The Shaftesbury Partnership have published Scaling Up Success, a paper looking at how lessons from commercial franchising can be applied to the social sector. Over the last 12 months, The Shaftesbury Partnership has built on the experience the team have both in commercial franchising and in growing social enterprises to create FranchisingWorks, a social enterprise that links unemployed people to robust commercial franchise businesses. FranchisingWorks is now showing how commercial franchising can play an important role in economic regeneration in Greater Manchester.
SP believes that commercial franchising also offers learning for social enterprises who are looking at a franchising model for expansion. This paper is a first attempt to distil some of the ‘rules’ of commercial franchising and offer suggestions on where they are relevant to the social sector.