McDonald’s franchisees in Victoria reveal how they got started and where they are now
Australia-wide, 85 per cent of McDonald’s Australia’s restaurants are owned and operated by local businessmen and women. Here, we chat to four of Victoria’s most successful.
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Australia-wide, about 85 per cent of the Macca’s restaurants are owned and operated by local businessmen and women.
Some franchisees have spent years working their way up from kitchen to corporate, while others have made the move over from other industries.
The job of a franchisee goes well beyond making burgers and fries – although they do that too – and covers team building and professional development, community involvement and business betterment.
The 50-odd Victorian franchisees that work with McDonald’s to run 260 restaurants across the state contend with the changing economy, running 24 hour stores, dealing with staff turnover and adopting new technology.
As some of Victoria’s most successful Macca’s franchisees tell us, owning a franchise is not for the faint of heart, with a strong work ethic, business nous and people skills required.
Franchisees also make a significant financial investment, with McDonald’s requiring upwards of $1,500,000 unencumbered funds, without partnerships or investors to get started.
Here are some of the Victorians who’ve had the best success at it.
Jenny Sadler
Which restaurants do you operate?
McDonald’s Yarraville, Derrimut, Sunshine, Taylors Lakes, St Albans, Laverton North, Avondale Heights, Deer Park, Highpoint (Food Court), Williamstown North and Altona.
How long have you been in the business? How did you get started?
McDonald’s was my first job. I started working at McDonald’s a week after my 15th birthday.
I did my HSC, and got into university but I had very little money, so I thought, ‘I’ll be McDonald’s manager for a year and then I’ll go and get a real job’.
Well, the rest is history, I ended up having a corporate career, I got promoted within the organisation and 17 years ago I became a franchisee.
I started with two restaurants and today I own and operate 11 restaurants in the western suburbs of Melbourne.
What does your typical day look like?
I don’t know if I actually have a typical day to be honest.
I think the one thing to know as a franchisee is the businesses can be pretty relentless. If people have a perception that you can just sit at home all day and not be present in the business, that’s not true at all.
If I go in to a restaurant and it’s busy, I’ll get behind the counter, roll my sleeves up and help in the kitchen, talk to customers, deliver food – it’s not just sit back and relax.
But day-to-day, inspiring people and overseeing what the teams do is a big part of it. I’m responsible for a lot of people’s first jobs and their first entry into their careers. That’s my biggest responsibility, ensuring that they have a great experience and that their McDonald’s experience is a stepping stone into bigger things in the future.
That’s probably what I spend most of my time on, is working with my people, following up with my customers and working within the communities that support me.
I probably spend about 20 per cent of my time on things with the community.
About eight or 10 years ago, I became involved with Western Health, so I’m currently a board director on the Western Health Foundation. We also sponsor close to 45 sporting and community clubs.
What’s changed over the time you’ve been involved?
I started as a 15 year old nearly 40 years ago and we didn’t have technology, we had the old Sweda cash registers and we had to manually add everything up, so the business has really moved forward and embraced technology.
I’m also really proud as a franchisee that the MyMacca’s app is one of the top five loyalty programs in Australia.
Something else that’s also changed and evolved is the number of restaurants we’ve got.
McDonald’s continues to grow as a much loved brand in Australia and that’s why we’ve had the ability to grow.
Describe the challenges of running a Macca’s franchise.
I think that the biggest challenge that we face on a day-to-day basis is managing people because we’re not robots!
Whether it’s a staffing issue, whether someone has something happening at home or whether someone wants to progress in their career in the future, the biggest challenge is around what happens with people.
I’ve got close to 1500 employees working in a really fast paced environment under the pressure of what our customers expect.
I think post pandemic, another of the challenges that we faced, is that for some reason, people have got less patience.
It’s getting better but it’s still a challenge.
What’s your favourite part about being a franchisee?
It makes me very proud when I have people in my organisation who have gone on to be successful and they call me and they say, ‘I just got this promotion, Jenny, and I wouldn’t have got it if I hadn’t had the experience at McDonald’s’.
Recently, my general manager Hayley, who has worked for me for over 10 years, became a franchisee herself in regional New South Wales. So that made me feel very proud that I could help her achieve her dream to be a business owner herself.
Another highlight for me was in December 2022, I opened the Williamstown restaurant. It was always my dream to open the Williamstown restaurant and my daughter also works there as well.
That was a very proud moment for me, opening our McDonald’s restaurant in my hometown where pretty much every time I’m in the restaurant, I know so many of the customers because that’s where I’ve lived for over 20 years.
I’m also proud of the fact that I’m the first woman co-op president in Australia. So I’m the conduit between the Victorian/Tasmanian licensees and the corporation. Every market has a co-op president representing the McDonald’s franchisees in that region.
In the 50 years of McDonald’s, I’m the first woman to have achieved that role and I’m really quite proud of that.
Tully Lyster
Which restaurants do you operate?
McDonald’s Seymour, Wangaratta, Cobram, Yarrawonga, Mooroopna, Shepparton North, Shepparton and Swan Hill.
How long have you been in the business? How did you get started?
I’m a second generation licensee as my father operated some restaurants in northeast Victoria for 15 years.
I started in the in the business as a relatively young 18 year old after completing my HSC in New South Wales and have been in the system 31 years. I started in 1992 in roles from a crew member, through to restaurant manager, then operations supervisor of a couple of restaurants and was lucky enough to become a relatively young franchisee at 28 years old, which I think in today’s landscape is quite young.
I had the benefit of opening a couple of restaurants with my father at early age so I think that really helped my experience and my confidence to grow and build a team and relationships with the communities.
Now I operate restaurants across a range of shires in northeast Victoria, which allows me to have a great understanding of different regional communities of different sizes and how we can best support those communities with employment opportunities.
What does your typical day look like?
There’s lots of hands-on talking to customers in our restaurants, networking with our stakeholders in our community, building relationships with our suppliers, but for me, it’s really about developing up a young person to have those transferable skills that they’ve learned through Macca’s.
We’re all committed to running great restaurants and I think it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to work with not only young people but people of all different skill sets and ages to build their confidence.
McDonald’s might be their first job and building that confidence and those transferable life skills for me, is my passion.
What’s changed over the time you’ve been involved?
The great thing about McDonald’s is we’re always changing and we’re relevant to the needs of our customers in our communities.
The digital landscape has very much been part of the business over the last five to 10 years with the digital investments we’ve made not only in the restaurants with our kiosks, but also through the convenience for our customers through the My Macca’s app.
We’ve also got delivery now, which I think is fantastic, especially for regional centres to provide that flexibility for our customers. That convenience of having delivery for our customer base is very exciting.
Describe the challenges of running a Macca’s franchise.
In the post-Covid landscape staffing and people, I think in most businesses and most industries, has been a challenge.
But the exciting thing is that our numbers are getting pretty close to pre-Covid levels.
So I think the excitement is that we’re seeing not only young people, but people of all ages, looking at Macca’s as a first job, and also a career.
What’s your favourite part of being a franchisee?
I think the growth. Being able to open five restaurants in various communities and providing employment opportunities in those communities has been a wonderful, tremendous opportunity.
In my career, I’ve been very fortunate to open five new restaurants in different markets and have been lucky enough to influence people’s careers from the start. Being able to do that is been a real highlight.
Also building relationships with various members of the community, whether it’s your local clubs, your local presidents, the different councils is also rewarding, seeing the impact we can have in some of our local communities.
The McDonald’s businesses is exciting, it’s ever changing, we’re a global leader in our brand.
Ben Duncan
Which restaurants do you operate?
McDonald’s Bendigo, Kangaroo Flat, Epsom, Strath Village and California Gully.
How long have you been in the business? How did you get started?
My best mate got me a job at the Heidelberg Macca’s store back in 1987.
Macca’s wasn’t something I actively sought out to do, it was just a casual job back then. I stayed on and became a full time employee after I finished high school. I did a couple of other jobs in conjunction with McDonald’s, but Macca’s was something that I could never really leave.
About 1994 or ‘95 I returned to my previous employer, employed as a full time manager and worked my way up to a supervisory position, working for him for almost 26 years.
In 2013, I got an opportunity to buy a couple of stores from my previous employer, and late last year it was the 10 year anniversary of that.
I currently operate five stores in the Bendigo region of Victoria, which was an opportunity that came out of the blue in late 2021. The operator was exiting the system at that time and that created the opportunity for someone else to come in and I seized that opportunity and I was able to move here and here I am. So I’ve been in this current role with the five stores here now for almost 10 months.
I’m still relatively new to the area and coming from Metro it’s definitely been a huge learning curve for me.
What does your typical day look like?
There’s a lot of structure and routine that goes into the job but there’s also a lot of reactive elements to it.
Ultimately, I’m checking in on our senior leadership team every day and I generally go and visit each store at least once a week. I’m talking to the store management team about the challenges and the progress that we’re making in relation to the business focuses we have.
A massive part of my role is really about people development. That’s the key to our success, developing our people to work as effective teams building their skills, so I try to be a positive mentor through a positive culture.
A lot of my purpose is around developing their skills to be able to run the business, problem solving, prioritising and being effective business runners and people managers.
What’s changed over the time you’ve been involved?
When I started out, McDonald’s was a lot simpler in terms of its menu offering, it wasn’t 24/7 and the compliance side of the business was a bit less of a focus.
Today, we’re obviously a lot bigger business. We operate 24/7, we have a lot more staff and a lot more systems and responsibilities that we have to administer.
The training and people focus over time, people have become even more centric to the success of the brand so the betterment of our people has become even more exacerbated over the years.
So I think today, developing our teams and giving them the skills to run the business is more critical than it’s ever been and doing that in a safe and compliant way is a significant change I’ve seen as the business.
Describe the challenges of running a Macca’s franchise.
The biggest challenges for us in regional Victoria has been around people and being able to attract enough people and retain them.
So we’re still going through those motions at the moment but it’s certainly improving and we’re making progress.
Obviously, there’s a bit of pain out there with inflation and the other environmental pressures that we have in society at the moment, we’re not immune to that.
Responding to that and developing the skills and our team is really what my priority is. So we’re constantly, through my senior leadership team, trying to work with our newer managers, and we’ve got quite a few of them.
That’s the other challenge with people, with all the new faces in the last couple of years, trying to get some of those skills and experience that we once had prior to Covid.
We’re definitely making positive traction with building out our staff base, we employ almost 600 people in the town we’d love to probably be about 100 more than that.
So we’re actively trying to increase our crew base, and at the same time build up the management team and their skills so they can be more effective in the roles that we expect of them.
We’ve also had some competitors come in the market up here and as I said the inflationary pressures and those sorts of things have had a bit of an impact, but we’re starting to see that change.
What’s your favourite part of being a franchisee?
Some of the people that we’ve invested time in over the last couple of years are really starting to hit their strides and be their own people. So that’s been a massive highlight and something that we’re proud of.
We’ve also done a lot of things with local sporting clubs and the local Chamber of Commerce.
Last year, I sponsored a symposium for mental health and resilience training for a lot of business leaders up here to help broaden their skills and knowledge base so that they can implement that in their own workplaces. So that was something quite fulfilling.
We do a lot of things up here with the Bendigo Basketball Association. We sponsor the national women’s team, the Bendigo Spirit, which is really cool. They’re only growing in popularity and the girls are doing really well.
The other thing that I want to mention is Macca’s has a tremendous philosophy about the three legs of the stool. That is the licensees, the corporate side and the supply side are each integral legs of the stool and rely upon each other for success.
I love that about the business and that’s what makes it strong.
Linley Larkin
Which restaurants do you operate?
McDonald’s Gisborne, Rosenthal Village and Sunbury.
How long have you been in the business? How did you get started?
I got involved in McDonald’s when my father became a franchisee in 1991 when I was nine years old.
I started helping by doing things like wiping dining room trays and things like that but my favourite job was when we had a new store, testing the shake and sundae machine.
I started working there when I was 13 or 14 and worked all the way through school. When I finished high school, I was pretty keen to go and try a few different things. I did a bit of travelling and I was pretty passionate about doing some volunteer work and working with not for profit, so I did did that while doing my studies for eight years.
But I was just really excited about business and running a business and clearly the best business to be involved in is McDonald’s.
So 15 years ago, I went back in worked with my father again he had six restaurants at the time. I spent a few years working in different roles and relearning how to make all the burgers and fries and things like that, a fair bit had changed in that eight years. Then I did all my management curriculum and spent some time in a in a supervisory role.
I put my hand up to be a franchisee and went on that journey of meeting with lots of different licensees and spending a little bit of time working with a different franchisee just to make sure that it was exactly what I wanted to do.
Then eight years ago, I was lucky enough to purchase the Gisborne restaurant from my father. So I moved up to Gisborne which was a bit of a coming home because I’d grown up in Sunbury because that was my father’s first restaurant. It was really lovely to walk back into that community.
Then almost two years ago, my father retired and I was able to buy the Sunbury restaurant from him, which was really nice.
And then they opened the second store in Sunbury called Rosenthal Village almost four months ago.
So I operate three restaurants and we have 441 staff.
What does your typical day look like?
I often say that I’m a professional meeter, because I go around and I spend time with people. I’m a big believer that if your people have the resources that they need to do the job well then they generally do work really hard and do a great job for you.
I spend most days being out in the restaurants, talking to our management team, seeing how they are, helping troubleshoot things with them. I think a lot of the time it’s about just listening and offering a little bit of insight and a lot of encouragement, trying to identify what the people are doing well and making sure that they feel noticed and that they continue to do that.
A lot of times I’m making burgers and fries too. Being out there and doing it with them and trying to see things slightly differently. I think when you’re spending a lot of time in the one restaurant we say you’re going a bit store blind because things have always sort of happened that way you don’t challenge it.
What’s changed over the time you’ve been involved?
I often reflect back on the fact that Sunbury’s quite a big town now, but when we moved here, the McDonald’s was being built, there were two petrol stations, a supermarket and one KFC and then all the other streets were just paddocks. Sunbury has changed a lot.
The schools are now huge with huge numbers of people. So that that’s been great. It’s been great for business.
There’s so many more options for the local people in terms of sporting, eating, shopping – there’s a lot more to be able to keep people in the town and spending their money in the town, which is really nice.
Describe the challenges of running a Macca’s franchise.
I think the challenges have changed a lot over the years but at the moment, I think the biggest challenge for our business are some financial pressures and some staffing pressures.
Finding people can still be pretty difficult. We spend a lot of time trying to keep good people and find good people, that takes up a big percentage of time.
Also, the Gisborne community has grown just as the Sunbury one has. We see all the houses being built and traffic is probably becoming a bit of a problem in Gisborne now, just as I remember it was in Sunbury 20 years ago.
But with all these things, there comes so many more opportunities for people to come in.
What’s your favourite part of being a franchisee?
Well, certainly being able to buy the Sunbury restaurant was really fantastic.
I can’t even put into words how special it was to be back in that restaurant that for four years I spent every Friday night of my life working in and now I sort of pinch myself every time I go back in there.
The Sunbury restaurant, when we purchased it, was the busiest in the state so it was fantastic. We were so proud of the results that we were doing and the amount of customers that we could move through that drive through being one of the busiest drive throughs in the state.
But definitely seeing the people grow and watching them on their journey is a highlight for me.
One of girls who runs our Sunbury restaurant now, said she had to leave early because she finally had a house inspection. We employed her as a 15 year old school girl and she’s now running the biggest restaurant for us in our organisation she’s bought her first house. She’s going to move into her first house with her boyfriend who she also met at McDonald’s.
They’re the real highlights, watching the people that are so young when they start and watching them flourish and become adults and hopefully thinking we’ve paid a pretty positive role in that.
I always encourage my friends to get their children to come and work at McDonald’s.
They learn a lot and make some fabulous friendships.
The experience that they get puts them in a strong position for their future careers.
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