How to Manage Staffing Your Business
It is an interesting time to say the least, but one common factor for just about any business in today’s market (Pandemic / Post Pandemic) is the difficulties in staffing the day to day business. As a business owner, you are facing enormously unique obstacles above and beyond the typical difficulties in finding and keeping good people. With the government continuing to “Stimulus” to the hilt, many positions are extremely hard to find people to work at all, much less bring talent and passion to the job. The reality is that the current circumstances will pass and that the impact of the Pandemic will begin to dissipate. This doesn’t change the fact that finding and keeping good people is always difficult, the current market circumstances have just exacerbated an ever-present issue that is always an obstacle for operating any type of business. The reality is that many employees are willing to work as hard as they need to in order to keep their job and not a whole lot more. The one’s that have the work ethic and drive to do more, many times will leave and chase bigger paying jobs or worse yet, become competition for your business.
When you franchise your business, you in effect address the staffing issue by putting owner operators in business for themself, but not by themself. Although this certainly does not mean Franchising is a silver bullet, the franchisee now becomes a vested owner operator and essentially takes the day to day management off the Franchisor’s plate. This incorporates the staffing of the location and business and the idea is that with the owner onsite every day, they are better positioned to find, develop and keep good people in the operation. It’s not a silver bullet, but by empowering the owner operator and giving them the opportunity to build a business that they own, you now have the most driven, passionate and consistent operator you could hope for. When they win, you as the franchisor wins and this allows you as the CEO of the brand to focus on bigger picture initiatives like growing the company.
There are many industry segments involved in franchising. You can find a franchise representing almost industry, but most of the franchise brands are in industry segments which tend to be labor heavy and require a significant amount of staff to operate. This includes business segments such as food service, staffing, retail, healthcare along with a variety of other markets. Brands such as Anytime Fitness, Brewster’s Ice Cream, Two Men and a Truck and UPS Stores would have had difficulty scaling to even a few locations, but through franchising were able to develop globally recognized brands in part because of the owner operator’s ability to address the staffing needs of each of these businesses. If the leadership were faced with the task of staffing each unit, this would be not only an enormous financial risk, but maybe more importantly extremely complicated and difficult to oversee that many employees. The reality is that even a handful of company owned locations creates a heavy burden on the CEO of the brand.
Franchising a business isn’t for everyone or every brand, but for those that fit the mold and are looking for ways to scale their brand into new markets, the franchise model could be the answer. Attracting and keeping human capital is even more difficult in today’s market making the franchise expansion model that much more attractive. For more information on how to Franchise Your Business, contact Franchise Marketing Systems (FMS Franchise) at www.FMSFranchise.com
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with a former Army Ranger who had served time in Afghanistan and certainly had put in his time serving our country. He had been planning his new business to provide professional body-guard/security services for the past year and a half. It was hard not to feel for him, he had clearly done so much for our country and now was sort of wallowing in his own thoughts on what to do next. In working with franchise investors and potential business owners who are researching and trying to understand whether to get into business, this scenario seems to play out quite often. The fear, anxiety and thought of getting into business tends to plant people’s feet in concrete and they can’t bring themselves to take the leap. This is a problem not only for people individually as it is my belief that small business ownership is the best, most effective way for people to take control of their future and truly realize their potential as a working professional. The second issue for the overall picture is that less and less people are starting businesses as the rate of entrepreneurship across the country has been declining for some time which does not bode well for our overall economic health.
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.
Franchising is a marketing and selling business which many times is driven by publicity and exposure for the brand. Some great franchise systems were successful in their franchise recruiting efforts almost entirely by being effective at developing great PR for the brand. What is Franchise PR? Public Relations is exposure for a brand by using credible sources to publish information and stories on the brand, what makes franchise PR unique is a focus on exposure through resources that are relevant to franchise investors.
At the forefront of any good business model is a great marketing system. Franchising is the art of duplication, so it makes sense that a solid franchise investment offers an excellent franchise marketing system. The best franchises in the world are often closely correlated with the best marketing minds. What effective franchise leaders have been able to do in their execution of a franchise development program is to define a target customer base, build strong messaging to that customer and build a plan to put the brand in front of that customer as frequently and efficiently as possible. In the end it’s really pretty simple, the good franchises have marketing figured out.
What makes the difference between a good business and a great business? There are so many good businesses out there, why do most of them level off at “good” and never transition to “great”. In our experience working with businesses and helping determine whether a brand should expand through franchising, this discussion and the dynamics of this scenario are reviewed many times over. Really, any business that is even considering franchising tends to be a “good” business. They have proven their model has some merit, their value proposition has some unique differentiation from the rest of the market and the leadership behind the brand has vision for growth and scale. Most of these businesses don’t have what it takes to franchise, but certainly would be considered good businesses by most. These factors are some of the key indicators from our perspective which delineate good from great:
My consulting firm, Franchise Marketing Systems helps businesses become franchise models. Over the past several years, I have purchased franchises as part of my work in the industry. It has been interesting to say the least to see the other side of the relationship as a franchisee. Buying a franchise can be a confusing, scary and enormously time consuming process. All of this many times leads to bad decision making as people skip steps and tend to jump into something that maybe wasn’t the best business decision to begin with. The irony of it all is that franchising is by nature a business model that helps entrepreneurs and investors avoid unnecessary risk and skip the learning curve through a proven and validated business model. The buying process provides many of the same benefits just by the simple fact that the franchise legal process requires certain disclosures and information to be presented to a franchisee prior to their making a buying decision. So what can you do in researching your franchise investment to help avoid the pitfalls of a bad investment and find the shining star of an investment you’ve been looking for?
Franchise Marketing Systems will be sponsoring the September 2016 Franchise Expo held in Atlanta on 9/24 and 9/25. The Atlanta franchise show is one of the countries strongest small market shows and will be this fall’s largest franchise marketing event. The Atlanta franchise show consistently draws a large volume of franchise buyers to the event primarily from the Southeastern United States. In developing effective franchise marketing campaigns, Tradeshows have always been a key aspect to any franchise development model and in today’s technology driven marketplace maybe even more so than ever before.
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