A few weeks ago we had Brecon Gage, our newest addition to the Franchise Growth Advisor team, on the Franchise Growth Podcast to share 3 ways to support your franchisees.
Brecon was a successful franchisee for 2 franchise brands for almost two decades and joined the team in early 2022 to bring his expertise to the AC community.
As a young entrepreneur, Brecon didn’t believe in coaching (gasp – tough to admit that) and spent many years thinking he knew all there was to know.
But… like we all do as we grow, he had a moment of clarity on the value of external support and guidance and ended up having some incredible coaches and mentors over the years.
In the discussion on the podcast, Brecon and Belle dove into the value of supporting your franchisees. Frankly – supporting franchisees is pretty much the number one thing a franchisor can do to create system success.
Support can be coaching, it could be creating templates, it could be creating supplier connections… there are a lot of ways you as a franchisor can support your franchisees and today we’ll be giving you 3 to implement in your system right now.
1) Getting Business Foundations in Order
If you’re a more emerging system, a big part of the support you can provide is the foundation of your business. Vision planning, goal setting, creating projections and goals for the first 10 years, 3 years, 1 year, and quarterly.
If you don’t clarify these things (on paper!) everyone is rowing in different directions. It’s imperative that everyone is rowing in the same direction for you to see success.
Getting your franchisee’s staff and team on board with these goals is equally as important. Creating buy-in could look like having team brainstorming sessions, explaining the WHY behind each goal, and even getting some feedback from the team to help increase engagement.
Here are some things you can do to get your franchisee’s foundations in order…
- Have a planning/goal-setting process you share with your franchisees
- Teaching your franchise business coach(es) this process
- Teaching your franchisees how to create buy-in with their own teams
- Holding your franchisees accountable to their goals and projections
2) Provide Leadership Training
One of the best ways to support your franchisees for success is to provide leadership training so they can be an amazing leader for their team!
A great element of leadership you can start with? How to customize leadership for different types of teams/personalities.
There are some wonderful tools out there that can help your franchisees understand their team’s personalities and how to best support them for success.
Taking the time to show your franchisees how to learn about their staff’s strengths and skills will help them determine the personality types that best fit their business roles (we can’t all be the same personality type in a successful business!)
You may use a tool like this for your franchise development process already – an even better reason to show your franchisees how to use a tool like this for their staff! You know it works, now you can use it to support your franchisees.
3) Customize Your Support (as much as possible)
As a more emerging brand, you will likely customize your franchise development, training, and coaching a lot more easily (there are just not as many franchisees to manage).
But as you grow and become more established as a brand with 50+ units it can become tempting to never customize your support. It’s just more work!
However, a way you can stand out as a franchise system and create more franchisee success is to take the time to adjust or tweak support for franchisees who may need it. You will gain a reputation for caring, and your franchisee will be more likely to achieve their goals.
You don’t have to have every customization prepared in the system right away! That’s completely unrealistic and would be a full-time job in itself. But something that makes a BIG difference in your mindset is that you could customize something in your system (if a franchisee has a specific learning style for example)
Have more questions about supporting your franchisees for success? We discuss this and more in our free virtual AC Roundtables where franchisors gather on zoom to collaborate and problem-solve together.
The AC Roundtables are a free resource we offer franchisors who are seeking collaboration and peer-to-peer learning. We’ve been running these virtual roundtables since 2020 and we always love to have new franchisors join us!