Issam Soubjaki

Issam and Enza Soubjaki are the husband-and-wife team behind food franchise Burger Edge. The duo were introduced to the brand as customers, and became franchisees before buying the franchise outright.

In the second half of the 2009-10 financial year they opened a new store every eight weeks, taking the chain’s revenue to $6.8 million. They currently have 17 franchised stores and are aiming for 24 by the end of June.

Today they talk about the transition from paid work to the franchise sector, buying the business you’ve bought into, and why they are keeping one eye on the exit.

One of the things I liked about your story was the transition from customer, to franchisee, to multi-unit franchisee, to franchisor. Can you take us through the story?

Issam: Well, it’s one of those stories where you liked the product so much you buy the company sort of thing. I’ll be honest, the first thing that attracted me to Burger Edge was the product, it was great taste, great presentation. It just really hit the spot in terms of what a retail food business needed to be, especially a franchise operation.

Did you have a background in that sector?

Issam: No, I’ve come from IT marketing. So all my life I’ve worked for dotcoms, IT firms, and I spent 12 years in senior marketing roles across Asia-Pacific and the US. I basically spent a lot of my time building up brands and building up businesses, and four out of the five companies I’ve ever worked for eventually got bought out and got swallowed up into other companies. So you kind of have a very short timeframe to get your message across and build up your business and to really maximise its value. Because that was always the brief that I got from my CEOs – we’ve got to get market value up. So we basically saw this product and we were very ripe to do our own thing. And then Burger Edge came along.

How did you find that shift into the world of franchising? Were you working on the grill and behind the counter, or did you take a more managerial type role?

Issam: For me it was a baptism of fire, that is the best way I could describe it. You have to sort of get into the really nitty gritty from day one.

Enza: Neither of us had been in franchising before. I am a scientist so I came from working in a laboratory, although I’ve had a little bit of food experience, I waitressed through uni and high school. But as far as franchising we sort of jumped in. It came quite naturally actually, it’s not that difficult to run one of the stores.

Issam: In some ways it’s better not to know what you’re getting yourself into. We’re both very enthusiastic and driven people, but it was more the excitement that really attracted us – it felt like we were getting into the ground floor of something.

I gather you became master franchisees in Victoria very quickly after joining? How did that come about?

Enza: Burger Edge was already here, Victoria was the first place that it was established and the Yarraville store was the first store. So when we went to buy into the company we were offered the Yarraville store, the master franchise and the Highpoint store, which was under construction, as a package.

Lots of people find the process of running one outlet difficult enough, did you have to get up to speed pretty quick to run all those businesses?

Enza: We had family working with us which helped a lot because we didn’t have to worry about finding new staff straight away. They trained up in Yarraville and when the new store opened up half went to Highpoint and half went to Yarraville, so we could incorporate new staff with the experienced staff.

Issam: When you’re excited you take on everything, and what we found is nothing really daunted us, we just felt we were on such a steep learning curve that whatever came we just sucked it up and went on with it. Now looking back on it we actually learnt a lot of new things in a very short time but if I had my time again, I’d do it exactly the same. I don’t believe in sort of sitting their pondering over something for months and months and months and then deciding. If you see an opportunity you need to pounce on it, you’ve got to throw yourself right into it and that’s exactly what we did. But we didn’t really have a choice to be honest.