Chinese born Zhen Li, the franchisee of Trios Southland, says the company’s training course and the continuing assistance offered by Trios’ business development manager gave her an excellent start in her business.

My mother and I came to Australia just over three years ago and we decided to invest into a Trios store mainly because of the honesty and the careful processes that Trios human resource management team guided us through.

Before we decided to invest with a Trios franchise store we had little or no experience in food retail or food wholesale. We did a training course at Trios head office for about five or six weeks. We were first trained for shop staff duties.

And then we learnt management duties – ordering, finances, staff management, and local area marketing.

The course was very good and we learned a lot but we were still not totally confident. So the business development manager came in and helped us every day for two weeks after we had started in the business.

The BDM worked with us with the ordering, the training of staff and interviewing new staff and then showed us how to handle promotions in the local area.

After the training sessions and those two weeks we got off to a very good start. We found out how to operate the outlet and that gave us confidence. The BDM then came in weekly and then monthly to show us through any difficulties.

Our English wasn’t that good and we had cultural issues, there were many things we had to learn like how to handle and talk to staff because we do it differently in China.

We were very grateful for the course and extremely thankful for the time the BDM spent with us in the business.

It’s a very good business, it’s really easy to manage a Trios franchise; we are very pleased with it and very happy with our relationship with head office.