Accra Beach Hotel

Executive Summary

Aussie Pooch Mobile was founded is a continuously growing company since the foundation in 1991. Dog washing with the accessory value added services lift Aussie up to be a dominant company on the market. The introduction of the franchise system increased profitability quickly and the company continued to follow the successful franchise strategy.

Aussie Pooch Mobile was considering being a more international company and expands internationally. Different issues need to be considered in the expanding process: where, when and in what from should the company expand? What products and services are needed for being successful in the future as well? Increasing competition can influence all the decisions of Aussie, so they have to be aware of the demand and their possibilities in different countries, before expanding internationally.

Situation Analysis

Aussie Pooch Mobile is Australia's largest mobile dog wash and care company, that offers such a service which is taken to the customers homes directly. Their image in the market is so great with this mobile service plus adding additional services free to customers about the dog's diet, health care and skin problems.

According to the technology they use special hydro bath equipment that enables the operators to clean the dogs more thoroughly than it is possible in a basic home garden.

They experienced that such a special bath could reduce and eliminate the fleas and ticks,

improve its skin condition and clean its coat and alienate smells.

Their goal is to niche the dog bathing industry and trying to going international.

From the Australia's population of 19.387 million (2001) 40% which is 7.4 million households owned at least one dog. There were about four million domestic dogs in the country. This percentage is relatively high and it means that almost at every second household hold at least one dog. Their aim is to attract new customers but retain the existing ones as well. They use a brightly colored trailer which helped to promote the service many times. Once they could ask the satisfied customers to recommend the service to their neighbor or on the other hand could encourage the owners to increase the frequency of the service was another way to build business.

They segmented those people who were busy and could afford $15-$30 amount of money. They used different allowances like they did 2 or 3 dogs much cheaper or they always offered valuable and supporting information about the dogs which were the motivational factors of the business towards the customers. According to the frequency of the use of the service, the whole company bathed more than 20,000 dogs each month which gave them a $3 million annual turnover.

But there were two significant competitors the Jim's Dogwash and Hydrodog. Jim's strategy was to create smaller territories and working with relatively low prices recruiting new franchisees. Both competitors did not use any

kinds of special offers except Hydrodog sold food products.

So we can say that APM uses a prominent strategy by providing several master franchisees that allows attaining large a territory and sell franchises within it. To maximize profitability they need to operate as efficiently as possible and reducing the time spent in non-revenue-producing activities. Otherwise they should focus on marketing and promotional activities to become more widespread among the consumers' minds. They need to support the marketing efforts by newsletters, telephone hotline service for expert advice, yellow pages, web-site, distributing public relations, information articles and sympathy card. Therefore they would be a strong and successful company among their competitors.

Finally, their point of view is that not the size counts but the quality of the service therefore they are focusing on doing a great job and making the franchisees successful.

The SWOT analysis of APM can be seen in Table 1.

Strategic alternatives

The main question is not whether to expand internationally or not, but how to expand internationally. As the company already operates in 5 countries (Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Malaysia, United Kingdom), the management already decided to go internationally. Until 2002 the company stayed in the Australian region. This strategy had the advantages that they knew the market expectations and demand at the home market in Australia, and cultural differences could be overcome

easier in countries close to Australia (the French territory New Caledonia and New Zealand). Malaysia is a riskier investment from the geographical