The Interface Financial Group’s IFG 50-50 franchisees are invoice discounters. As The Interface Financial Group is the only invoice discounting franchise available they can hardly be described as average.
What do we do?
It’s all in the name – we are invoice discounters, in other words we buy invoices at a discount. Here’s the transaction – our client is a manufacturer or a provider of a service on a business-to-business basis. Once they have completed an order and delivered it to the customer, they supply an invoice to the customer usually with payment terms known as N30 – or net 30 days. Once upon a time as the fairytale goes… that meant that customers paid their suppliers on the 30th day after they received the goods and the invoice. Unfortunately, 30 days has become 40, 50, 60 and in some cases even 90 days. This means that suppliers are waiting sometimes as much as three months to be paid for goods or services that they have delivered. For a company that is growing rapidly, not knowing when your customers are going to pay is a serious cash flow issue.
The Interface Financial Group solves their cash flow problem by buying those individual invoices at a discount, therefore providing their client with immediate cash to continue growing their business and meeting all of their day-to-day requirements in a timely manner. The transaction is not in any way a loan but rather a buy/sell transaction, and when it is completed the invoice then belongs to The Interface Financial Group. On payday, 30, 40 or even 90 days later, payment is made direct to The Interface Financial Group and the transaction is complete. It’s clearly a win-win-win situation. It’s a win for the client who received immediate cash and didn’t have to wait many weeks to be paid, it’s a win for the IFG 50-50 franchisee as they earned income on the transaction, and it’s also a win for the customer who enjoyed extended terms for payment of the invoice.
In the majority of franchises, the franchisor trains the franchisee and provides startup assistance, after which the franchisee is usually running the franchise on their own perhaps with periodic reference to their franchisor for help and direction or products and supplies.
With the IFG 50-50 franchise, we have an approach that is clearly not average. We work with franchisees on every transaction from the very beginning of their franchise – the transaction in fact becomes a syndicate of franchisee and franchisor working together. That working together aspect covers areas such as the required due diligence to get a transaction started and the all-important funding of the transaction. Funding is the buying of the invoice, and when that happens franchisee and franchisor come together to combine their individual working capital contributions to provide payment to the client. In any financial transaction there will always be ‘paperwork’ to complete – IFG 50-50 franchisees gain comfort from knowing that all paperwork is handled by the franchisor giving them a virtually paperless franchise.
By virtue of the fact that it is paperless, the skill set that we seek in a franchisee does not involve form filling, bookkeeping, report writing etc., but rather a high degree of people skills. This is a franchise that is all about people, money and technology. Our franchisees are engaged in working with their clients on a one-on-one personal basis at an ownership level. Similarly, franchisees market their service through a relationship marketing approach, one that has been tried and proven by the franchisor for over 40 years – and this means that franchisees do not normally market to the end user, instead they adopt a marketing approach that results in business being referred to them.
There isn’t very much about the franchise that is average! Franchisees create income with their franchise through the discount fees earned on each transaction. This means that the more capital a franchisee chooses to deploy, the greater their income and this is compounded by the fact that the franchisor provides a capital leverage program whereby franchisees actually earn a higher income than their deployed capital would normally generate. This results in franchisees effectively working with OPM – Other People’s Money – and thus are able to grow their own franchise at a rapid rate.
The IFG 50-50 franchise is far from your average franchise, and for individuals that like to think and work outside of the box the franchise creates an interesting and unique opportunity.