When we started CasaGees six years ago, we weren’t thinking about licence models or franchise structures. We were thinking about dough hydration, oven temperatures, and whether anyone in Gloucestershire would actually pay us for a pizza on a Friday night.
It took a few years of running the business – and a lot of conversations with people who wanted to do something similar – before we started to think seriously about how to package what we’d learned. And when we did, the question of how to do that became surprisingly important.
What a franchise model would have meant
A franchise model would have meant people trading under the CasaGees name, following our systems and branding, paying us ongoing royalties. But the whole point of a home pizza business is that it’s yours. Your name in your community, your relationship with your customers, your brand growing alongside your reputation.
And practically speaking, a franchise puts the franchisor in the business of policing standards. That’s a different business to the one we wanted to run.
We could have gone down the franchise route. We chose not to. Here’s why.
What the licence model actually means
Instead of licensing our brand, we license our knowledge – the systems, the processes, the hard-won lessons from six years of running a home pizza business from a domestic kitchen.
The people who work with us through the Pizza Business Blueprint build their own businesses, under their own names, in their own communities. We give them the roadmap. They build the destination.
When someone builds their own brand, they have skin in the game in a way that a franchisee doesn’t quite have. It’s their reputation. Their neighbours are their customers.
The pride they take in it is genuine and personal.
The honest case against the licence model
If you want an established brand name behind you , ie something customers already recognise before you’ve made a single pizza then a franchise can genuinely accelerate your early customer acquisition. If building your own brand from scratch feels overwhelming rather than exciting, that’s worth paying attention to. The licence model asks you to back yourself.
What we’ve seen the licence model do for people
The people who’ve come through the Pizza Business Blueprint share a few things. They wanted something genuinely theirs. They were looking for a proven system without being boxed in by someone else’s brand. And they wanted support from people who had actually done what they were trying to do.
It doesn’t suit everyone. But for the people it suits, it suits them very well.
Why this model exists at all
We built Business In A Pizza Box because people kept asking us how we did it. We answered those questions one conversation at a time for a while. Eventually it made more sense to package the answers properly – not as a franchise, not as a generic online course, but as a genuine blueprint built on the specific model we’d spent six years developing.
Not a shortcut, not a guarantee, but a significant head start for the right person and built by people who are still running the business they’re teaching.
If the licence model sounds like the right fit for you:
The Pizza Business Blueprint is our step-by-step guide to launching and running a home pizza business — built on six years of doing exactly that at CasaGees. Find out more here.
