Charley's Grilled Subs

Samantha MacMillan

Strengths and Weaknesses:

I am interested in the food-franchising world so, I chose to direct my franchise towards sandwiches. From the selection I was given, I chose “Charley’s Grilled Subs”. The founder Charley Shin was inspired to make his own subs after making a wrong turn on his family vacation trip, stopping to eat at a local restaurant in South Philly, and discovering something so delicious that he could not forget it. Here, he experienced his first Philly Cheesesteak Sub, which changed his world forever. After coming back from his trip, he tried and succeeded in perfecting the creation of this delicious sub and ended up making a franchise out of it.

His franchise has been existent since 1991 and now resides all over the world from “Ohio to Hawaii to Alaska to Japan and beyond”. Some of the franchise’s keys to success are the training methods they use and the full-on support they provide to all of their franchisees. Because the franchisor is deeply involved in each of their franchisees, they were voted by QSR Magazine as the “Best Company to Work For” in 2009 and voted by Entrepreneur Magazine as “Best of the Best Quick Service Restaurants” from 2004-2009. It is extremely important for the franchisor to support and teach its franchisees in order for the whole business to be successful. If one of the franchisees was not properly trained and did things a different way from what the franchisor wanted, then that franchisee could be hurting the “Charley’s Grilled [Sub‘s]”good reputation. Managing and keeping track of employees in all the franchisees is crucial to the business. Another strength that this company has is financial advice and assistance. This franchise is doing a great job with balancing their incomes and distributing it throughout their franchisees. They are keeping a watchful eye on each of them and have been giving good financial advice because this company just keeps expanding. He now has about 400 locations in forty-six states in the U.S. and fifteen in other countries. The last significant strength that he acquires is marketing. Just from visiting his website, he makes the potential costumer feel intrigued about his restaurant and want to try out his famous Philly Cheesesteak sub sandwich. He uses technology quite well and even displays a fun video that explains how the company came to be. His marketing skills definitely made me interested in his franchise.

The only weakness that this franchise might display is expanding internationally. He has a lot of business here in America and not so much in other countries, when in comparison. The franchise has to accustom better to the different societies in order to get more business internationally. They have to adapt to different cultures like Sheika Lubna al-Qasimi has done and work to perfect the needs and wants of the customers in that particular society.

Did your search give you enough information to answer most of the questions in Figure 5.8?

Unfortunately, the website that led me to the franchise’s information was not enough so I had to use Google and other websites to look further into the franchise. I needed to know more about the locations of the franchises, an actual estimate of the numbers of franchisees Charley owns, and other information pertaining to marketing and finance.

For the video: http://www.charleys.com/about/