ASK Local Franchise FAQs
Q: Am I given a Sales Territory and am I limited to where I can sell?
A: You are not limited to where you can sell. We give you an available location name local to where you are based. For example if you live in Fulham and ASK Local Fulham is already taken you could take ASK Local Chelsea. But you are not limited to selling anywhere, so if you have a great Social Media network and personal business contacts in Fulham, Chelsea or Newcastle you are completely OK to sell and promote in those locations to them.
Q. Do you do all the Job and Project Management and Delivery?
A. Yes we Project Manage and Deliver everything ordered by your customers either from one of our online print shops, or via email, contract or telephone. All you have to do is look after them from a sales or customer service perspective.
Q: I already have a website, how do I link your print software shop to it?
A: Very easily. We set you up an asklocal.uk sub-domain for our brands on our platform. For instance our franchisee in Fulham has fulham.asklocal.uk and that links directly into all main brands with franchise link codes. All you need to do is link your www.yourdomain.co.uk to the site we provide you. We could in some circumstances host a sub-domain of your existing domains on our server doing the same thing, so in the Fulham example above they could have alternatively had print.theirdomain.co.uk but in those cases we would have to charge you for setup and for placing a https security certificate on the subdomain which we would be hosting.
Q: Is there a Fee charged for the Franchise?
A: Yes we charge a very small fee of £3000 for the Franchise. This is being discounted to £1200 until 31st March 2022 so just covers our costs in setting you up, we don't make a profit on that (the high specification 17" Laptop costs us £800 to purchase and configure).
Q: Are there any other charges?
A: There is a low cost monthly management charge of £69.99 per month. Again we are not making a profit on this and it just covers things like our Filemaker and Microsoft Office monthly Cloud licenses for you having Filemaker (which accesses our bespoke Job and Client Management Sysyem App and Microsoft Office on your laptop (Filemaker alone costs us £31 per month) and VoIP telephony costs providing you a local number and calls.
Q: What happens if I want to stop?
A: We have a very fair and ethical contract. The last thing we want is people working with us who are not committed to us and our brands. So you can stop at any time giving 1 month's notice, with no financial penalty at all so a maximum of just 1 month's management fee still to pay. But you get to keep the Laptop which you in effect paid for.
Q: Can I add my own products to the Print Shop?
A: Unfortunately not, however we do have a separate customer print-on-demand shop on our ASK Online brand at www.askonline.shop where we sell Calendars, Merchandise and Printed material to the world for Photographers, Charities, Fundraisers and Companies. So subject to our agreement, and as long as not competing with what we already offer then let us know your product(s) or service(s) and we can sell them for you via ASK Online as can other franchisees in our network. You obviously get your Franchise Commission as well as your ASK Online Shop commission on sales as you are in effect a customer of your own ASK Local franchise in that scenario.
Q: How much can I earn?
A: As an ethical company we do not want to make false promises to you, so our stock answer is this is down to the quality of your leads, business contacts and sales skills. But on School Yearbooks alone, we are already the UK's leading low cost provider (we will show you the competition's shocking samples at training), and the average Hardback Yearbook order to secondary schools is over £1000 (so over £150 commission on each sale), and there are over 30,000 schools in the UK and over 60 in your local area. We have just added School Eco Planners (Student and Teacher Planners to Schools) to our portfolio of brands, all produced in-house at a lower price than the competition, so there are over 30,000 potential new customers there. And that is just a small section of our potential market. We are also launching a Sports Club Printing and Merchandising brand and our ASK Online print-on-demand Distribution brand launched in 2020 is already successful. So without promising anything to you, we believe if you work hard promoting full time then £500k-£1m+ annual turnover is very easily achievable in time, generating you over £75k-£150k earnings per year; and for part-time mums and dads just looking an additional income, or the already self employed looking for an additional part time revenue stream £200k+ is easily achievable generating you over £30k earnings per year. Remember you are promoting for an established company and brand that was established in 1988 not for a new start up.
Q: Can I visit the ASK offices?
A: Yes you can. Simply give us a call and we can arrange a meeting and show off our ASK brand services at one of our Franchise Information Workshops.
Q: I'm interested, what are the next steps and how long does it take to set me up?
A: It is very simple. Just Apply Here, we then quickly assess your application. Once approved we have a very fair and simple plain English Franchise Contract we send you. Once signed you are invoiced the Setup fee and once paid we configure your laptop, setup your websites and put you live on our system. The process sould take 2-4 weeks. You then either visit for Training at our offices or we train you virtually online.