Turning your business into a franchise is tough, especially since most businesses are not good candidates for franchising. Businesses that require great skill are often difficult to franchise, and businesses without a very strong brand identity are difficult to franchise. If your business doesn’t have a strong identity, or even a strong idea, then it is difficult to franchise. Think of all the strong ideas that have built brands. Volvo = Safety. Dominoes = 30 minutes or free. McDonalds = Cheap food fast. The first step is to ensure your business is suitable for franchising, otherwise you are throwing money away on a project that will never take flight. Here are a few tips you can use to help you franchise your business.
1 – Get A Franchise Consultant
Even if you read every book on the subject, you are not going to know everything you need to know. Getting a good franchise consultant will help you create a plan of action. You need to know what to do and in what order things should be done. Ideally, the planning phase should take a long time and the execution time should take as little time as possible. A franchise consultant will help you achieve this lofty goal.
2 – Pay For The Legal Work
There is a lot of legal work. From making sure you are not infringing somebody else’s protected ideas or properties, to things like making sure the franchise owners cannot sue you. This sort of thing takes a long time and is stupidly expensive. However, it is needed to protect yourself from the many ways your franchise may end up losing money.
3 – Getting The Investment
Setting up franchises and selling the idea to other people is very expensive. It starts out easy to budget, but it takes a long time for franchising to become profitable. That is unless you have significant investment. Your franchise may fail even if you have lots of money, but it is far easier to react to the business environment and is far easier to grow quickly if you have the right investment.
4 – Make Digital Signs Part Of Your Business
They are great marketing tools, they can set an atmosphere, they create branding opportunities, and they are all part of a modern and successful business. Plus, as you will learn later in this article, there are ways that installing digital signs may help you stay in contact with your franchise buyers. There are tools for every type of business, from Kitcast for restaurants to Kitcast content scheduling for 24 hour businesses. Just make sure you exploit the signs as much as possible because they can be powerful tools to add to your arsenal.
5 – Promoting Your Business and Your Franchise
You need to promote your business to show how well it runs, and you need to promote your franchise to the people who may buy it. You are offering people a way to start a business that has a higher than usual chance of being successful. The buyers you are targeting are very skeptical and are being asked to spend a lot of money, so your marketing and promotion has to be slick, very efficient and ultra-effective.
6 – Install and Run a Mentorship and Maintenance Crew
This is very costly, but it is a necessary expense if you want to ensure your franchise buyers are as successful as possible. This is expensive because you are paying experts to go around your various franchise buyers and help them run their business. It is also expensive because these experts have to be good at their jobs or they are going to make the situation worse. In addition, different business owners will run things differently, and what works for one may not work for others. You also need a maintenance crew to help keep businesses running that are struggling. You need to help them keep running until they can turn things around on their own. This (again) is a lot of work and can be very expensive if it is done ineffectively or inefficiently.
7 – Make Franchise Wide Decisions And Keep Business Owners Updated
Franchises do this all the time with their promotions. They may also do it with their technological advances. For example, right now, McDonalds is still issuing digital menus for the restaurants that haven’t caught up with the others yet. Speaking of digital signs, if you insist that your stores have them, then you can run franchise wide promotions very easily. If you insist your staff have them in their offices or break room, then you can issue information to your entire franchise by simply creating suitable content for their digital signs.
8 – Offer Marketing Help on a Continuous Basis
There are many ways you can do this. It depends on if you are supplying, if you are the primary marketing force and so forth. For example, some companies offer goods to their franchise owners for half the price and then force them to run discounts on their products. It is up to you how you conduct your marketing, but you need to find a way to offer continuous direct or indirect marketing help for the people who have bought your franchise.
9 – Managing Sales, Networks, Branding and Supplies Over The Long Term
As you are gathering new franchise buyers, you need to manage the entire process and set up systems to do this over the long term. You can mostly plan for this before you start your franchising, but you need to leave a lot of wiggle room and keep improving your processes as you go. If you are running a big franchise and you are very involved, then this can be a lot of work. Failure on your part will negatively affect all the buyers of your franchise, as well as your future subscription fees, dues, and/or sales of your franchise.
10 – Managing Your Reputation
Even if you are a very hands-off franchise. Even if you are only allowing for people to use your business name and/or business properties, you still need to manage your reputation. This is tough because you may be the one making the big announcements and making the big moves, but the owners of your franchise are also having an effect on your reputation. You need to manage your reputation as a whole while also putting out the fires being lit by your franchise buyers. Not to mention having to create new rules and protocols to ensure that similar problems do not rise again. Over the long term, managing your reputation is the most important part of franchising a business.
