Bespoke Foil Company had a big range when we started thinking about franchising. Prints, keepsakes, frames, a handful of things we had added because a customer asked once and we said yes.
Every one of them sold. That is the trap, because a range that sells looks like a strength, and nobody wants to cut something that is bringing money in.
What a range costs a network
When you are the one running the business, a big range costs you almost nothing. You know every product, you know the pricing, and you can explain any of it to a customer in a sentence.
Hand that range to somebody who has never met you and every product becomes a question. What is this one for? How do I price it? What do I say when they ask the difference? A franchisee with forty things to learn learns none of them well, and the customer feels it.
The range was not the product. The range was forty small decisions we had made over five years, and we were about to ask a stranger to remember all of them.
The test we used
We asked one question of every product. If a franchisee sold only this, in a town we have never worked, would the business still be the business?
Most products failed it straight away. They were nice, they were profitable in our hands, and they had nothing to do with why people came to us. One product passed without any argument, and it was the one people had been driving across the county for.
That became the hero. Everything else either sat behind it as an upsell with a defined place in the journey, or it went.
What changed once there was one
Pricing got simple, because there was one thing to price and a small set of things to add to it. Training got shorter, because the first thing a franchisee learns is the only thing she has to be brilliant at.
The brand got tighter as well, which we did not expect. Photography, copy, the session itself, all of it could point at one thing instead of trying to represent a shelf.
And the numbers got honest. With one hero product, the question of whether a session was worth running had one answer rather than a blend of twelve.
The bit people push back on
You will lose some revenue in the short term. We did. A few customers wanted the thing we no longer made, and a couple of them said so.
What you gain is a business that can be handed over. That is the only thing a franchisee is buying, and no amount of range makes up for it.
If you are looking at your own range and wondering which one is the hero, the honest answer is usually the one you would keep if you could only keep one. You already know which that is.