My name is John Purtell and along with my wife (DIANNE) purchased Bakers Delight (BD) in Bullcreek Perth WA. We were told on numerous occasions by a few representatives of Bakers Delight BD that the store would take $10K per week. Never in the 2.5 years that we operated did it come anywhere close. We opened on about $6K at the end of 2001 and when we left the store in 2004 we had managed to get T/O up to about $7.2K. Our experience with BD was far from "delightful". Our intention when first looking into becoming a franchisee with BD was to LEASE a store which BD advertised as an option of only requiring $20K to get "onboard". We were well aware that financially, leasing would be our only option as we have a young family and didn't have the at least $100K cash outlay required by BD to purchase a new store and be a fully fledged franchisee.
After we sat through one of the many seminars that BD hold recruiting new franchisees we were approached by a BD representative and asked if we were interested. We told them our financial situation only allowed us to entertain the Lease option, to which the response from the BD Representatives was that BD no longer offer the LEASE option. With this info we advised that while interested our financial situation didn't allow us to continue with our enquiries into becoming franchisees with BD. However, instead of allowing us to walk away, the representative said don't let "the money" side of things deter you we can do lots of different and innovative things to help you get into your own shop.
Our road to "HELL" had officially begun when we sat down to listen and ultimately got taken for the deception ride that BD delivers. We were upfront with the little cash we had to secure a bakery whilst BD assured us that it would be ok and that their preferred lender WESTPAC Bank would be able to put something together for us and that we would be CASH POSITIVE the day we start trading in our $10K a week store. Needless to say that our store never traded well, although we had "expert" opinions from other franchises and BD representatives, not to mention the Franchisors of BD themselves- Roger and Leslie Gillespie, trying to find fault with the way we were operating for a possible reason the store was just not successful, however, no fault in our operations could be found as we followed the so called BD System to a T. After our numerous cries for help, BD chose to sit back and watch us "GO UNDER".
So here we are today with 4 young children, our business lost to liquidation, our family home lost and now officially bankrupt to boot, not to mention the mental stress and strain on our marriage and our family. My wife had a nervous breakdown and required medication and the need to call on other family members to assist in caring for our young children resulted. While we did seek legal advice initially and advised that we would have a good case against BD on a few points any hopes of pursuing this line of enquiry were dashed as we didn't have and still don't have a cent to our name to fight these "Giants" and their high paid lawyers. At the end of the day I just want our story heard as it has come to our attention that BD has also been "underhanded" with a number of franchisees and that "WE" are not an isolated "incident". BD needs to be made accountable for way they do business.