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Case Study

Storefriendly self storage: Franchising for growth

By Benoit F. Leleux, Christian Bomb, Wilfried Tchouanga and Camelia Teodorescu

15 pages

November 2018

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Reference: IMD-7-2000

The case offers a unique perspective into franchising as a business model for growth and a reduced-risk entry path to entrepreneurship, with an application in the Singapore self-storage market. In 2011, Jes Johansen, a Swedish national, sensed an opportunity to innovate self-storage in Singapore: smaller facilities, with smaller rooms, located closer to the customer and at a higher price per m2, resulting in a smaller rental bill but much higher convenience. He had seen the concept implemented in Hong Kong by a colleague, Kevin Chang, under the StoreFriendly brand name. Jes decided this might be the opportunity he had been looking for. After convincing Kevin to become his partner, Jes set up StoreFriendly Singapore. After testing and implementing the concept in a single first outlet, proving the value proposition and getting a bit of traction, he decided to accelerate growth through an original franchise system. Over two years StoreFriendly grew to ten franchises and two owner-operated branches. In 2015, SingPost, as part of a broad logistics diversification, approached him to acquire StoreFriendly. With a catch: they wanted to own all the outlets directly…

Learning Objective

Franchising as business model for growth
franchising as lower risk entrepreneurial path
growth management
scaling up
business models
franchise relationships
incentive structures
exit management

Keywords

Finance, Operation, Entrepreneurship, Franchising, Business Model, Emerging Market, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Supply Chain Management, Incentive, Growth Management, Exit, Engineering, Operations

Settings

Asia, Singapore
StoreFriendly Self Storage, Logistics and Supply Chain
2012-2018

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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