The key to fostering a mutually profitable franchise relationship is understanding (i) the basic principals of franchising and (ii) how the franchisor and franchisee work together toward a common goal – the success of the franchise business.
The key to fostering a mutually profitable franchise relationship is understanding (i) the basic principals of franchising and (ii) how the franchisor and franchisee work together toward a common goal – the success of the franchise business.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Divorcing a franchisee is the act of removing a franchisee from, or asking the franchisee to leave, the franchise system. It can be messy and difficult, just like divorcing a spouse. But sometimes it's the only solution.
There are three ways in which you can accomplish the split:
Franchisees often look to their franchisor as a "parent figure" - a pillar of strength to lean upon and a chief source of advice, knowledge and creative inspiration. If you as a franchisor fail to live up to this larger-than-life image and do not provide sufficient advice and direction to your franchisees, they will feel they are being shortchanged on the basic services that they are paying for.
As a franchisor, you can offer needed guidance to your franchisees thr...
In a previous post, we discussed how developing a good questioning strategy can help franchise support representatives to solve franchisees' business problems. This article covers the next step - implementing a solution.
Often franchisees will have predetermined expectations about how, and when, their support representative will help them implement a solution to a problem. These expectations are sometimes not realistic. It is therefore important to cl...
As a franchisee support representative, one of your most important problem-solving tools is a well developed questioning strategy. You can use thoughtful, well-crafted questions to define a franchisee's problem and to determine the franchisee's needs. But a good questioning strategy has a far broader purpose: it will help you gather useful information about the wider forces surrounding the problem.
Your questions should be crafted to help you to find out:
Whether you are a Franchise Support Representative dealing with franchisees, or a teacher helping a student work through the reasons why he/she has trouble with math, the steps to effective problem solving are essentially the same:
It is natural for franchise support representatives to feel that if you present our ideas clearly and logically and with the best interests of Franchisees at heart, they will accept your expertise and follow your suggestions to build their business. Therefore it comes as a surprise when you find out that some Franchisees will always resist change, no matter how reasonable the recommendation. But resistance is not futile.
Our continuing series on Resolving Issues with Franchisees provides guidelines for the Franchise Support Representative to follow in attempting to find a solution to contentious problems with a franchisee by listening to their point of view and brainstorming to come up with solutions.
The aim of our current series of posts is to provide Franchise Support Representatives with a set of tools for confronting and resolving issues with franchisees. The first step in this resolution process is to define the problem and establish what needs to be changed.
Finding a way to successfully work through issues of potential conflict with your franchisees is critical to the success of your business, and it allows you to be a constructive member of the organization as well as an effective leader to your team.
The following action plan outlines some steps to take when a particularly difficult issue must be confronted with your Franchisees. This plan provides a means of tactfully handling thorny problems. It will aid you in your interactions with franchise...