Interview with the Franchisor: Volodymyr Klichuk, franchise of ÉDES bakery

I still remember the moment when we were driving around the city and finally came up with a name for the place – ÉDES, which means “sweet” in Hungarian. However, the beginning of this story was a little earlier. In September 2022, when I was looking for a business idea, my wife suggested the idea of “Kiurtoshkalach” (Hungarian: kürtőskalács), which we had previously tried in Budapest and at Christmas fairs in Ukraine. It seemed like a
pretty interesting venture, so we started looking for a place. It was the first experience of offline business and many things remained unknown and unexplored.

We managed to find the space quite quickly, although there were many businesses in this location before us and all of them closed quite quickly, we took a chance and took it. I should note that neither my wife nor I were bakers or even cooks. However, we started looking for a place to buy a special oven (we could only buy it abroad) and started thinking about the design, menu, and other things that were necessary to open. Later, when the oven we ordered arrived, we started testing different recipes, changing and improving them (which, by the way, never stops). And about a month later, we opened the doors of the bakery.

Since the beginning of our work, we have made three important emphases in our work. These are:

• product quality;
• quality of service;
• marketing.

Since “Kiurtoshkalach” (Hungarian: kürtőskalács) used to be sold mainly only at Christmas fairs in Ukraine, we decided that this festive atmosphere should always be maintained at ÉDES. And in the first week, the result exceeded our expectations! It was very pleasant to see many customers getting great emotions from our place. Despite the problems with electricity during those months (blackout period), we were inspired by what we were creating.

Since childhood, I have known that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I not only went to study management but also read many specialized books and attended courses. This helped me make many right decisions at the beginning that led to our success. As I mentioned earlier, product quality and service were very important to ensure that our customers had a great experience and wanted to come back again and again. And marketing, which introduced people to us and our product and brought them to us for the first time.

The ÉDES bakery is a modern, well-thought-out, and fast-implementing project with minimal investment, quick payback, and minimized risks for the investor.

When we started thinking about further vectors of business development, we first of all planned to open another branch in Lviv. But when I was looking at scaling options and analyzing each of them, I thought about taking the franchise route. I was well aware that we had to become a major player in this niche, and the way to do that was through rapid and high-quality development, which would be difficult to achieve on our own in a short time. 

This is how we started developing the ÉDES franchise together with FRANCHISE CAPITAL. At the moment, 5 months have passed since the start of franchise sales and we already have more than 30 franchises sold throughout Ukraine, with 4-6 partner establishments opening steadily every month. The best indicator of success, I believe, is that most of our partners, after opening the first establishment, quickly get the desired results and buy not one, but several additional licenses (i.e. franchises) from us. This fact speaks for itself, without the need to even mention that franchisees are already making more profit than they expect from the very first month. 

People from all over Ukraine already know ÉDES very well and are looking forward to seeing it in their cities. Under each of our videos in tik-tok, we receive hundreds and thousands of comments from people who are waiting for us to open in their cities. And when that long-awaited opening comes, all we have to do is upload a single video and the next day there is already a line of people waiting to get in.

Our partners are young people, married couples who dream of owning their own business or are already running a business (pizzerias, coffee shops, confectioneries, clothing stores, real estate agencies, car business, IT, develop franchises of other projects, etc.), middle and senior managers, people who want to become part of a proven and successful project. Given that the ÉDES brand is already quite well-known and the amount of investment we have is not large, there are many people who want to become our partners. We were forced to select partners much more carefully and refuse to partner with many of them for certain reasons.

Yes, definitely. We cover cities all over Ukraine quite densely. We already have a list of cities where we are not looking for partners. Every week, new cities are added to this list. But Ukraine is a big country, and there are still quite a few settlements that we consider promising and interesting for further scaling. Therefore, my advice to those who want to buy our ÉDES franchise is to act, to hurry up!

1. From day one, prepare your business and brand for further scaling. A lot can be said here.
2. Try to bring your business to a stable and constant income with minimal involvement from you as the owner. Or better yet, without your personal involvement at all!
3. We live in an era of rapid change, digital creative marketing, and artificial intelligence. The sooner you accept this and start using it, the better.
4. Build a professional team. You must learn to delegate tasks to your team and trust the people you work with.
5. Only qualified franchise professionals should be involved in the preparation of the franchise package. You should understand that it is impossible to calculate everything and prepare a high-quality set of tools yourself. The price of a mistake will definitely be higher than the savings! We chose FRANCHISE CAPITAL for this purpose and have never regretted it!
6. Don’t be afraid to share your experience and best practices! It is impossible without openness and transparency.
7. Make decisions quickly and act!

I believe that not only can it, but it is the future! A franchise is successful when it is a system of many important components that are successfully interconnected. At the core are a brand, a competitive product/service, and a professional team, followed by modern technology, innovation, creative marketing, service component, corporate culture, and training. I could go on for a long time. But the point is that successful entrepreneurs with proven and competitive businesses can share their “recipe for success” with entrepreneurs from other parts of Ukraine. In this way, competitive products and services, innovative business concepts and proven business models will be able to scale up quickly enough, raising the national culture of entrepreneurship, restoring the regional economy, developing territorial communities, etc. I believe that this will contribute to the development of Ukrainian entrepreneurship and the rebuilding of Ukraine.

We are constantly working not only to help our partners run their business correctly and successfully, but also to constantly improve it, strengthen our competitive advantages and our brand. Because there should be only one name associated with a “Kiurtoshkalach” (Hungarian: kürtőskalács) – ÉDES! At the moment, we are working in Ukraine, but we are confident that in the future, ÉDES establishments will start opening outside our country.

Yes, we are ready. But first of all, I would like to give a chance to Ukrainians who reside outside our country. We know many cases when our fellow Ukrainians buy domestic franchises and successfully develop them abroad. We are also open to such requests.

If you are interested in the ÉDES bakery franchise, you can find out more about the features of the ÉDES franchise, what is included in the lump sum payment, requirements for the premises, support at the opening and afterwards, and the contact details of the representative in our catalog here.

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