steady first six months of the year which is promising, with sales in an upward trajectory and performing ahead of prior year. In line with our plans, we’ve got a good balance between some of the standard bread and butter work, plenty of vehicle wraps which is one of our specialities, mixed in with a range of larger projects, creating a varied portfolio and strong profit position.
With a strong team in place, positive sales position and a robust strategy, we were more than comfortable (albeit a little nervous) to embed the new CoreBridge software and see how it would fit in with the business, support our processes and overall improve efficiencies. Given we’ve all been in the industry for some time it was going to be an adjustment on our part!
Before we could start, we had the absolute legend Dan (Business Transformation Projects Lead and gym buddy when he’s in Dartford) set up the back end of the system for us and he’s been an absolute star. In the background Dan and the team have spent the past three months migrating all of the information over from our legacy system as well as setting up our entire pricing structure (a difficult job for a bespoke company), plus building the new CoreBridge master system which will enable the team to migrate and onboard the rest of the network at a much quicker pace.
Going live on 10th June, I spent some time with Dan to go through the system in detail, understanding all the different elements and learning what’s possible. Being able to work with live data was a massive plus, so a big thanks to Dan for importing everything for us! Working in an environment where each and every project is completely bespoke meant that the first step was learning how to use the quoting module as this is the starting point in the process for us in many ways. Quoting on average 65 projects per month, we spend a LOT of time quoting, so we need to get this right!
By the end of the first day, any apprehension went out of the window as I felt comfortable enough to run some quotes on my own and after two days, I felt completely confident and was easily working my way through the quote log. The pricing structure is easy to understand, the margins are adjustable, material selections and specifications are there at the click of a button, multi-component jobs are easy to compile and understand, and I could quickly see the benefits. Whilst initially I’m only using a small percentage of what’s possible, I can see how the whole process will evolve and create future efficiencies.
Next up was invoicing, reports and the basics of sales analysis, along with a real-time dashboard, which I was thrilled was accessible at the click of a button. We’re still in the early phase of learning the basics, but the personal elements we’re able to still include is a big relief to me personally as it’s a massive part of our service and what we pride ourselves on. Next on the training schedule is accountancy, sales analysis, personalised automation and the customer portal!
There’s bucketfuls more to learn, so I’m keen to see how the training progresses. At the moment it’s too early to calculate the time it’ll save the business, but what I can see is an evolving programme, which is bespoke to us, it’s intuitive, forward-thinking, will definitely create efficiencies, allowing us to quote more and therefore drive turnover. In addition to this I can already see the avenues it will open up allowing us to improve upon our internal and external communications, create a slicker customer experience and a new world of analysis with data at our fingertips.”
