Only a 10/10 location will do

2022 marked the fifth consecutive year of falling vacancy rates on the high streets, with 13.8% of stores being free to lease by the end of the year*. Despite the demand for a prime spot being higher than ever, Bill Painter, our Director of Development here at Snap Fitness, refuses to settle for anything less than a 10/10 location.  

“The success of a franchise business has its foundations in initially finding the right location. You want to set your franchisees up for a profitable future and one of the core foundations lies in finding the right location,” advises Bill. “We take our time to find the right location which reassures our franchisees that we care about their success – fulfilling our ethos to be ‘One Team’ at Snap Fitness.” Below, Bill discusses why, at Snap Fitness, we ensure our franchisees only consider launching in a location that gets full marks.  

A considered approach

At Snap Fitness, we support you in finding the ideal location for your business launch. From initial search to completion of lease, you should make the most of expertise available to you from our franchise support team. Even though the relationship between us as your franchisor and yourself can be reassuring in the early stages during a location search, we place importance on having an honest conversation of ‘could you open’ versus ‘should you open’.  

We encourage you to consider both your competitive edge and practical elements, such as customer parking, to give you the best chance of long-term success. Opening a franchise location should be a considered process – over the last 20 years we have learned that finding the right location involves several steps which are kept consistent by working with our franchisees hand in hand.  

Your franchise location selection is crucial as this will likely form a significant part of your investment portfolio for the coming years. This is why we take the property process so seriously. We encourage you to investigate any upcoming changes in the area to navigate both dips and rises in market demand to support your business planning process.  

Location, location, location

It is vital to consider the local area of your franchise location to determine how many people have easy access to it. In the case of a 24-7 gym like ours, retail parks with significant multi-weekly use or locations close to superstores like Tesco are ideal, as are those which have access to high street or free parking.  

Although we have this view, we are always learning and have found that launching franchise locations in smaller towns usually bypassed by larger corporate chains can also work. And, our most successful club is on a big city high street with no access to parking – instead, we targeted the 110,000 people within a 7-minute walk of the club – it’s all about finding an ideal location whilst tailoring your plan to what works for the specific area.  

As a franchise which relies on growing a healthy membership base, we also want to ensure there is enough latent demand so local demographics and competitor analysis form part of our location review. For instance, it is important to be informed about locations that are already well served by businesses of a similar concept and their customer satisfaction levels. Are there new things you could offer to this area? Is your USP enough to help you stand out from the rest? We work with you to get a feel for the local market and customer demographic before you delve into investing in a location.  

Use adaptability to your advantage

A good franchise model often takes an adaptable approach so it can utilise a variety of commercial spaces, creating opportunities in every market - from small communities of 10,000 people to larger cities. Being flexible in the specifics of your site opens up the opportunity for more unique locations, such as in renovated churches and warehouses. At Snap Fitness, we’re currently looking at launching a club in an old art-deco cinema, ensuring the unit-level economics work rather than finding the cheapest way around an exciting location. Eclectic buildings can work if you have done your homework, and working with a franchisor, like Snap Fitness, who has the vision to adapt to the site that still make financial sense can be a rewarding business partnership.  

As adaptability can lead to opportunity, we make sure to help you to evaluate locations which are unconventional or different to anything you have seen before. It’s important that your franchisor can adapt to unusual floorplans - at Snap Fitness, we tend to prefer large, open spaces as they allow our architects and equipment partners to be creative in creating spacious gyms with distinct layouts unique to the location.  

All this being said, the single limiting factor of our expansion across any country is finding those 10/10 locations. We take a little more time finding the perfect locations for our franchisees but that leads to much greater benefits even prior to launch – read about our latest growth figures in our last blog.

For more information about how you can utilise our property acquisition strategy as our franchisee, enquire now.

*Local Data Company, 2022, Fewer vacant stores by end of 2022.