âThe Founderâ is a 2016 movie based on Ray Kroc and McDonaldâs origin story, which won critical acclaim for Michael Keaton. In one important scene, Kroc (played by Keaton) visits a franchise location only to find that the operator has introduced fried chicken on the menu to compete with KFC. This flies directly in the face of the menu standardization he hoped to enforce across the McDonaldâs system. If you havenât seen it, I highly recommend that you do.
This scene is pivotal as it demonstrates the issues and challenges in achieving brand consistency. As a true visionary, Kroc wanted more than to sell burgers and fries. He aimed to deliver the same quality burgers and fries no matter where McDonaldâs was located. And isnât this the true goal of all franchises? To have uniform consistency from location to location? This was the key to what ultimately led to McDonaldâs franchise dominance.
The crux of this article is that this uniformity becomes the cornerstone of all successful franchise brands, along with learning how to achieve it.
Inspect What You Expect
This mantra and approach go beyond establishing expectations and having a mechanism in place for verifying that expectations are being met across your entire system. So, how do you ensure that this principle is embedded in your operations?
Establish Clear-Cut Expectations
Do your franchisees clearly understand what you expect of them through regularly ongoing communications? These can best be conveyed through town hall meetings, newsletters, and updates to your franchise operations manual. However, based on FranConnect, franchisee visitations arenât frequent enough to create sustainable changes.
Enter the Playbook
The playbook is a comprehensive document that outlines an organizationâs key strategies, processes, and practices. Itâs a âliving, breathing document that serves as a roadmap for operating a business. It helps to ensure consistency and efficiency and to align with a brandâs goals and values. Your playbook can be used to ensure adherence to your vision and vision statements, core values, roles, and responsibilities. However, the most utilized facet of franchising tends to be around the businessâs operational processes. It is a step-by-step guide to daily operations and routine activities critical to the business.
Systematic Audits
We have found that the trend has shifted to where more and more Franchisors are augmenting their franchise visitations by having their franchisees conduct their self-appraisals on the present state of their businesses. This translates into a regular cadence and approach that combines unexpected and announced visitations with franchisees âkeeping scoreâ with their utilization of franchise playbooks such as those deployed within FranConnect. Your audits should inspect strict adherence to your standards, customer service protocols, and operational requirements. You can readily conduct these assessments on your own accord, through your franchisees, and with solutions like RizePoint, a quality management system for multi-location businesses.
Utilize Checklists
Playbooks are critical to guiding your Franchise Business Consultants to assess each component of the operatorâs execution and compliance with your standards. Well-defined checklists or playbooks deliver on your âinspect what you expectâ program and can take average performers. With the help of your most accomplished Franchise Business Consultant, top Franchisees can be used to share their insights through your published playbooks. Youâll quickly see how this can transform your rank-and-file franchisees into exceptional operators.
Your Digital Tools of the Trade
Using technology tools and platforms that can aid you in monitoring your operational metrics, including your sales performance leading indicators, customer feedback through NPS, or other customer experience tools, can make good performers great performers. Your compliance checklists will provide you with the ability to provide on-time interventions when your standards arenât being met.
The Power of Data-Driven Insights
Franchisors often find themselves with limited access to the systemic insights that exist within their organization based on data being kept in operational silos. This can gravely impact your franchise teamâs effectiveness and the utility of playbooks. While playbooks are a standard operations framework, your data-driven insights allow your franchise operators to craft strategies that impact local market conditions. Imagine the power of sales data and customer feedback and how they could help franchisees adjust everything from your quality standards marketing to customer service and execution.
Performance benchmarking is one of the greatest benefits of aggregating data into a format that allows franchisors and franchisees to benchmark performance across different locations. By allowing your technology to analyze data on sales, product quality, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency, you can make informed decisions that can greatly enhance system-wide performance.
Continuous Improvement
With the average span of control of one Franchise Business Consultant to every thirty Franchisees, our research and pulse surveys show that the frequency of visits to franchise locations is too infrequent to bring lasting change. In having a technology-enhanced solution such as FranConnectâs automated operational playbooks, some triggers go to the Franchisee, Franchise Business Consultant, and others within the organization to allow for follow-up and a drive for continuous improvement. This can also help you continually update the playbooks to convey the most effective strategies and processes for the location and system.
Conclusion
Franchise Business Consultants equipped with data-driven insights can provide the most effective advice to franchisees, who can use those insights to address the individual challenges at each location and optimize their operations based on objective evidence. Additionally, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen an ever-increasing trend toward franchisees completing unscored self-appraisals using playbooks.
For those taking the best practices approach to leveraging the skill set of your top performers and expanding that knowledge through playbooks, you will have the advantage of taking average performers and turning them into your best performers.
And breaking down silos and taking a data-driven approach will help transform operations and strategic planning and allow you to evolve your system into a model of brand consistency.
Ian Walsh
