Franchise Agreement
The document you’ll live with for ten years.
Drafted to protect your brand, secure your royalty, and give you the standing to enforce standards when someone stops meeting them.
Nobody reads it until something goes wrong.
That’s the nature of a franchise agreement. It sits in a drawer through the good years — and then a franchisee starts buying stock off-system, or lets standards slip, or opens a competing business two suburbs over, and suddenly every clause matters.
At that moment you find out what you actually signed. Whether you can enforce your standards. Whether your restraint of trade holds. Whether you can terminate, and on what grounds, and what happens to the site afterwards.
A weak agreement doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly fails to help you on the day you need it.
What the agreement governs
Rights granted
Exactly what the franchisee may use, where, and for how long. Territory, exclusivity, term and renewal — the four things most disputes eventually come back to.
Fees & royalties
Initial fee, ongoing royalty, marketing levy — how they’re calculated, when they’re due, and what happens when they’re not paid.
Standards & compliance
The link between the agreement and the operations manual, so your standards are contractually binding rather than merely recommended.
Supply & sourcing
Approved suppliers, nominated products and what a franchisee may and may not buy elsewhere — drafted to be enforceable and commercially defensible.
Termination & exit
Grounds, notice, cure periods, and what happens to the site, the stock, the customer data and the signage when the relationship ends.
Restraint & confidentiality
Protecting your system from a departing franchisee reopening under a new name — written to be reasonable enough that a court will actually uphold it.
How we draft it
Commercial terms first
Before a word is drafted we agree the deal: fees, term, territory, obligations both ways. Legal language follows commercial intent, not the reverse.
Drafted by an attorney
Your agreement is drafted by a qualified attorney experienced in franchise law, working to the commercial terms we’ve agreed — not adapted from a template by a consultant.
We walk you through it
Clause by clause, in plain language, until you understand what you’re signing and could explain it to a franchisee
An agreement your franchisee will sign.
It’s possible to draft an agreement so one-sided that no experienced franchisee will touch it — and if they do, a court may decline to enforce the harshest parts anyway. That isn’t protection. It’s a false sense of it.
The agreements that hold are the ones that are firm on the things that matter — brand, standards, royalty, exit — and reasonable on everything else. A franchisee who feels fairly treated is a franchisee who renews, and renewals are where franchise networks make their money.
We draft for the ten-year relationship, not the signing meeting.
What goes with it
The agreement, the disclosure document and the operations manual work as a set. Each one relies on the other two.
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Franchise Readiness ·
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Get the agreement right first time.
One free hour to talk through your commercial terms and what your agreement will need to carry.
Or call Robin directly on 082 451 1604