Neal - Virginia, United States: As I think back about the early days and how the business evolved, I really could not have survived, I wouldn’t have been successful without the support of WSI and that support for me came primarily in three ways. First, I brought to the business no experience and no knowledge whatsoever. I was a technical neophyte, so I really knew nothing. I knew business I just didn’t know anything about the internet or anything about technology. So in the early days, I can’t remember a day that went by that I didn’t make a phone call or submit a support ticket to home office, seeking help, seeking an answer to a question and I was so impressed because they were always accessible to me and they always tried to answer my question on the first attempt and they did it almost all the time. So that was the one way that ongoing support for somebody who really didn’t know anything, okay.

The second level of support was the supplier network. Again, I had no connections in the marketplace and I had no real knowledge of what made a good supplier, didn’t make a good supplier so being able to leverage that WSI supplier network, that e-marketplace, enabled me to have some confidence that what I sold could be delivered and could be delivered in a quality way and in a time effective way. And the third thing is the ongoing training and I felt that WSI did a remarkable job of ongoing training. Philosophically, I knew I wanted to grow a nice sized business so I knew I had to invest in myself, so I seized every opportunity I could to participate in WSI sponsor training programs and that accelerated my knowledge. So I kind of combined all those things together to make the WSI business model work.

Al - Georgia, United States: We hear things about franchises all the time - you know, like they began at the beginning and life is great and at some point the bottom drops out and then there’s no support. But it’s quite different with WSI, quite different. So I went through my training, I went through a lot of patient people that worked with me and helped me in the process to get started, and I’m very thankful for that - Raj and Anna, phenomenal team. And then going through the online training, which is pretty good and it gave me a lot of foundational things that I needed, and I was able to easily apply that when I went to Toronto, when I went to Mississauga to have that kind of training, which is really important with the QSP program but what’s even more important to it is that when I call up and I’m like, man I need some help with something, and they pick up the phone or they call back as fast as they can and they answer my questions, because there’s things I’m just uncertain about - I didn’t come from a digital background, I mean SEO, no clue what SEO meant. When you talk about Meta tags, I don’t know anything about that, nothing. I do now – I knew nothing about those things, they’ve been very patient with me. The suppliers are patient with me, the Home Office is patient with me and the one thing that impresses me – I have to tell you this – is that even when I visit with new franchise owners right now and I know I’m going to put Mark Dobson, one of our founders on the spot, is that I’ll say to him, I’ll say here’s how responsive WSI is, and I’ll say – I said so you don’t know I did this but I sent an email to one of the founders of WSI when we started our phone call and I’m waiting for his response, and I said we're about an hour into the conversation and I’m like, guess what? Mark sent me note, hey Al, how are you doing, let’s talk soon about X, Y and Z. That responsiveness is so important to me because I need it. Somebody asked me a question, a brand new phone call - a brand new franchisee that was looking at things and looking at the business, he said ‘so, tell me what do you know about digital marketing now?’ I said What? A year later, 60%. I said ask me tomorrow, 55% percent. Just like this [snapping his fingers] and I have to have that network behind me to help me and they’ll help you. You just got to ask, you’ve got to work with them. It’s phenomenal. It’s been a great experience. It’s important, it’s important to me because a lot of people help me when I started in this business and I think it’s important if I've got something to offer, I want to share, if it makes sense, right? So I appreciate that open communication from Mark, from one of the founders being very responsive on emails or phone calls and in my production centers, to typing in support at WSI and getting a response the exact same day. I so appreciate that, because there are too many things moving so fast, we’ve got to have that responsiveness with anything that we do at WSI, it absolutely exceeds my expectations.