Trends

The good news: Franchising is experiencing a remarkable growth phase - not only in unit count and system-wide revenue, but also in the number of new and emerging brands. The bad news: It's harder to keep up with all the good news! That's a nice problem to have - and why we've brought back our "Good News!" roundup of selected news items on unit growth, investment and financial developments, international expansion news, refranchising, and milestones attained by franchisors large, medium, and emerging. Here's your chance to follow the leaders, every third Tuesday of the month.

So if you're not doing it already, send us your good news here.

New Units/Growth/Expansion
MOD Pizza Signs 50-Unit Deal for Florida with BBX Capital
Checkers & Rally’s Signs 40 New Franchisees in Continuing Expansion
Toppers Pizza Signs 2 New Deals for 35 More Locations
Newk’s Eatery Enters Indiana with 15-Unit Development Deal
Captain D’s Inks Deals for 9 New Restaurants (Georgia, Texas, Virginia)
Burgerim Continues U...

Shelly Sun, CEO and co-founder of BrightStar Care, never planned to start a company. But in 2001, she and her husband, J.D. Sun, were struggling to find quality in-home care for his grandmother and discovered they weren't alone. They decided to take matters into their own hands.

"We built a healthcare staffing company to provide the full continuum of care, from home care to supplemental staffing for corporate clients such as nursing homes and physicians," she says. Sun says she worked 90 to 100 hours, 7 days a week in those early years, but the payoff has been worth it.

They launched the company in 2002 and began franchising in 2005. "Although we already had three successful company-owned locations, we knew that through franchising we would be able to expand much faster than if we were to do it on our own," she says...

Recent decisions and efforts by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) have raised the serious possibility that franchisors may, depending upon the particular circumstances, be considered joint employers, along with their franchisees, of the employees of the franchisee.

Last August, the NLRB issued a decision (Browning-Ferris) in which it ruled that a company could be a "joint employer" of the employees of its independent contractors even if it does not actually control the employment decisions of the independent contractors, as long as it 1) exerts indirect control or 2) possesses the right to control those decisions. Similarly, the current Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division of the DOL (David Weil) has taken the position that to protect workers, franchisors should be held liable for the labor and employment liabilities of their franchisees...

Benchmarking the good, the bad, and the best practices
Results from the 2016 Annual Franchise Development Report (AFDR) were unveiled in October at the 17th annual Franchise Leadership & Development Conference. The 2016 AFDR is based on responses from 134 franchisors representing 51,004 units (48,431 franchised and 2,573 company-owned).
Participants in the survey consisted of franchisors who pre-registered for the conference and completed an online questionnaire. Responses were aggregated and analyzed to produce a detailed look into the recruitment and development practices, budgets, and strategies of a wide cross-section of franchisors. The data, with accompanying commentary, provide the basis of the 2016 AFDR.
Highlights from the report were presented in a 90-minute general session...

The good news: Franchising is experiencing a remarkable growth phase - not only in unit count and system-wide revenue, but also in the number of new and emerging brands. The bad news: It's harder to keep up with all the good news! That's a nice problem to have - and why we've brought back our "Good News" roundup of selected news items on unit growth, investment and financial developments, international expansion news, refranchising, and milestones attained by franchisors large, medium, and small. Here's your chance to follow the leaders, every third Tuesday of the month.
   So, if you're not doing it already, send us your good news here.


New Units/Growth/Expansion

This may sound mean or unsympathetic, but one of my least favorite sayings is, "I gave my best." To me, this is an unacceptable crutch. I don't want to hear it.

My personal feeling is this: when the goal is to accomplish greatness, go where no one or no team has gone before. I wasn't asking for your best effort; your best is what you were capable of in the past. I was expecting you to figure it out, to try a thousand ways (and, if need be, another thousand ways), expecting you to innovate, lose sleep, get around it, find loopholes, research, and sweat like you never have before. Every extraordinary accomplishment, invention, or revolution was not a result of someone giving their best. Somehow that person or group found a way to do what no one else could do...

Millennials live in a world that is increasingly virtual. They text, Snapchat, and tweet instead picking up the phone and calling one another, and they Skype instead of going out for coffee. That is part of the reason companies are having a hard time filling a growing number of open sales positions: sales is a profession that requires a great deal of personal, face-to-face connections.

A recent study from Harvard Business School's U.S. Competitiveness Project found that employers spend an average of 41 days trying to fill technical sales jobs, versus 33 days for jobs in other professions. The same study cited a cloud-based software company that would have had $2 million more in revenue if it had met its hiring goals for sales reps...

One of the largest challenges in franchise development is finding and keeping the right people in the right places, from the top of the franchisor office to the front-line employees at each franchised location.
A franchise provides a systematic way to conduct business that, if followed properly, produces a reproducible margin. This is true no matter whether the franchise is located in the U.S. or another country. What does a good, profitable, proven franchise bring to a country? A proven business system, a brand, manuals with job descriptions, technology, marketing programs, sometimes a "magic sauce," and training--lots of training, for all levels of employees.
However, one common aspect of franchising, no matter what the country, is the people required to make the business operate...

Editor's note: Whether you're an aspiring, emerging, or established franchisor, these basic tips on how to build and grow your concept still apply (always will). And for you development pros who know it all, reviewing the fundamentals every once-a-while is always a good idea.

Franchising your company is a great way to earn more revenue, grow your brand, and take on new and exciting opportunities. While many people assume their franchise's growth will just come naturally, businesses do not just magically start spreading and growing. You must be willing to put in the work to make sure that your franchise grows. Here are 10 of the top tips to consider when you are trying to grow your franchise and expand your business.

The good news: Franchising is experiencing a remarkable growth phase - not only in unit count and system-wide revenue, but also in the number of new and emerging brands. The bad news: It's harder to keep up with all the good news! That's a nice problem to have - and why we're bringing back our "Good News" roundup of selected news items about unit growth, investment and financial developments, international expansion news, refranchising, and milestones attained by franchisors large, medium, and small. Here's your chance to follow the leaders, every third Tuesday of the month.
So if you're not doing it already, send us your good news here.
New Units/Growth/Expansion
Pie Five To Open 30 New Locations in North Carolina
Caribou Coffee, Einstein Bros...

Note: This article appeared on the Marketo blog.

We're three-quarters through 2015. (It snuck up on us, too!) Right now, many marketers (you?) may already start looking toward the future by brainstorming ideas to execute in 2016.

A word of advice: Wait! There are still 3 months remaining in 2015, so don't waste them. It's time for you to turn up the heat!

We've seen some big changes and trends in the marketing space since the beginning of the year: mobile took off, social media restrictions were lifted, and SEO... well SEO stayed pretty confusing for many. Most of these changes probably had you rethinking your marketing efforts. With this in mind, let's analyze how we can leverage the first 75% of 2015 to close the year out strong...

Interviewing sales candidates can be extremely difficult since even a subpar seller is trained to tell people what they want to hear. Many candidates look great on paper, only later to turn in lackluster performances.

Since the cost of bad hires is enormous for a company's bottom line, it is critical for those in charge of hiring to "get it right." The key is to look beyond the resume and test for certain personality traits. Here are the 7 most common personality traits found in top sales performers, and tips to find out if the candidate across the table truly possesses them.

1) Success-driven. While skills can be learned, a desire to succeed and a pattern of behavior often cannot. Since no sales candidate will assess themselves as unambitious, the interviewer must delve deeper...

Editor's note: Part 1 appeared in the previous issue of this newsletter. The original article appeared on the Help Scout blog.

Hudl, a sports video software company based in Lincoln, Neb., has a system for feedback they refer to as #RealTalk. Playing off the slang phrase "real talk" (curt honesty), the team uses the phrase to denote when a conversation has taken a serious turn. It's a half-joking phrase used to inspire genuine candor among the team:

RealTalk, one of six values read off at the start of each Hudl retreat, plays an important role in the company, from use in hiring to performance reviews to product updates. It's written in emails, said out loud before feedback is given ("All right, give me the real talk...