About Lime Licensing Group
Andy Cheetham founded Lime Licensing Group in 2012 after a hugely successful career as a multi brand franchisor. Lime is a full service agency helping brand owners to create franchise systems and to recruit franchise partners mainly in the UK and North America. Today Lime is a group of franchising professionals who between them have many decades of experience to draw upon. We are the most widely accredited franchise advisory firm in UK franchising being both members of the British Franchise Association the Quality Franchise Association and Licensing International. Lime is a prolific recruiter of franchise brands for over 40 different UK franchisors and several from Europe and North America.
We also assist a few specialist brands to enter new markets by creating brand licensing propositions. Brand licensing allows our clients to partner with other companies to run with their brand in their own market. A good example of this is the licensed brands in the sunglasses market where the fashion retailer Gucci partners with a sunglasses manufacturer who then markets Gucci branded glasses to the sunglasses market. This is the key difference between franchising and licensing where franchising is principally about replicating the same product or service into the same market but in a geographically different location.
Lime’s USP is that our clients get real world solutions that have practical benefit. There is so much rehashed content in UK franchising that we see the same mistakes being made over and over. Everything that Lime does is created from within our organisation based on successful franchising that we have directly been involved in.
The company provides expert commentary and articles to a wide variety of media including Entrepreneur.com, What Franchise magazine, Franchise Direct, The British Franchise Association, Point Franchise, Elite Franchise and many others.
Lime has 6 regional offices in the UK and one in Canada and everyone in the team is experienced and prides itself on their professionalism proved over many ears in business. Have a look in more detail at Lime’s core team here.
A brief history of how Lime came to be is below.
Timeline
1993 – 2002 – Cottage Industries Group – Andy’s family owned business which owned three franchise brands, Appletree Cottage Greeting Cards, Candy Cottage Confectionery and Top Beat Entertainment. All retail supply brands concentrating on the convenience retail sector. The group supplied around 10,000 retailers through a network of 167 franchisees and was sold as an ongoing concern in 2002.
2002 – After fulfilling a 12 month handover period to new owners Andy took a career break and returned to work advising several well established and brand new franchisors including the well established market leading Pitman Training PLC
2003 – Franchise Pro – Andy created the UK’s first franchise brokerage advising potential franchisees on the best fit franchise for their personal and financial circumstances. Franchise Pro had 8 offices around the UK and Ireland. Franchise Pro was eventually acquired by a North American venture capital fund in 2006.
2008 – Andy launched the Ambience Venue Styling franchise growing the startup firm into the UK market leader in venue styling carrying out around 5,000 weddings through 42 franchise owners within 3 years. Ambience was sold as an ongoing concern in 2011 and Andy took another career break and competed in an amateur round the world sailing event.
2012 – Andy launched Lime Licensing Group to add a brand name to his work as a freelance consultant
2018 – date: Lime’s first regional office opened in Cambridgeshire, followed by Wales, Manchester, London, Surrey, Warwick, Burley in Wharfedale, Exeter, Norwich and London. Lime Licensing Group is now the UK’s largest regional office network of franchise consultants.
Contact us on 01274 662001 or fill in the form here.