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Field
visits
A different
approach
“At their
best, field visits can be a rewarding experience, focusing on
building the franchisee’s business to the next level. When visits
are negative, both parties waste valuable time and energy, blaming
anything and everyone for the business not reaching its full
potential.”
Franchisor
representatives have a role to play beyond checking that
franchisees are meeting standards and complying with operational
requirements. By adding business coaching to the mix, franchisors
can make field visits a positive experience and a valuable means of
assisting franchisees to improve their performance.
Having
been on both sides of the fence – as a franchisee and as a
franchisor representative – I know that field visits can be either
a very positive or very negative experience. Cynically, field
visits can also be viewed as just another item to cross off the
checklist for the franchisor – after all, the franchise is paying
for such a visit.
At their
best, field visits can be a rewarding experience, focusing on
building the franchisee’s business to the next level. When visits
are negative, both parties waste valuable time and energy, blaming
anything and everyone for the business not reaching its full
potential.
Given its
potential to improve business performance and motivate the
franchisee to reach even higher, why does the process sometimes
have poor results?
The
heavy-handed approach
One reason is
that quite often the approach taken by the franchisor service
representative is that of a policeman. The visit is spent checking
that standards and operational procedures are being adhered to by
the franchisee and pointing out items that need correcting. It’s as
if the representative gains great pleasure from this fault-finding
exercise and the result is that he or she forgets to focus on
business and profit-building activities.
Even when
policing standards and procedures is not the intention of the
franchisor representative, the visit is often perceived this way
and the franchisee is likely to become very defensive about their
business. After all, the franchisee is probably working very long
hours striving hard to reach certain goals, sales levels and
general operational excellence. There may be many reasons why they
are not quite reaching the target, but along comes the head office
representative with clipboard and pen and he or she begins to
highlight items and issues that need attention. It’s no wonder the
franchisee feels as if they’re getting kicked while they’re down!
And while this mightn't be the case, perception is stronger than
reality.
Coaching as
incentive
How, then, do
we ensure that the franchisor is servicing franchisees without
being overcritical of the individual and their performance? How can
the visit be planned to check that essential operational standards
and procedures are being adhered to while spending as much, if not
more, time on building the business as well?
One possible
solution is outsourcing the business development side of the field
visit to business coaches.
Business
coaching and business development managers are becoming more and
more widely accepted in the business community. We are starting to
see their true value being realised when used correctly and when a
professional organisation and the right coach for the business are
selected. The advantage of outsourcing business coaching is that
the franchisee will be much more receptive. They know that the
coach is independent of the franchisor and they realise that the
role of the coach is to focus on profit-building exercises –
activities that the franchisee will benefit from, such as
developing business plans, setting sales budgets, organising Local
Area Marketing programs and so on. It’s a fresh approach that will
be welcomed by the franchisees.
But what
about the operational standards and procedures, I hear you ask. Who
will maintain those?
This is where
the franchisor can leverage the business coaching service, by only
offering it to those franchisees who qualify by attaining a certain
level of operational compliance. Business coaching then becomes the
incentive for franchisees to maintain operational standards of
excellence. By separating the two functions and having different
people perform those functions I believe that the results can only
be beneficial to both franchisee and franchisor and build better
businesses.
Tailoring the
approach
If
outsourcing is not preferred by the franchisor, the business
coaching model can still be adopted by implementing a range of
internal strategies, including the following:
1.
Split the field visit and franchise performance review into two
parts – compliance to operational standards and procedures, and
business coaching or business development.
2.
Train field service representatives to become business coaches,
with the skills to implement business development activities as
well as to be expert technicians on the operational standards and
procedures of the franchise system.
3.
Use two franchisor representatives when conducting field visits:
one to perform the compliance check and one to perform the
business-coaching role. Representatives can exchange roles with
each field visit to other franchisees in order to develop skills in
each area. A bonus is that this approach will also ensure job
variety for the franchisor representatives. Another advantage is
that you have a better opportunity to match each franchisee with
the correct franchisor representative according to their
personality, rather like ‘good cop, bad cop’.
4.
Develop an incentive program based on operational excellence in
order to gain access to the business coaching services. This will
work well if the plan is only to provide business coaching services
to those franchisees who are operationally compliant.
5.
Another strategy for implementing the right business coaching to
meet franchisees’ needs is to split your franchisees into various
categories as follows:
•
Non-compliant franchisees – more likely to be your new franchisees
learning the system and trying to reach operational
compliance.
•
Operationally compliant franchisees experiencing stagnant sales
growth – these tend to be franchisees operating the business
according to the operational procedures and standards and working
‘in the business’ but not ‘on the business’.
•
Operationally compliant franchisees and sales-to-operational
capacity – These franchisees are ‘operational excellence
personified’ and working ‘on’ their business as well as ‘in’ their
business. For them to grow further they will need to develop new
markets, relocate to a better location or reinvest more capital
into the business; in order to reach new sales levels.
•
Franchisees wanting to sell for many various reasons, both good and
bad.
Once you have
categorised franchisees into these groups, you need to meet them at
their stage of the business life cycle, delivering the appropriate
business coaching solutions to help them reach the next level and
attain their desired business and lifestyle goals. Whether coaching
takes the form of educational workshops, skills development,
helping the franchisee write a strategic business plan and coaching
them through the various action steps to succeed, or helping them
put together a professional business sales package, the end result
should be focused on enhancing the performance of each individual
franchisee and of the franchise network as a whole.
In summary
the objective of all franchise field visits should be to help the
franchisee build a better business. If this is not happening in
your franchise network and field visits have become a frustrating
and non-productive task, maybe a different approach is needed.
Outsource part of your franchisee support to business coaches or
give your field representatives the appropriate training and tools
to conduct productive field visits which will take your franchise
network to the next level.
Franchisees
will gain better value for money from their service fees and a new
culture will begin to develop, bringing the franchisee and
franchisor closer together. Maybe another incentive program could
be to provide life coaching for individual franchisees, but that’s
a subject for another time.
Leon
Pike is a
franchise consultant with Franchise Alliance. Through their
franchise system development and franchise coaching services,
Franchise Alliance offer tailor-made solutions for franchisors
looking for better and smarter ways to develop their franchisees.
Leon can be contacted on (08) 9444
4222.
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