Most franchisees do not read manuals – but you still have to give them one.

You’d think that the conscientious franchisee would study your paperwork carefully, having just spent thousands to join your network, but face it; did you read the instructions for the last expensive car, television or coffee maker that you bought?

In fact, it’s not such a bad thing that franchisees use your manual for a doorstop rather than for enlightenment. They probably just want to get on with making a success of your business after good training.

WHY IS THE MANUAL IMPORTANT?

So, why bother with all the expense, time and nervous twitches that you will incur writing a manual? The manual you give to your franchisees is actually far more important to you than it is to them, for the following reasons:

• 1.it reinforces the value of your unique concept;
• 2.it helps you to ‘engineer’ your system;
• 3.it is a reference for franchisee training;
• 4.it promotes good support office infrastructure;
• 5.it extends the power and terms of your franchise agreement.

1. It reinforces the value of your unique concept

Not so long ago, many manuals were just ‘cut, copy and paste’ jobs with a franchisor’s name gummed over folders ‘borrowed’ from other long-established franchisors. Being borrowed, they were often years out of date and already discarded by the organisations that originally wrote them.

Older manuals were masked in legal language so convoluted that even their owners didn’t understand them and they often preached more about roasting a franchisee slowly in hell should they dare open late than actually saying much about what they should be doing when they did open.

Using another franchisor’s manual isn’t going to help you or your franchisees very much, nor is an ‘off-the-shelf’ manual, because they:

• are obviously generic – especially if you forget to change, for example, ‘doughnut’ for ‘auto car wax’ on just one of the 200 pages;
• are overly anonymous – even a good copy and paste job removes so much that made the manual unique to the original franchisor that the document becomes anonymous and reflects none of your own company’s philosophy;
• are largely irrelevant – when using someone else’s manual as a template it is tempting to leave in a lot of policies that are unnecessary for your own business, just to preserve the weight of the folder;
• include your operation and systems as an afterthought rather than as the heart of the manual – if they aren’t written for your business, they tend to shoehorn your operation into the gaps, rather than have it defining and driving the contents of the manual.

If, however, your manual is written from scratch for your business and is comprehensive, it will:

• make it clear to your franchisees that you have put in the effort that they deserve;
• preserve the business philosophy, style and emphasis that made your business successful in the first place;
• underline the value and uniqueness of your concept.

2. It helps you to ‘engineer’ your system

Properly constructed, the exercise of writing your manual will help you to create the best systems for the smooth operation of your franchise.

Starting from scratch, outlining the aspects of your business that you need to communicate to your franchisees – and thus the eventual contents of your manual – helps you understand and map all the things you need to systemise for franchisees to copy your business successfully.

The best modern franchise systems are ‘engineered’ around the actual operations of the business and how their first franchisees really learn them and try to copy them.

The best manuals are those that grow with your franchise and systemise those aspects of your business that your first franchisees learn less well, find less than intuitive, regularly fall below your standards in achieving. They help franchisees to perform better in the operation of your business, are efficient rather than bureaucratic, and help franchisees concentrate on sales rather than administration.

In short, you should engineer your systems to drive your business in the real world and record their ‘blueprints’ in your manual. You should not let your business be driven by a poor or theoretical manual.

3. It is a reference for franchisee training

By thinking through all your systems and writing them in your own manual from scratch, you will be better able to train franchisees in full and in sequence. The manual will form a valuable reference tool for your training staff.

Your manual can also be used as a record of training, and you ensure that get franchisees ‘sign off’ each aspect or chapter as it is completed.

There will then be a written record that you have trained them in each aspect and they won’t be able to claim later that ‘you didn’t tell me that!’

4. It promotes good support office infrastructure

Your role as a franchisor is to provide franchisees with a systemised business that you have already proven to be successful. Nevertheless, knowing how your business works successfully is very different from developing it to support franchisees to do the same.

However strange it may seem, good franchisors often find that the process of engineering their franchise system to serve the needs of franchisees, and recording it in a manual, leads to improvements in their own central infrastructure.

It is also very tempting when writing a manual to preach what you would like to practise but don’t. The conscientious, sensible franchisor will then implement the good systems that it has designed for its franchisees at its own branches. A good manual is a valuable component of any business, even before it has any franchisees.

5. It extends the power and terms of your franchise agreement

The reason that old-fashioned ‘off-the-shelf’ manuals were full of legal gobbledegook and not much in the way of operations (apart from the fact that most of them originated from American systems that operate in a more litigious environment) was that they were conceived as an extension of the franchise agreement rather than as a tool to help franchisees with the day-to-day operation of their business.

Franchise agreements are now quite comprehensive and well tested in themselves, and already contain many of the policies and restrictions that used to be part of manuals, so there is less need to confuse franchisees with legalities in the manual. Franchisees are also more aware now than they have ever been and will not accept a manual that is really just a thinly disguised extension of the legal agreement. They want more operational guidance in manuals, even if they never read them. However, your manual will still be referred to in your franchise agreement, and often cross-referenced to it, as an integral part of that agreement – meaning that anything that you require as a standard or procedure in your manual is as good as a clause in your agreement.

HOW TO GET FRANCHISEES TO USE YOUR MANUAL

The best way to get your franchisees to use your manual is to make it interactive and searchable.

Most franchisees will use a computer daily in their business – whether it is a store or service business. Even those franchisees that have no administration duties will still use a computer as their EPOS till or to receive details of their next job, even if this is via a PDA or smart phone. You may even have supplied those computers in your joining or equipment package.

It is therefore quite bizarre that so many franchisors still hand out their manuals on paper rather than computerising them and making them interactive and searchable.

Many franchisees expect that manuals will now be interactive – either on CD or online – in a format that allows them to type in their question and have it answered. Not distributing your manual in this way can make your business less attractive to prospective franchisees, while making it interactive will give you a competitive advantage.

The simplest way to distribute your manual interactively is to put it up on the internet or your intranet as a ‘Wiki’. A ‘Wiki’ is an online resource that allows users to add and edit content collectively. You can control who is allowed to access or edit any part of a Wiki and moderate any entry – thus allowing some parts of it to grow with the experience of all franchisees, and other parts to remain strictly as you want it.

It is very simple to get your manual online as a Wiki and any good franchise consultant or manual writing professional will be able to help you with this.

Once your manual is in a Wiki format, you and your franchisees will enjoy the following advantages:

• it is easier to use, so everyone uses it more;
• it is less daunting viewed screen by screen than as a weighty printed manual;
• it is interactive, so franchisees can comment on each subject’s usefulness or add their collective experience to it (where you allow) and thus want to keep using it;
• it is searchable, so a franchisee can find the answer to their question quickly;
• you can set all or part of it to be unprintable and only viewed on screen;
• you can set it so that it can’t be copied and pasted from the screen and so that no-one can download part of it or the entire manual to email to a competitor;
• you can restrict access to parts of it or all of it, so that only your franchisees can see it, so that you need not reveal all of it to all users, and so that you can stop any franchisee accessing it if you are in dispute with them;
• it can grow with collective experience, as your franchisees and support team update allowed sections for you, so that it becomes more useful and stays current;
• it makes it easier to write the manual in the first place because, once you have the contents structure in place, any number of people at your head office can edit those parts that you delegate to them at the same time, rather than you needing to slowly circulate a master copy or coordinate contributions and waste time adding them to the master;
• it allows you to distribute a useful manual sooner. You wouldn’t print a half-finished manual but if your manual is online; franchisees can make use of the bits that you have finished before the whole thing is complete.

You should take care to protect any version of your manual that is electronic. If you neglect to lock electronic versions of your manual for access, printing and editing they can be easier to distribute and copy than paper versions. If an online version is too easily hacked and is not placed behind firewalls within your intranet it may also be at risk of being placed in the public domain. The technology to protect you from any of these risks (such as coding manual access to a specific computer) does exist and you should get a good franchise consultant or manual writing expert to help you set it up.

Your main priority is to get your franchisees to use the manual, not simply read it and then forget it in their first week of trading. If you make it easy for them to refer to when they have a question – before they call your support team – you will save yourself a lot of infrastructure time and money. If it’s really easy to use and they regularly refer to it, you will also be more likely to ensure that franchisees do things the way you want them done, to your standards (and prevent many misunderstandings into the bargain).

Encourage franchisees into the habit of referring to your manual by ensuring that support team members refer them back to it when they call with a question that the manual answers in detail. The support team member should call back later to ensure that the manual answered the question. Eventually, franchisees will get into the habit of checking the manual before they call.

THE IMPORTANCE OF USING EXPERIENCED MANUAL WRITERS

You may be the only one that truly knows and understands your business but it does not necessarily follow that you would be the best manual writer, any more than you would be the best trainer.

Modern franchise-manual-writing professionals have years of experience of the best format and writing styles to get your message across to your franchisees. A good franchise-manual-writing professional will also know how to make your manual interactive and how to safely put it online so that franchisees use it, but at the same time without assuming that they will ever read it all the way through.

If you have employed the services of a good franchise consultant to help you engineer your franchise system from scratch, they will already have got you to pass on your knowledge to them through questionnaires, existing documents and demonstration, so your role in constructing a good manual need not extend to actually writing it.

More importantly, good franchise consultants have dealt with many other franchisors’ businesses and their franchisees. Through that experience, they know how franchisees behave and thus what to include in your manual, what to reinforce and how to communicate it in a way that franchisees will learn and implement properly. If you have never been a franchisor before, you will save yourself a lot of time and money by learning from the experiences of other franchisors with whom your franchise consultant has dealt.

It can take from three months to a year to engineer the systems that need to go into a manual, and from 300 to 1,000 hours to write it all down. Employing a franchise consultant to do it for you can free up that amount of your time which you can then spend on further developing your business.