1851 Profile with John Prichard, Fantastic Sams Franchisee

With more than 1,200 salons located throughout North America, Fantastic Sams Hair Salons (www.FantasticSams.com) is one of the world’s largest full-service hair care franchises with an excellent reputation for providing quality hair care services for the entire family. Fantastic Sams Hair Salons has been consistently ranked as one of the top franchise opportunities by Entrepreneur Magazine, Black Enterprise Magazine, Franchise Times and Bonds. John and Patti Prichard, who are central Minnesota franchisees for Fantastic Sams, embody the spirit of the company and its dedication to hard-work and delivering a quality product. On March 21, 2013, they were integral in opening their 26^th store within the state of Minnesota, primarily in the suburban areas of the Twin Cities. They have been with the company since 2004 and continue expansion goals into the future. How did you learn about the brand? The source came from a business broker that I was working with. I looked at many business opportunities and found Fantastic Sams to stand out from all the others. Why did you choose an opportunity with Fantastic Sams? We were leaning heavily towards a service business and quickly saw Fantastic Sams was where we wanted to invest our resources, time and energy. The hair salon industry represents terrific stability, and Fantastic Sams offers a strong full-service, value pricing model that appeals to men, women and children.  This provides the opportunity to have the largest share of the hair salon audience combined with a tremendous growth opportunity. It lined up well for us. What challenges have you overcome to get where you are now? Number one has been securing the capital needed for the kind of growth we’ve had. Opportunities with Fantastic Sams have been excellent and because we’re in multi-tenant buildings with leasehold improvements and specialty fixtures, establishing the collateral needed for lenders is challenging.  We’ve been able to secure needed capital from our own resources, equipment leasing companies, community banks, salon seller financing and securing Small Business Administration (SBA) backed loans. Secondly, this is a high turnover industry and early on in business, we made a commitment to provide our staff with strong training, development and support to help them be successful.  Fantastic Sams also provides excellent training and support which has been instrumental in supporting our success. Over time we have developed strong teams in our locations and have an attractive career path for those in the salon industry. What are your expansion or development plans? What is your end goal with Fantastic Sams? We’re planning to continue to grow and develop both with new locations and opportunities when other owners want to exit. We are currently looking for good locations to open new salons in the Twin Cities areas and within two hours outside of this area. We will continue to look for opportunities with current Fantastic Sams owners that decide to exit the business. Within a couple years, we may look at opportunities in Minnesota further away from the Twin Cities. This would require that we continue to build the infrastructure to accommodate salons further away. We don’t have an end goal with Fantastic Sams and have put in place a Trustee Board that can step in should something happen to us and keep the business operating for God’s purposes.