Curbside Enthusiasm: A Look at Mobile Franchises

Franchising has seen significant advancements in the past decade, from the emergence of fast-casual dining to the development of apps and cloud services to help run operations. But one of the biggest changes came on four wheels—the rise of mobile franchising. 

Mobile-based businesses were once the realm of plumbers, handymen and other service technicians who would roll up to clients’ homes in vans. But today it’s much more, with franchises putting entire coffee shops on bikes, building restaurants and bakeries into the backs of trucks and jamming anything they can think of into RVs. And customers love it.

During the Great Recession, as financing dried up, the franchise community began thinking about ways to make offerings more affordable. The solution, in many cases, was to put the concepts on wheels. Mobile businesses tend to have lower startup costs than brick-and-mortar operations. They also have a shorter ramp-up, so franchisees can start bringing in revenue almost immediately, rather than negotiating a lease and waiting for a build-out. 

As mobile businesses became