Greg Carafello
Greg Carafello was interviewed about his role as master franchisee for New York City and New Jersey.
Entrepreneur reported on Greg Carafello’s work as a Cartridge World master franchisee for New York and New Jersey, and interviewed him about the effort and skills needed to survive in a major city environment.
Carafello lost his previous printing company in the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001, but “leveraged his knowledge of the area and the printing culture” and his position as a “veteran of doing business in New York City” to survive going out of business and later become master franchisee for New York and New Jersey for Cartridge World.
He told the site that having opened stores in suburban New Jersey “using Cartridge World’s typical in-line strip-mall model”, he was “forced to rethink” his plans when bringing the stores to Manhattan, where he currently has four stores “and room for another 30”. He noted that “what we determined upfront is that we don’t need to pay high retail rents for sales offices and production facilities […] you don’t want huge rents for franchisees trying to start out”.
As a consequence, his New York City franchisees “divide their operations”, with the expensive storefronts given over to the retail side of the business whilst their offices and sales staff are moved to “cheaper locations”, with cartridges refilled “at a facility outside the city”, an idea that has “been adopted throughout the Cartridge World system” and christened the Manhattan model by Carafello.
The Manhattan model “has a smaller footprint”, he stated, and all manufacturing “happens off-site at a Cartridge World facility. If Cartridge World didn’t have its own factories, this store model would not work”. With location “everything” in Manhattan, Carafello added in turn that the key isn’t “where his stores are, but what’s above them”, with the “formula for success” in being based at the bottom of a high-rise building said to be “to have at least 60 floors of business above”.
This, Carafello went on to explain, is because a store has “got to be in a high-volume area […] 95 percent of our business is from small firms with fewer than 20 employees, like accountants, law firms etcetera. The point is, there are enough small businesses in a building like that to support a franchise in a handsome way”.
Marketing-wise, the franchise “can’t afford to advertise in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal”, so it advertises in business publication Crain’s New York, with Carafello adding that Cartridge World has actually found the “best form of advertising is to bungie-cord a sign around a guy and have him hand out sample pricing cards on the street. That really gets the phones ringing”.
His thoughts for the future include that Manhattan’s Cartridge World stores have “become essentially a business-to-business product”, with franchises in the future perhaps choosing “not to have retail stores at all”, instead using “an office with a sales and delivery team” which would “be a first for the system and a much less expensive way of doing business”.