Franchise Articles

Megan M. Conway is Director of Marketing at Service Brands International, franchisor of Molly Maid, Mr. Handyman, and Protect Painters. We asked her for her thoughts on how the marketing department at Service Brands fits into the company's "development culture." For more on this topic, see the first quarter issue of Franchise Update magazine, which focuses on the theme of building a development culture. Here's what she had to say.

I believe marketing is the heart of every successful franchise company.

Marketing affects all customer and franchise development aspects of the company, including the sales process, building brand awareness, attracting and converting leads, building and maintaining customer relationships, and efforts to entice people who are no longer engaged...

Janet is a savvy small-business owner. She successfully navigated her way through the recession and is enjoying steady growth. She's well-versed on her clientele and knows their individual likes and dislikes. She knows who her competition is and what they're up to. She keeps up with trends, so she has a Facebook profile and a Twitter handle.

So why has she seen a marked increase in the growth of her competitors' businesses and not her own? When she hears people speak of her product, why do they associate it with her competition? What can Janet do to make sure her company is foremost in her customers' minds?

Regardless of the size of your company, or your position within it, you know how important it is these days to be established on social media platforms, spending ample time actively engaging your client base...

If you are tasked with building a social media dashboard to track your efforts, look no further than this post. I have built many dashboards over the years, and as a personal resolution to making my job easier, I decided to cut to the chase and get to the metrics that matter most. That means cutting out the everyday metrics that litter and cloud up the social media manager's real success story.

Now I am not saying that tracking followers, fans, sentiment, etc. is not important, but those are the vanity metrics that tend to give social media a bad name. These types of metrics are great indicators, but they don't really tie back to your business bottom line: driving revenue. With that being said, here are the top metrics that I measure here at Marketo on a weekly basis...

Capriotti's Sandwich Shop has been named one of Technomic's Top 100 Sandwich Chains and received Sandelman's Award of Excellence for Customer Service. Capriotti's also leads SMG's Benchmark Database of Customer Experience Metrics among Fast Casual Restaurants.
"Culture and service are based on having the right people in the right places," says James Gimbel, who operates two Capriotti's shops in Iowa and one in Las Vegas.
"We genuinely care about customers and we really want to get to know them because we do plan on seeing them again and again in our restaurants. Our goal is really to befriend our customers, to know their names, their families, where they work. That's not possible with every single customer, but that's how we think about it," he says...

Social Media Usage: What It Means to Marketers
A survey conducted by Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange can help guide your business in using social media. The average American Internet user spends about 2 hours a day on social media. Social media users average 3.6 hours a day. It's even higher for business owners, women, and senior executives. Your customers and suppliers are there, and you need to be, too. One in three Americans check brands' social media pages regularly; higher for under-35s and business decision-makers. Social media is a tool for these folks: take advantage of it. Half of Americans engage with brands in social media channels. Again, the numbers are higher for younger people and those who have jobs that involve gathering information about businesses and markets...

Michael Decker now operates an Expedia CruiseShipCenters franchise in Orlando, Florida, but he says it was his military experience that provided the crucial background he needed to become a successful franchisee.
Decker served in the US Army in Germany and Tacoma, Washington between 1975 and 1979 and then two years of inactive required duty from 1979 to 1981. Prior to becoming a franchise owner, he attended Orlando College, now Everest College and UCF, graduating with a B. S. in Business Management/Marketing. From here he began his career in the travel industry in 1996 and worked at Premier Vacations as a travel and receptive center sales manager. He went on to work with several other vacation and cruise lines until opening his own Expedia CruiseShipCenters business...

The process of organizational change is complex. A number of associated factors have the ability to impact the organization's overall ability to successfully evolve. Improper development, management, and monitoring can result in the change process spinning out of control and creating chaos. In the center of this storm, it is the leader who must then wrestle control of events and restore order.
As individuals are making the shift from a management to leadership style, the entire workplace is being buffeted by change. The leader is no longer controlling the employee's actions, but guiding and directing them through involvement and empowerment. Properly executed, this should be a smooth transition. However, ill-conceived plans implemented by poorly prepared leaders and employees can turn the entire process into chaos...

The 14-year-old Michael Knobelock was not just selling newspaper subscriptions in his native Houston but he was racking up awards as top salesman, earning between $400 and $500 a week in the 1970s. He was a born salesman.
After high school he sold ads for the Yellow Pages where he was again a successful bell-ringer. But the real twist of fate in Knobelock's sales life came when a friend approached him about purchasing a convenience store.
"My parents loaned me $10,000 to purchase a closed-down convenience store and reopen it," says the 50-year-old Knobelock. It turned out to be a life-changing move. For the next six years he made the store more profitable than it had ever been, and in the process realized that he knew how to run a business...

Ralph Askar is building a successful brand... again

Just as history has a way of repeating itself, Ralph Askar has a way of leaving his mark on organizations. He's doing it again with Instant Imprints.
In his more than 25 years in franchising, the former civil engineer from Chicago has been one of the most successful area franchisees and international master licensees for Mail Boxes Etc. (MBE) and The UPS Store, working to build the brands in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia. He's also been on both sides of the fence, as franchisee and franchisor. At MBE, he was a corporate executive, serving as vice president and as president and CEO for the brand in Canada. In 2005, under his leadership, MBE rebranded as The UPS Store and went on to enjoy significant growth as a franchise...

Millennials provide a unique challenge for businesses today. Many business operators are struggling to understand this generation and how to get the most out of the employer-employee relationship. Here is a quick guide to those born after 1980 and how you can turn them into some of your biggest fans and assets.

Communicating: They do it differently than you. Let's start there. Veterans like face-to-face meetings, Boomers like phone calls, Generation X prefers email and Millennials do most of their communicating via cell phone, text messages and social media. Interpersonal skills and presentation skills often need work, so be prepared to explain what is important to you and expected in your line of work. But be open to letting them develop relationships through the channels they're most comfortable with...

PostNet International Franchise Corp., which turns 20 this year, entered franchising with a development culture firmly in place. "We started as an independent consulting firm back in the '80s," says CEO and founder Steve Greenbaum, so a strong development culture was critical to its growth and success.
"When the business is dependent on growth, you learn very quickly," he says. "Ten years later, when we began franchising, we already had a very effective method of growth and knew how important it was to the culture of the business."
For Greenbaum, having a "development culture" means an organization supports, encourages, and embraces the idea that growth fuels the company and creates positive momentum. "Fundamentally, the idea is aligned with how important development is to the organization...

This is the third part of a mini-series on how to better understand the psychology of franchise buyers. The first part appeared in December's newsletter, and part two last month. All 14 tips originally appeared in "Grow to Greatness: How to build a world-class franchise system - faster," a book by Steve Olson, president of Franchise Update Media Group (see below for how to order).

10) Buyers process information in stages
Avoid overdosing individuals with too much information too quickly, or you'll prompt prospects to prematurely eliminate your opportunity. Worse yet, you can overly excite a candidate at the outset with nothing left for an encore.

Our brain is most effective processing new information in modules, progressing from general content to specific details in later stages...

John Metz is a franchisor (Hurricane Grill & Wings), a franchisee (Denny's, Dairy Queen, assorted hotels), a landlord, and a renter/lessee--as well as having other several business interests. We asked him for his thoughts on closing units that are losing money, clearly failing, and whose chances of a turnaround are slim to none - from his four different perspectives.

As founder and executive chairman of The Saxton Group in Dallas, Kelly Saxton has taken a family approach to building a business that has opened and operated more than 100 restaurants in his 30-year career. Whether talking about his two sons, Adam and Matthew, who are vice presidents at the company, his 1,000-plus employees, or the customers and markets the franchise and development company serves, Saxton understands the value and power of connections.
The largest franchisee of McAlister's Deli, The Saxton Group operates 50 of the fast casual restaurants in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and four Pinkberry frozen dessert locations in the Dallas area. Recognized by Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business as one of the top Dallas companies for dynamic growth, the company has earned McAlister's Deli Franchisee of the Year and Developer of the Year awards numerous times...

Ten years ago, if someone told you that the second biggest retail company by market capitalization (after Walmart) would actually be a virtual or a cloud company, you would have laughed. The fact that AT&T and Verizon would be selling off their landline operations would have been considered impossible. If someone said you could run an entire office without any physical infrastructure except your laptop and smartphone (no servers, PBX boxes, etc.), the person making such a statement would have been declared crazy.

But the "cloud" has affected us in a dramatic way, and all of the above have become truths. Today, you don't need a landline-based phone system for your office. It's actually considered archaic and hinders productivity compared with the features that cloud-based systems provide...

Darren J. Miles is Director of Global Franchise Operations at Caribou Coffee Company. We asked him for his thoughts on the hot topic of breaking down interdepartmental "silos" and its importance to franchise development and creating a "development culture" throughout the franchise system. For more on this topic, see the first quarter issue of Franchise Update magazine, due out later this month. Here's what he had to say.

Many organizations are made up of extraordinarily talented teams in development, operations, human resources, marketing, finance, and other functions, often with each function armed with their own goals and objectives. When goals are not aligned and transparent, territorial struggles can develop, causing all kinds of problems...

October marked an infamous anniversary on Wall Street. Twenty-five years ago, the unthinkable happened when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a record 106 points to end the trading week at just under 2500. The following Monday, now known as "Black Monday," the index shed an additional 508 points in one session. While the day's decline was widely blamed on a newfangled process called "portfolio insurance," it didn't help investor psyches that U.S warships started shelling an Iranian oil platform in the Persian Gulf that very same day.
At the time, given the multitude of concerning events, many high-profile economists, strategists, and media outlets immediately began predicting a global recession and bear market. Interestingly, neither happened...

With an estimated 1.8 zettabytes of information created and stored in 2011 alone, there has never been a more opportune time for hackers to challenge franchise data security, according to a DC Digital Universe study. Numerous yearly reports announce the increasing strain of data breaches among large and small businesses alike. Since it may seem impossible to predict and protect against each possible scenario, have you considered breach coverage or breach insurance to act as a fail-safe solution?

The real cost of compromise
What many businesses don't realize is that the compromise fine assessed by most merchant processors ($5,000 to $50,000) is only the beginning of penalties associated with a data breach. Other costs may include the following:

"How do you stage a successful new store grand opening, soup to nuts?"

David Buckley
Chief Marketing Officer
Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores
The first step to a successful franchisee grand opening is disciplined advance planning. Our planning begins with a review of our cadence for chain-wide promotional offers to select a date where we will have the most attractive offers in the marketplace. A successful grand opening is built upon a solid promotional offer. Once we have selected a date for our grand opening, we will execute multiple grand openings on the same date to drive operational efficiencies. This allows us to increase the effectiveness of our budgeted investment for the event. With advance planning we are also able to leverage our existing media, versioning the advertising to support grand opening markets...

To Glenn Mueller, franchising at its core is a partnership. And as the largest single franchisee in the Domino's Pizza system at 135 units, he's a great partner to have.
When we last visited with Mueller in late 2010, he told us how he and his team had not only weathered the massive Hurricane Katrina--which affected many of his Gulf Coast Domino's stores--but how he had reopened stores within days to take care of his team members and the people in the communities they served.
Beyond his compassion and relentless drive, it's difficult to write about Mueller without acknowledging his unending pursuit of innovation. For example, those insulated bags that keep your pizza steaming hot while it makes its way to your house? Courtesy of Mueller and his team...