Franchising Gave This Entrepreneur a Fresh Start — and a Chance to Embrace New Technologies
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April 2021
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Every industry can be disrupted — and Yousuf Ali knows that well. He spent decades as an old-school marketer, until he got outmoded You spent 20 years in marketing before becoming a franchisee. Why make the switch?
I mostly worked with B2B clients, consulting on direct or snail-mail marketing. We were very successful. But in 2009, when social media started to really hit, I didn’t pay much attention to it. I thought it was temporary, something that wouldn’t catch on. And I was wrong. We started seeing companies move their budgets to support social media marketing, and Related: This Family of Tropical Smoothie Cafe Franchisees Is Using Their Business to Build Community
So how did you end up as a My Eyelab franchisee?
Franchising felt less risky than building something from the ground up, so I attended various franchise trade shows to see what was out there. My Eyelab appealed because it is technology-based. They’re one of the first brands to use telehealth to connect their retail customers with doctors, and I saw a future there. I didn’t want to repeat my past mistakes 
What’s been the biggest learning curve with this transition?
Having spent my career in B2B, I was used to the luxury of time — spending hours and hours getting to know clients. In the B2C world, customer service is different. You have to do it well, but you have to do it fast. For the first few months, my sales associates would come to me and say, “You spent so much time talking to that one customer; I serviced three while you were chatting.” They told me to either speed up or take a step back and let them lead — which is what I’ve done. We recruited a lot of our associates from customer-facing industries like food service so that they would come in with that expertise.
Related: Why This Oakland Cop Became a Subway Franchisee
Has that freed you up to focus on growth?
We just opened our second location in February, a third will open in April, and we have two more in development. When the pandemic hit, we did slow down a bit. But Have you learned to embrace social media in this new career chapter?
We do a lot of social media! We even recruited a manager to focus on all our social media marketing. I still have faith in direct mail — but social media helps us reach customers, too.