Taste of
our Model

The Waters Edge team provides complete support from site location and lease negotiation to grand opening. We partner with a nationwide construction firm who will design your location and solicit bids from local, reputable contractors. Our construction firm will oversee the buildout to ensure that it is done on time and on budget.

We have made the art of winemaking into a simple four-step process anyone can learn. We are experts at helping you market the wine to your local community by focusing on generating revenue from five different categories. Your winery location will be unique in your community. No similar model exists that combines all five of these categories to help you stand out from any competition.

Your wines will be crafted using our tried & true recipes that produce consistently high-quality vino. We provide all the necessary equipment your location will require to make wine efficiently as well as operate a low-overhead kitchen for the bistro. Waters Edge offers our franchisees a monthly newsletter to keep you up to date on developments and techniques to help your winery grow. You are invited to join a monthly conference call to share ideas and promote growth. We also host a biennial franchise meeting to gather and learn together.

Pre-training Stage
Our new owners will receive a set of materials that includes our Operations Manual, Learning Guide, and several books that give foundational knowledge on how to operate a successful franchise business as well as on the world of wine. Our Director of Training provides guidance on which materials are the highest priority to review as well as a tutorial on using our CRM system to track every step that needs to be done to get the winery open for business. The CRM will be used to allow our internal team and our franchisee to collaborate on the steps involved in each phase of opening, and it also ensures that no steps are inadvertently missed. Once the location is about 12-14 weeks from opening, our Director of Training will move our owners to a more active training schedule.

Online Learning
WEW has invested heavily into an online training portal, also known as a Learning Management System, or LMS for short. Our owners will begin a series of lessons that involves an online tutorial, a review and a quiz to ensure that the lesson was completed to our satisfaction. Each week, our Director of Training will review the material on a conference call with our owner and address any questions or fill in any gaps in the materials for the week. This training will generally be about 8 – 10 weeks depending on the pace of our franchisee. The primary focus of this online training is threefold: 1) Learn how to manage a winery & bistro; 2) Learn more in-depth wine knowledge specific to the way our owners market and sell our wines; 3) The foundation of how we produce wine at each location.

In Person Training at the Franchise Location
Our Director of Training will make arrangements to make four trips to the location to help our emerging winemakers produce wine in their stainless steel tank system. Each trip will focus on one of the four stages of winemaking. Our owners or operating partners will be making the wine at their location under our careful supervision. We ensure that every winemaker in our system is using our carefully written manuals to follow each step involved in the winemaking process. Once they complete this part of the training, they’ll be able to make wine independently and confidently – however, we are always here to provide support anytime it is needed after the training is completed.

After the grand opening launch, our new owners will begin working with our Director of Franchise Support. They will collaborate to identify critical growth and success goals and monitor how a new location is doing to achieve those metrics weekly. After some period, we’ll move to monthly then quarterly calls to make sure our owners are reaching their maximum performance in terms of sales, EBITDA, and guest satisfaction. Our Director of Franchise Support will also visit each winery about once a year to score their site in several areas and offer ways to further improve the location’s performance.

PR & Marketing Support
Upon signing the franchise agreement, our marketing team begins to work with our owners to seed the market with excitement about surrounding the opening of a new winery location in their community. As the opening gets closer, our marketing team works closely to promote the story of the winery and its owners in traditional media channels such as print, online and broadcast, as well as providing posting content and boosting strategies for social media. Furthermore, our marketing team helps owners integrate with their local Chamber of Commerce and other networking groups to foster strategic partnerships upon opening their new location.