FranchiseCanada September | October 2017 25S
ymposium Cafe set a big goal for itself this
year: win the Grand Prize at the CFA’s Awards
of Excellence within three years. It was a big
one, because winning one of the two prizes
means your company’s franchisee relations
are the strongest of any participating CFA
franchise in the country. It wouldn’t be easy to achieve,
especially in year one.
So when a tableful of the Symposium crew took their
seats at the awards gala in Niagara Falls in April, no one
was really expecting to win. Which you would have seen
and heard quite clearly if you were in the room when
Symposium Cafe was announced as the Grand Prize win-
ner in the Traditional Franchises category.
“I think we broke the decibel level record in there!” says
Symposium Co-owner Bill Argo with a laugh. “We couldn’t
have been more proud or happy. Right now we have the
best group of franchisees we’ve had in the 13 years we’ve
been franchising, and this award just shows it.”
There are 24 of those franchisees across Ontario now,
with another six opening by the end of 2017, most in smaller
centres, the average with yearly sales of between $1.4 mil-
lion and $1.5 million. All of them offer casual, contempo-
rary dining for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late night.
That means everything from eggs Benedict to steaks, cap -
puccinos to Caesars, cheesecakes to salads. Inside or out
on the patio, the décor is casual and contemporary, with
plush seating, dark colours, and Renaissance-inspired
stone art walls. Raphael’s famous The School of Athens is
a visual centrepiece in each restaurant.
But Raphael didn’t paint his fresco in a day. It’s taken
Bill and his brother Terry more than 21 years to get their
company to this point.Dessert to start
The Argo brothers were 16 years into previous careers
before opening their first Symposium location in 1996 in
London, Ontario. Bill worked in finance, Terry in opera-
tions, so their skills were a good match. Plus their dad
had owned a full service restaurant in Toronto since the
1950s, so they knew the industry.
They went in a slightly different direction than their
dad, though, launching Symposium as a dessert café.
“That was the hot trend back then, with places like Just
Desserts and Coffee, Tea or Me having success,” says Bill.
“But we tried to be a little different and wanted a concept
with this artwork by Raphael at the core. It shows ideas
being exchanged in a town square, and we started with
the idea of people coming to exchange ideas, having con-
versations in a modern-day setting.”
And those people did come in steady numbers
throughout the first eight years. So much so that Bill and
Terry began franchising in 2004. Their first franchise
outside of London was in Waterloo, and it was a key turn-COVER STORY