Genevieve Allen | WOMEN IN FRANCHISING
Founder & CEO at Club Engage and Board Member at The Franchise Association of South Africa (FASA)
When Genevieve Allen went looking for a business idea in 2012, she wasn’t scanning through spreadsheets from a corner office. She was in Spain, midway through a Masters in Business Innovation, chasing a hunch that South Africa was missing something obvious: professional, safeguarded aftercare for children once the school bell rings.
That hunch became Sherpa Kids South Africa, launched in late 2013 under a master licence Allen acquired herself. Nearly a decade later, in 2022, it became Club Engage, a rebrand that would test everything she’s built. Today. Alen sits at the helm as a Founder, CEO and Master Franchisor of one of South Africa’s largest outsourced aftercare and holiday care networks, operating across more than 40 schools and serving over 4000 families.
From Exco Boardrooms to the School Gate
Allen’s path to franchising wasn’t a leap from nowhere. Before Club Engage, she spent years in senior leadership at a JSE-listed education group, rising to Managing Director and Exco level more than eight years at that altitude. It gave her a fluency in education systems that most franchisors in the sector simply don’t have.
“Franchising appealed to me because it provided a way to scale a strong concept while creating opportunities for other entrepreneurs to build businesses of their own,” she says. It also meant persuading three very different audiences at once: franchisees, school leadership and parents that the model worked. “You couldn’t convince one without understanding the needs of the others. That taught me very quickly how important resilience, communication and execution are.”
The Rebrand That Could Have Broken the Business
Mid-2021, with COVID still reshaping the childcare sector, Allen made a decision most operators would have shelved: exit the international Sherpa Kids license and gamble on an entirely South African brand. It was a rebuild in the middle of a storm and by her own account, the moment she’s proudest of isn’t the launch or the first franchise sale or even the industry awards.
“What I am most proud of is that the business has endured,” she says. “Building something is exciting. Building something that lasts is much harder.” Club Engage retained every single client through the transition that Allen calls her strongest vote of confidence in both her team and the standard of service they’d delivered all along.
The scoreboard since backs it up: over 100 services opened, more than 40 franchise licenses sold, and FASA recognition including Newcomer Franchisor of the Year and Leading Developer of Emerging Entrepreneurs.
Beyond Babysitting: A Sector Playing Catch-Up
Ask Allen what outsiders get wrong about her industry, and she doesn’t hesitate: aftercare is mistaken for glorified babysitting. In reality, it demands rigorous recruitment, safeguarding protocols, staff ratios, first aid training, police clearances and constant coordination with schools and families “a home away from home for a child who may already have had a very long school day.”
She’s watched the market’s safeguarding standards rise sharply in recent years, partly driven by high-profile abuse cases involving figures like sports coaches. Club Engage was built on international best-practice standards from day one, Allen argues the market has simply caught up to where she started. Her current concern is the unregulated rise of au pairs often unscreened and loosely supervised and she’s pushed awareness campaigns urging parents to vet safeguarding practices as rigorously as they vet curricula.
At the centre of the offering sits Club Engage’s REACH framework: Run and play, Experiments and science, Arts, Create and Health, a structured answer to what happens between the final bell and pickup.
On Being a Woman in Franchising
Allen resists framing her hardest business moments purely through a gender lens. “Business is “challenging regardless,” she says. But she’s candid about what she believes about women in her sector routinely underestimate: social capital. “You cannot build a significant business completely on your own. Relationships open doors, create trust and expose you to opportunities you would not necessarily encounter otherwise.”
Her advice to her younger self follows the same thread: build that network earlier and more deliberately. “Ideas are the easy part. Execution is what matters.”
To women considering entering the sector today, her counsel is unsentimental: start with the market, not the idea. Validate the economics before falling in love with the concept, understand that a franchise buys you systems and support not a guarantee and don’t be afraid to lean on legal, HR and financial expertise. “There is a lot of satisfaction in building your own business,” she notes, “but the sweat equity part is very real.”
Life Off the Clock
Allen doesn’t pretend to have cracked conventional work-life balance; she calls herself “not a great example” of it. Instead, she blends the two: working from planes and trains, then switching off completely once she arrives somewhere. Travel recharges her, as does time spent among people building things in business and education. Her retired husband helps run both the company and what she calls “the business of life.”
Beyond Club Engage, Allen serves on the board of the Franchise Association of Southern Africa, sits as a Non-Executive Director for Rainbow Schools Botswana, and is a Director of the Diamond Women’s Network, a portfolio that keeps her, by design, permanently in rooms full of other people’s hard-won ideas.
