Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2015 | Page 20
BY EDDY GOLDBERG
TITA N S O F TE C H N O L O GY
SPEED THROUGH SYSTEMS
Oxi Fresh’s technology is so good, others want it!
F
ranchise systems play up their technology as a differentiator, but Oxi
Fresh delivers—in a big way. In
fact, other service brands have approached
them about using a customized version of
their home-built software. “Brands reach
out to us all the time,” says company
founder Jonathan Barnett. So far, Oxi
has partnered with one brand, Midtown
Chimney Sweeps, which relocated from
Southern California to Denver to work
more closely with the company.
Before partnering with Oxi Fresh, says
Byron Schramm, founder and president
of Midtown Chimney Sweeps, “We were
a small owner-operated company with
branches in several states. We needed a
quality scheduling center and researched
a lot of brands for solutions.” After partnering with Oxi Fresh, sales more than
doubled in the first 12 months. “Jonathan’s
system takes technology to a whole different level. For route optimization and
zone scheduling, there’s nothing like this.”
“It’s a great partnership because Byron keeps challenging us, and Oxi Fresh
benefits too,” says Barnett. And more
partnerships are in the offing.
Why? The technical reason, explains
Lead Software Engineer Andy Hoffner,
who designed the system, is that the core
application uses a single, unified code
base that underlies everything else he and
his IT team build for the company. “It
ensures that new features automatically
benefit all brands, while allowing us the
ability to customize along the way to fit
each brand’s individual needs.”
In other words, every improvement,
addition, or tweak the company makes is
potentially available to any other brand.
“The way we design things is looking
forward to change because our own internal needs are constantly evolving. It’s
important for us not to take shortcuts,”
says Hoffner.
Jonathan Barnett
18
The long road to success
“When we started Oxi Fresh, we had an
Excel spreadsheet for every single fran-
chise,” says Barnett, who founded the
brand in 2006 when he was just 26. They
had to manually build out a calendar every
month for each franchisee and key in all
the required information for every job.
This was time-consuming and difficult
enough when there were only a handful
of franchisees, but as the company gre ]