Why HTeaO is One amongst the High 10 Original & Emerging Franchises for 2023

How does a pressure-thru iced tea franchise promote extra than 400 franchises in 5 years, and construct the No. 9 save on our High Original & Emerging Franchises checklist? We spoke with HTeaO’s chief development officer Andrew Hawes to study why franchisees stare the emblem as a sweet opportunity.

How did HTeaO commence?

Our founder, Gary Hutchins, has owned a hamburger restaurant in Amarillo, Texas, called Buns Over Texas, since the 80’s. He started promoting iced tea there within the mid-2000’s. And around the time of the closing recession in 2008, he started noticing folk were coming in and as opposed to spending 10 bucks on a hamburger, they were factual spending two or three bucks on an iced tea. So in 2009 he added on 1,200 square toes to his hamburger restaurant and launched Texas Tea, offering eight flavors of iced tea from a pressure-thru.

His son Justin, who’s now our CEO, joined him and his mother in 2012, and that’s the rationale when they launched the first prototype of a freestanding Texas Tea. And when we opened that, we realized we could per chance additionally procure something particular that we could per chance additionally be ready to franchise. So we spent 5 or six years building the franchise model and the pork up machine and the infrastructure, and then launched the franchise opportunity in 2018, on the identical time that we rebranded Texas Tea to HTeaO.

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Originate you have faith you studied that right here’s an thought that can trail nationwide?

I suspect in some unspecified time in the future it’ll, and we procure now even had some ardour, crazily ample, from locations like North Dakota and Idaho. Nonetheless factual now our focal point is the southeastern United States, what I’d call “tea drinking nation.” The barrier to entry is great less due to you must no longer procure to point to what iced tea is somebody in Georgia. So our development technique, serene being an rising younger worth, is to form our worth and our consciousness within the southern U.S., and then when we procure now that publicity and procure a thousand locations commence, we can fetch precise into a few of the extra northern states that achieve no longer seem like as conscious of iced tea yet. And one of the most main reasons we precipitated what we call our brewhouse choices, which is our sizzling tea and espresso choices, along with growing our morning web squawk visitors, used to be to eventually trail into these markets where sizzling drinks are extra smartly-liked.

What are your dreams for the emblem for 2023 and beyond?

We procure 68 locations commence and operational on the new time, and 93 below construction, so as that must raise our total to about 160 stores commence within the next twelve months. Beyond that, we procure now already awarded 430 franchises in total, and we’re having a gape at awarding 175 extra this twelve months. The thought is to procure 500 locations commence by the quit of 2026.

To what invent you attribute that development?

Or no longer it is a model constructed around the most a success phase of a cafe. Any drinking locations owner will expose you beverages are where the cash is made. We eradicated the overall frustration and instruments that goes with food preparation. And it would no longer elevate a rocket scientist to clutch that water, tea, and ice are usually no longer too terribly costly, so the margins will even be very lucrative. I suspect folk can visualize, Howdy, right here’s something I will invent. I form no longer need culinary expertise or a background in restaurant administration.

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What forms of franchisees has HTeaO attracted?

Within the muse, it used to be a host of second profession form folk — folk who acknowledged, “I’d enjoy to form a enterprise for myself, but I need that pork up mechanism of a franchise.” So for the first few years, our development used to be closely weighted toward single-unit operators, and so they’ve been noteworthy. Now that we procure now constructed some worth consciousnesswe’re starting up to attract multi-unit, multi-worth franchise partners, which is extremely humbling. I serene look us as a very younger, unknown worth, so that you need to per chance procure somebody with 20 or 30 years of expertise within the franchise trouble elevate a leap of religion technique a lot to our team. We’re serene going to welcome single-unit franchisees, but bringing on multi-unit partners who can invent 5 to twenty stores over a shorter interval due to they’ve the infrastructure already in save is that in fact going to be key to our development going ahead.