We’re proud to announce that 2012 is off to a great start! We’ve recently received lots of local recognition and thought we’d share this great news with you.

First, we’ve been listed as a Startup To Watch for 2012 by the Ottawa Business Journal. Past nominees (Chide.it, FaveQuest, Select Start Studios and PatientWay to name a few) have had a tremendous impact on the Ottawa-Gatineau startup community  and we strive to do the same. For decades, our region has featured a tremendous wealth of engineering talent and we’re proud to be a part of the group of companies rebuilding our digital economy. 

Second, we’ve won a Bootstrap Award for Best Sales/Value Proposition. This award recognizes companies who’ve grown their companies without the use of external funding (such as venture capital). We’ve been growing organically since our creation in 2007 and bootstrapping has enabled us to focus on creating value for our customers from day one. Today, we have an awesome product that is a perfect fit for our target market. If we had to name a single element which helped us refine our value proposition (other than listening to our customers for five years), I would have to name Lead To Win.

Lead To Win is a startup ecosystem/accelerator (which takes no equity)  which helps companies get to market faster and/or accelerate their growth. We strongly recommend the program to other high-tech entrepreneurs, especially engineering students who don’t have a background in business.

Thank you to everyone who’s vouched for us over the years. 2012 will be a year of great growth for us and we hope to share more good news soon!

This pilot program is great news for Canadian franchises as it includes the adoption of business systems (franchise management, customer/work order management, inventory management, etc.). In the context of a franchise, these are often customized systems ensuring the uniformity of their proprietary business processes across all franchisees. Off-the-shelf hardware and software are not covered by this grant, but the following are:

• Internal labour costs: franchisor’s time spent elaborating the system
• Contractors: technology firm helping the franchisor adopt the technology
• Travel & Training
• Hiring of recent college graduates as a part of the adoption process

The new grant program is managed by NRC-IRAP. As with all NRC-IRAP grants, the process starts with the franchisor developing a relationship with an Industrial Technology Advisor (ITA). Over 240 ITAs, located all over Canada, will work with you to determine the best course of action for your business, whether is be via the new Digital Technology Adoption Pilot Program (DTAPP) or one of the numerous existing grant program­s.

As our specialty is creating franchise-specific software solutions, we’ve gone through the process in the past. Our team can work with both you and your ITA to establish the scope and requirements for your project.

For more information about DTAPP, please visit this site and call toll-free 1-855-453-3940 to be assigned an ITA in your area. 

“Using the FranchiseBlast system will allow employees to focus more on helping local families,” said Heather Meek, owner of Boomerang Kids. “We are expanding our franchise throughout Canada and we want to ensure the success of our current and future franchisees. FranchiseBlast will allow us to offer a complete easy-to-use system that helps store owners, employees and their customers. And now, I can even manage my business on my iPad!“

The FranchiseBlast deployment consists of an integrated suite of local and cloud-based tools that allow Boomerang Kids to automate the management recipes they’ve perfected throughout the years and replicate them in a franchise environment. FranchiseBlast will boost Boomerang Kids’ efficiency and customer service with:

• Point of Sale (POS) stations to allow employees manage and sell all items under consignment.
• In-store interactive kiosks and web-based tools to making it possible for parents to review their account and item statuses.
• A cloud-based franchise management solution giving both franchisees and franchisors immediate insight into the franchise’s operations.

“We are excited to be powering the expansion of a local franchise. Boomerang Kids has a solid management team and now has the tools to support its upcoming rapid growth.” said Jason Kealey, President of LavaBlast. “This collaboration strengthens our position in the Franchise Management market and has allowed us to bring on new team members and scale up our operations.“

About Boomerang Kids:

At Boomerang Kids, families can help the planet and their wallet through reuse and recycling of kids clothing and equipment. Parents bring the items into the store and Boomerang Kids will take care of verifying quality, selling and, best of all, sharing profits. The concept is extremely popular and independent of the economic climate. From their four initial locations in the Ottawa region, Boomerang Kids is now expanding Canada-wide via franchising.

About LavaBlast Software Inc.:

LavaBlast produces state of the art software solutions for the franchise industry and has played an integral part in the growth of numerous franchises, both in Canada and globally. By migrating to FranchiseBlast, franchisors reap the benefits of a turn-key software solution for their franchisees and LavaBlast’s deep software engineering skills to adapt their franchise in a rapidly changing technological environment.

About our flagship product, FranchiseBlast:

FranchiseBlast empowers you to run a successful franchise business with easy-to-use operational software. Manage day-to-day issues with franchisees, see everything happening in real-time and increase the level of control you have over your franchise business.

Download this press release (PDF format).

First off, I’ve recorded a short video featuring a variation of our franchise POS for the Teddy Mountain franchise. Teddy Mountain provides the stuff your own teddy bear experience to children worldwide and have been using our POS since 2006.

As you’ll see, I focus on a few of our differentiators in the point of sale space. We’re not a point of sale company and our POS is not conventional: we’re a franchise software company and we’ve created the best point of sale system for a franchise environment.

We bake in a franchise’s unique business processes into the point of sale, making it very powerful while still extremely easy to use. By integrating our point of sale with FranchiseBlast, we’ve also eliminated dozens of standardization/uniformity issues which face small retail chains or franchises.

Furthermore, we’ve given additional focus to cross-browser compatibility in this release as our POS is not only used regular POS hardware (in brick & mortar stores) but also on the Apple iPad for back office operations an for managing the warehouses that feed our franchise e-commerce websites.  We’re definitely excited by the potential tablets have for both retail and service-based franchises! Expect more news from us in this space soon!

In the meantime, if you know of small chains / new franchises which want to explore disruptive technologies in their locations, we hope you’ll point them in our direction!

We hope you’ll take the time to give it a whirl in the near future!

The current version of FranchiseBlast utilizes the same graphics on the desktop as on the iPad, but we’re not ruling out creating an iPad-optimized version in the future. We’re no strangers to creating interfaces for touch-based devices as our point of sale has been using touch screens since its first version. In fact, one of our retail franchise clients will soon be using their iPads to access a custom point of sale module from within the stores!

FranchiseBlast is franchise intranet software designed specifically for service-based franchises. You can see some of the franchise industries we focus on.

Launching FranchiseBlast as a separate site gives us the opportunity to really focus on explaining the benefits of franchise operational software, how it works, and why it’s a key part to franchise success. Explaining this isn’t always an easy task. But we think the site does a good job of describing high-level franchise software benefits and then going into more detail in the product tour.

The site is simple and easy to navigate. FranchiseBlast isn’t complicated software; and the website needs to reflect that. We want to show you the value of FranchiseBlast as quickly as possible, not tell you with endless amounts of copy and detail.

We’ll continue to iterate on the site and improve it; we’re far from done! Part of the process involves a lot of ongoing testing. We’ll be testing ways of generating traffic, how people navigate through the site, lead conversion and more. And we’d love to get your feedback on the site and how we’re presenting FranchiseBlast. So please feel free to get in touch at any time.