6 Tips For First Year Success as a Health and Wellness Franchisee

Your first year as a health and wellness franchisee will be the most challenging. You’ll have to learn new skills and the franchisor’s system, while making the leap from being an employee to being a business owner.

Tips to help ensure success during your first year as a health and wellness franchisee include:

1. Take Advantage of Your Franchisor’s Support, But Don’t Expect Too Much Support: You’re likely considering investing in a health and wellness franchise because you understand how beneficial it is to buy into a proven successful business model that comes along with a tremendous amount of support from the franchisor in a variety of areas including marketing, operations, training, and more. In addition, franchisees can tap into each other’s knowledge. The key thing to remember, however, is that as a franchisee, you will be responsible for building and running your business just like any business owner. In addition, you should ask for help when you need it.
2. Stick to Your Budget and Have a Plan B When It Comes to Funding: A realistic, detailed budget is essential to ensuring you are operating your business in a manner that will not only enable it to keep its doors open, but to start turning a profit. It will help you set goals and prioritize as well as evaluate the performance of your health and wellness franchise. Life doesn’t always go as planned, so it’s wise to have a backup plan regarding funding should your business take longer to achieve a milestone than expected.
3. Learn and Do Not Deviate from the Franchisor’s System: Learning all the processes of the health and wellness franchise system you are now a part of may initially seem overwhelming. You may be tempted only to learn some and not others. You, however, must learn and follow each and every one. The health and beauty franchise system you invested in is successful because it’s founders figured out what needs to happen for it to be successful. Deviating from the business roadmap your franchisor provides is just going to slow down your success timeline.
4. Expect to Work Long Hours: Since you have a learning curve and must constantly hustle to land new business as a health and wellness franchisee during your first year (actually having to land new business never ends for most franchisees), be prepared to work long hours. It’s important for your family and friends to understand you will be doing so. Sometimes they assume that now you are “the boss” that you don’t have to work as much. That may be the case once your business is established and you have managers in place. Until then, however, your franchise may at times feel as though it is consuming much of your life.
5. Learn to Live with Some Instability: By electing to become a health and wellness franchisee, you gave up the security of a regular paycheck and regular hours. Acceptance of this change and that it isn’t forever, will help you stay calm and focused. It’s important for your own mental health and the health of your relationships to carve out quality time to spend with family and friends.
6. Have a Future Vision and Map Out How to Get There: If you were employed prior to investing in your health and wellness franchise, you may find it hard to make the transition from a structured day that was planned for you by your boss to one where you have to map out your day and are accountable to yourself. Think about what objectives you want to achieve at the end of your first year and then outline a strategic approach to achieving them. It should feature a timeline of when crucial steps should be taken. Without objectives and deadlines, you will likely waste a lot of time and not achieve goals in a timely manner.

Owning a health and wellness franchise is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a good idea to view your franchise as a long-term investment that will likely get you to where you want to be if you put in the hard work needed and follow the franchisor’s system.

To learn more about the health and wellness franchise sector marketplace, read Health and Wellness Franchises Tap Into the $3.7 Trillion Global Wellness Industry.