The franchise development process requires effective marketing and selling to get the franchise network up and running. Franchise systems that do well in the early stages typically have a strong sales and marketing focus and the leadership many times excel in sales to a large degree. As the franchise system expands and the business matures, the need for operational management and support becomes a bigger issue and of greater importance to the success of the franchise brand. This transition from sales to support can be cumbersome for some organizations and business leaders making the franchise development process difficult. As an entrepreneur considering whether to franchise your business model, this dynamic should be understood and evaluated prior to launching a new franchise system. Start with a self-evaluation and understand what you are good at and what you are not good at, it’s ok to have weaknesses, it’s not ok to pretend you don’t have them. Great Franchisors have weaknesses, but they understand what they are and know when to hire people to manage the aspects of the business they can’t handle on their own in order to achieve long term success.
The sales component of franchising requires several key elements to be effective and should be defined up front in order to successfully sell your franchise model. First, have a great brand and image in place so that you look, present and show your best to prospective franchise investors. Your website, logo, store design, consumer marketing materials and anything that presents who you are needs to be done right and done well. Second, understand where franchise investors look to buy franchises and what it takes to get your brand in front of them. Yes, it cost money to advertise your franchise and yes you will need to intentionally drive traffic to your franchise offering. Plan on a marketing and advertising your brand as a franchise to put the offering in front of the right people. Finally, franchise sales takes focus, time and effort to make it work. If you aren’t interested and capable of selling larger investment opportunities, find someone who is and can focus on the sales effort to get results from your franchise sales campaign.
The operations and support side of the business is a different set of responsibilities and focus. After the franchise system gains traction, the support, training and operating responsibility to the franchisor becomes enormously important. Good franchisors have excellent training systems and operational support structures in place. Franchisees expect to see value from the relationship following the purchase transaction which can be a difficult dynamic for the franchisor to continue showing franchisee’s reasons to pay a royalty. Franchisor’s who excel in operational and management support are comfortable doing regular site visits, have excellent franchise marketing systems in place to help franchisee’s market and build their business and look at their franchisees as partners in the business with them. They believe that the franchisee’s success in the network is their success and everything they do relates back to helping franchisees improve their bottom line and see more value in being part of the network.
Christopher Conner
President
Franchise Marketing Systems
Chris.Conner@FMSFranchise.com
Franchise Marketing Systems 