Knights’ franchising, employment and property specialists have come together to support Puddle Ducks with the next stage of their journey.

Puddle Ducks’ focus on teaching independent swimming from birth, has remained its principle objective since 2002.  Despite now having awarded over 50 territories and teaching over 23,000 children each week across the UK already, it maintains its ambition for further growth to engage more communities to make swimming accessible to families with young children.

When the difficult decision to suspend lessons due to COVID-19 was taken in March 2020, Puddle Ducks took the time to progress projects and ensure that its franchises were in the strongest position possible to embrace future growth. 

It has moved forward with its ambitions to open its first state of the art swimming centre.  Located in Barons Quay, Northwich, Cheshire, the flagship swimming centre opened in September this year and already caters to the needs of nearly 700 babies and children 0-10 years old.  It will also be used as a national teacher training centre.

The business has also restructured its franchise network to take into consideration worker rights ensuring that it can meet its obligations ahead of legislative change.

Puddle Ducks has always been pro-active in their approach to developing the business and managing their franchise network which has enabled it to go from strength to strength despite recent market challenges.

Jo Stone, Owner of Puddle Ducks comments: “Our ethos of wanting every child to love swimming and respect the water continues to guide our growth strategy. The development of our own pool will provide us with capacity for an additional 1000+ spaces per week and we envisage this being a blue print for the rest of the network. It provides a pool and a building matching the high standards of our lessons. We continually look for ways to make our franchise model as sustainable as possible for our franchisees and Knights has been instrumental in helping us prepare for the future.”

Fiona Boswell, Partner at Knights commented: “Puddle Ducks is a great business to be involved with and I’m delighted that we have been able to support them getting ready for the next stage of their journey. I look forward to seeing their continued success.”