The Glass Guru

setting the stage for our franchise program. “In January 2007, we changed our name and relaunched as The Glass Guru. And at that point, we shifted gears from just running our own shop to recruiting and teaching others how to do the same thing. We put our shop under management and my wife and I started focusing on promoting and selling the franchises and bringing people in and teaching them how to do what we had done. “Franchising was a whole new business for us and we had just as much to learn about franchising as we had to learn about glass. But we matched ourselves up with some good owners, right off the bat – people who did a good job executing our model with our help. And we learned, over time, the ins and outs of supporting new stores, doing good marketing to attract the right types of individuals, and we really honed in on our ideal candidate, figuring out who the right type of person is for this business. We’ve been franchising, now, for 13 years; we’re just shy of 80 locations across North America, with five in Canada and about 75 in the U.S. We’ve become the largest residential glass provider in North America; really being the only franchise focused on the residential and commercial space.” BVM: What type of individual is an ideal candidate for a Glass Guru franchise? Frey: “We actually prefer that they don’t have glass experience. If they do, that’s okay, but, generally, we are not looking for glass people – we’re looking for people with good business skills. We’re looking for people who either had previous business experience or maybe they’re coming out of corporate America and have good management skills, or can execute a good marketing strategy. We look for people that are not planning on doing the installations themselves, but rather those who can build a team of people and run their business by the numbers.” THE GLASS GURU