The fundamental principles of franchising are based around the franchisor’s willingness to allow their franchisees to replicate the business system developed and successfully proven by the franchisor. This involves the transfer of all relevant information needed to replicate the system. While no guarantee can ever be made that the franchisee’s business will be successful it is accepted that there is more likelihood of success if the system is followed. It is implicit therefore that the transfer of the relevant knowledge in how to operate the system must be timely and complete. Effective franchisee training is therefore fundamental to the whole process.

DEVELOPING THE TRAINING PROGRAMME

The training programme must be suitable for any franchisee who might join the franchise network irrespective of their previous experience and existing skills base. It must comprehensively cover all aspects of the operation of the franchisor’s system. While the franchisor may have specified certain existing skills or experience in the franchisee profile it is not sufficient to rely upon the franchisee’s apparent ability to complete parts of the activity without further training from the franchisor in their methods.

In preparing to develop the training programme the franchisor must therefore:

• identify all the core skills needed to operate the system;
• produce detailed processes for each of the business’s activities;
• select the most appropriate methods of imparting this information through training;
• develop a timed programme for the delivery of this training while considering the skills requirements at various stages of the business’s development;
• ensure that each franchisee receives the relevant training and is competent in all the activities of the business.

• In identifying the core skills needed to operate the business the franchisor must be wary of assuming that the franchisee has even the most basic experience and skill base or that the existing skills will be relevant to the operation of the franchise system. It is important therefore to identify in each area of the operation all the skills required. These operations may include some or all of the following:
  • 1.marketing activities;
  • 2.sales processes including associated administration;
  • 3.product/service knowledge;
  • 4.product/service delivery;
  • 5.customer care.
  All of the above are likely to be specific to the franchise system. In addition the franchisee will need to understand the activities and the skills required to run a successful business. These will include some or all of the following:
  • 1.an understanding of business profitability;
  • 2.an understanding of the importance of cashflow;
  • 3.an understanding of basic administration and accounting;
  • 4.an awareness of relevant legislation, both industry specific and general, relating to employment, health and safety etc.;
  • 5.where staff are employed, the principles of management and leadership including training and development, performance appraisal, selection and recruitment processes etc.
  It is easy for a franchisor’s management team to assume that incoming franchisees possess experience and skills in these areas, or to consider that they are all ‘common sense’, forgetting that they themselves may have unconsciously developed these skills and practices through long exposure to running the original business.
• The detailed processes involved in the operation of the franchise will have been documented in the franchise operations manual. While this will be useful during the training process it is not sufficient simply to hand over the manual saying, ‘this contains everything you need to know to run the business.’ Although it may be useful as a training document the real value of the franchise operations manual is as a reference document to which the franchisee can turn to refresh their memory following training.
• Appropriate methods of delivering this knowledge and information must now be considered. Some aspects might best be delivered ‘on the job’ with the new franchisee accompanying an existing franchisee for a period of time. Other aspects will require a more theoretical approach initially and therefore be more suitable for a ‘classroom’ situation, perhaps followed up by some practical experience. Others may require an initial period of ‘self-study’, perhaps using the operations manual, prior to more formal training delivery. General business management training may be better delivered by external specialist providers.
• Timing the delivery of the training is critical. Too much, too quickly and the franchisee may not be able to absorb it all: too little, too late, and the franchisee will not possess the skills needed for a successful launch. There will almost certainly be some activities in which the franchisee is unlikely to become involved until the franchise is well established. For example they will not need to do a year-end stocktake until the end of the first year’s trading. Training related to this can reasonably be delivered at a later, more appropriate time.
• Training is not simply about appropriate delivery, it must also involve some process of examining the trainee’s understanding. In some areas an examination-type assessment may be appropriate while in others, observation of the franchisee in action may provide the best guide as to whether the training has been effective. The adage ‘If the pupil hasn’t learnt, the teacher hasn’t taught’ must be applied to results of this assessment.

TRAINING TOPICS

Marketing and sales

By definition, the core business, around which the franchise has been developed, is a successful business. This will often be as the result of the business owner’s innate skills in sales and marketing. It is often difficult for such skilled people to understand that few others possess these skills naturally and that many find the acquisition is difficult. Equally the ‘natural salesperson’ may find it difficult to encapsulate just what it is he or she does that makes them so successful at selling.

Every franchised business sells something, whether a product or a service, and no profit can be made until a sale is concluded. Selling skills and the marketing that precedes the sales opportunity are therefore critical to the success of the franchised business. However, sales and marketing are perhaps the two business activities that cause the greatest concern to franchisees in general. It is this concern that leads many ‘business opportunity’ providers to lead their marketing programmes with the phrase ‘No selling involved!’ and yet is difficult to see how any business can be successful if it doesn’t sell something.

Franchises that are particularly susceptible to these issues include those where a degree of cold-calling is required to generate sales opportunities. Anyone who has ever been involved in this marketing activity will know how frustrating it can be to spend hours on the telephone or making visits to potential customers, only to be rebuffed within the first few minutes of the conversation. It is important that the franchisees remain positive and confident under such circumstances and an understanding of this will need to form a key part of the marketing and sales training.

Most people learn best when they understand the reasons underlying the various processes they are being asked to undertake. It is not sufficient, therefore, simply to give trainees a list of activities they must fulfil or scripts that they must follow without also imparting an understanding of why those activities or scripts will produce positive results.

While the franchisor may know the marketing and sales techniques that work best in its business the whole subject of marketing and sales is one where an understanding of the core principles involved is invaluable.

Knowledge of the product or service

Part of the sales process will involve describing the product or service to the customer and showing how it can provide the benefits the customer is seeking. To do this the franchisee will need to be fully conversant with the details of the product or service offered.

Delivering the product or service

This is perhaps the area in which franchisors are most accomplished in their training. It is, naturally, critical that they should ensure that their franchisees know how to deliver effectively the subject of the sale, whether it is a meal in a restaurant or a business coaching programme. Equally this is the area that is often of most interest to the franchisee. After all it was the opportunity to deliver the product or service that probably initially attracted them to this franchise rather than another. They often, mistakenly, believe that it is the uniqueness of the product or service that makes the franchise successful whereas in reality it is often the marketing and sales activity that leads to the delivery that drives the success.

Customer care

Most businesses rely on or offer the possibility of repeat business from satisfied customers. It is generally acknowledged that it is substantially easier to sell to an existing customer than to find new customers. However, ensuring that customers are more than simply ‘satisfied’ will greatly enhance the chance of further sales or referrals to new potential sales opportunities. Customer care strategies will increase the opportunities for business development.

All of the above topics will most likely be delivered by the franchisor, their staff or other franchisees who have been developed as trainers. However, there is an opportunity to use specialist external providers to enhance many of the above subjects especially in the fields of sales and marketing and customer care.

Business management

Most potential franchisees will have little knowledge about, or experience of, running a business. It is important, therefore, that the franchisor ensures that they learn not only ‘how to do the job that the business does’ but also ‘how to run a business that does the job’.

Many owners of small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will have learned these skills from the experience that they gained from developing their own business and may have learned, in some instances, as the result of mistakes they made. Franchisees, however, see a franchise as an opportunity to build a business based on the franchisor’s experience and thus avoid making the mistakes that the franchisor might have made. Franchisors must, therefore, ensure that the franchisees possess all the skills, understanding and information they need to run a successful business.

This knowledge includes:

• 1.an understanding of how a business generates and keeps profit. This will include the principles of pricing to produce a margin sufficient to generate a realistic gross profit and the control of costs to leave a net profit providing an adequate return on investment;
• 2.an understanding of the importance of cash flow with particular reference, where relevant, to the credit control function;
• 3.an understanding of the basic principles of business administration and accounting including any administration and reporting requirements that the franchisor might require from their franchisees;
• 4.an awareness of relevant legislation, both industry specific and general, relating for example to employment, health and safety etc. While the franchisor should not put themselves in the position of acting as legal adviser to their franchisees it is desirable that they ensure that the franchisees are aware of the various obligations that the relevant legislation places upon them;
• 5.where the franchisee has to employ staff they should be aware of the principles of staff management and leadership including training and development, performance appraisal, selection and recruitment processes etc. As has been stated previously, many franchisees will have had no experience of running a business and these are among the skills they may lack.

Training on all of the above topics may best be delivered more practically and more cost-effectively by an external training provider that can supply a generalised, non-franchise-specific context for the learning.

DELIVERING THE TRAINING

Having decided on all the topics to be covered in the training, consideration must be given to the timing and method of delivery.

• Timing the delivery of the training will often depend upon the lead-time available between completing the recruitment process and the franchisee commencing trading. It is a fact of life that when a franchisee is learning they are not usually earning and many franchisors therefore try to reduce the amount of time spent on training to a minimum. This is, more often than not, a false economy. An extra week or two added to the training timetable may well produce a better trained and more effective franchisee who will make up for the additional period of not earning by higher levels of sales in the initial trading period. Thought should be given in developing the training process as to what knowledge needs to be imparted during the initial pre-trading training and what can be left until a later date when it can become part of the ongoing training. Providing in-depth training in the key areas prior to trading is far better than trying to deliver all the training at this stage. Where timing allows, it may be possible for the franchisor to train a number of franchisees at the same time. However, with typical levels of recruitment, these opportunities are rare during the initial training process. Most initial training is, therefore, delivered on a one-to-one basis. Group delivery may be more suitable for later elements of the ongoing training programme. This greatly influences the options for the method of delivery.
• It is important to have a variety of delivery methods for the training since different people learn in different ways. Some will respond well immediately to practical activities, others will learn best when they understand the theory of the activity before putting it into practice. Time spent working alongside an existing franchisee can be useful provided that the tutor franchisee sticks rigidly to the franchisor’s operating systems and is efficient at the task being taught. Experience tells us that when training is done in this way it can tend to reduce the productivity of the tutor since he or she has to spend time explaining the processes and even allowing the trainee to practise delivery skills. This may well reduce the tutor’s earning capacity and the franchisor should seek ways of directly compensating for this loss while at the same time rewarding the tutor for their efforts. Classroom-style training may be appropriate for some subjects. In normal training processes this would involve the preparation and delivery of a formal ‘lesson plan’. It is important to have such a plan even when training on a one-to-one basis to ensure that all the relevant topics are covered. The trainer must also be careful not to allow the particular interests of the franchisee to divert the training from its planned programme. Only in this way can it be guaranteed that the training has been completed across the full subject matter. There may be subjects in the training provision which the franchisee can learn away from the formal training process by periods of self-study. This is a particularly relevant process where factual information needs to be learned, for example developing knowledge of the properties of certain cleaning chemicals and the circumstances in which they should and should not be used. The franchisee can be encouraged to learn these subjects in their own time and at their own pace with the franchisor simply having to check that the learning has been completed. The increasing use of distance learning using the internet allows trainees to learn in the comfort of their own homes and in their own time. While this is not an ideal delivery method for all aspects of training, it is particularly useful where factual information has to be learned and then tested. This method allows the franchisor to monitor the trainee’s progress through the training programme and, by online testing, to ensure that all the necessary knowledge has been acquired. In the same way there may be elements of the training that can be delivered by video or DVD rather than in person. This is particularly useful where there is a largely visual element to the learning outcome. For example, a restaurant operation may use this method to show how to present a particular dish on the plate or a training company may provide a recorded example of a particular training module.

DOCUMENTING THE TRAINING PROCESS

The operations manual has a clear role to play in supporting the franchisee training activity. It may be, however, that additional training materials need to be developed to complement the instructions laid out in the manual. After use the franchisee should retain a copy of these materials, including any personal notes they have made during the training, as a supplement to the operations manual.

As franchisees receive each element of their training this should be documented and signed off by both trainer and trainee. This primarily confirms that all the modules in the training programme have been covered. It also ought to allow for either trainer or trainee to identify areas where additional training may be required in order to ensure total competency. The completion of this training record can also act as a prompt to initialise or set up a timetable for the next stage in the training process.