Maximising franchisee success
If franchising is the business of selling and servicing franchisees then the first and most important priority is to make your franchisees successful.
I know this is common sense, but just how many franchise companies really live up to this? There are three main components:
Recruiting the right people with the right underlying skills and behaviours
Having a financial model which enables success for both sides
Having a training and supervision model which makes franchisees feel loved but not smothered.
Every franchisor has their heart in the right place, but when running an often-complex business it is easy to lose sight of one or all three of these long term goals. Not from a policy perspective, but an implementational one.
How? When under pressure to hit franchise sales targets it is very tempting to lower recruitment standards. As a new franchisor it is also often unclear what the truly essential skills and behaviours are for a new franchisee. Pilot stages can give more clarification, but it is not until volumes are ramped up that it becomes clear. Recruiting the wrong people means a lot of time wasted unpicking complex legal agreements and a significant reduction of the income you hoped your franchisee was going to generate for your business.
The internet is littered with horror stories of franchise models that are financially unsustainable. There are many more examples of “networks” and “Membership organisations” that charge large fees for little more than a logo. When the fee model focuses almost entirely on generating cash by selling to new people rather than how to generate fees from existing members the whole thing becomes very cynical very fast. There is little incentive to develop members once they have joined or to focus on retaining them. It is all about finding new people.
The level of disillusionment of members of these networks can be very high, and justifiably so. By changing the financial model slightly both sides will be both happier and better off. People buy franchises or join these organisations for a reason – normally because they feel they either do not or can not start a business from scratch. To pay often thousands of pounds and then be not much better off than if you had started on your own is tough.
Franchise businesses need to be able to assimilate new franchisees efficiently. But training new staff in any business is fraught with dangers, to do it in a model where that person is self-employed, often a distance from your office, and who didn’t pay you a lot of money in order to be treated as an employee is at the top level of difficult. If you read the descriptions on the BFA they contain information about the training programmes offered to new franchisees. These programmes are incredibly front end heavy. Days and weeks of intense residential induction courses to cram everything you need to know about being successful into the shortest period possible and delivered in a way that is of maximum convenience to the franchisor. Many companies have access to mentors or coaches, webinars, annual conferences, handbooks, business development specialists, all singing and dancing CRM and data systems, brilliant social media and PPC – the list goes on.
But when I talk to franchisees of some of the biggest and most successful franchise brands they almost all talk about how tough they found the first year – the lack of support structures that worked for them, coaches who because they were doing the support alongside running their own franchise were not fully focused or available. The sheer volume of information that needs to be processed and then applied – this is the bit that takes time, and every franchisee carries out this process in a different way according to their learning styles and confidence levels. This first year is of course the danger period – this is when a new franchisee is most likely to disengage or go rogue.
The most relevant theory is known as the Community of Practice. This can be translated as “how we do things around here”, the collective wisdom, skills, attitudes and behaviours of everyone in the organisation. A new franchisee is on the outside of this community and needs to be drawn into the centre – to be included. To maximise success, it is a process which should be actively managed, and it is done by focusing on the acquisition of competence and of active inclusion in the community. Even then, it is a slow process – think months and years not days and weeks.
What is the solution?
With the use of long-term training and support programmes for new franchisees which are designed by experts. Too often training sessions contain the content that the person delivering thinks is amazing rather than being focused on what the delegates need to know or be able to do. Training is great for disseminating knowledge and teaching skills. But how often have you left a training session and immediately and seamlessly put every piece of information into practice? You don’t. Why? Our brains are just not wired that way. The application of knowledge and skills requires a different training skill set, and a significantly different time scale.
Why am I so opinionated about this? For 20 years I ran a large vocational training company. Vocational qualifications focus on the demonstration of competence. Can you do the job? It is a completely different method of education than academic learning which is about the acquisition of knowledge and skills but not the application to the workplace. Workplace learning is different from classroom learning. My post-graduate qualifications in Lifelong Learning and Educational Leadership gave me the opportunity to study how people learn most effectively at work and the processes involved with the development of both competence and expertise. I then applied these to my work training ex nursery managers to be amazing teachers and assessors of vocational qualifications.
We have developed a training course – Vanquish your Sales Demons which puts all of this learning into practice – 10 months of teaching and 1-1 coaching to help people be bigger bolder and braver in how they market their business. Why is this interesting in a franchise context? Because our research shows these are the key skills which are not being successfully acquired and implemented by current franchisor training programmes.