5 Must Dos for a Successful Franchise
Whether you’ve already bought your franchise or you’re in the early stages of finding the right franchise opportunity for you – here are five key ingredients you need to make your franchise a success.
1 – The right people!
It’s important to get the right people on board with the right attributes – and that includes you. You need to be driven and motivated to push your business forward in order to accomplish your aim. Remind yourself what your end goal is and why you chose to run your own business. In particular, if you’re looking for a management franchise you and the team you build will need:
- The right ‘can do’ attitude
- Personality – the ability to get on with a wide range of characters – especially if operating in the service sector
- A strong work ethic – even more so in the early days of a new business venture – so you’re prepared to cope with long hours, early starts, late nights and weekends. As a business owner you may be able to add flexibility to your traditional working day but more than likely you’ll never switch off totally. Running your own business is often a 24/7 commitment
- Flexibility – both in terms of willingness to work hard and in your thinking – this will allow you to work around any problems and to be innovative
- A good team mentality – even if there are only 2-3 people in the workplace
2 – Experience
When looking to buy a franchise don’t be put off if you don’t appear to have specific experience in a particular industry. Your transferable skills and the skills of your staff are usually the key factors in determining the success of the business.
For example, Driver Hire is the UK’s leading provider of staff to the transport and logistics industry. As a leading niche recruiter, you don’t actually need experience in recruitment or the logistics industry to join the business as a franchisee. As well as the ‘right people’ elements listed above, the key skills they look for are:
- Good organisation skills
- Discipline to work within a structured environment
- Basic IT skills and a reasonable understanding of finance
- A good communicator confident to sell and provide a high level of customer service.
When building your team look to hire skills that differ but complement one another. A blend of experience within the team can really help a franchise grow.
3 – The environment
A positive work environment – both physical and mental – has been proven to encourage good behaviours and improved productivity in the workplace. It’s important that your work environment encourages staff to take responsibility and to feel comfortable in sharing ideas.
The 4 ways discussed in the article include:
- Identify good and bad staff
- Improve communication
- Make the office comfortable
- Be flexible
4 – Structure
By choosing a long established franchise you’ll be able to more easily identify, and research, why that particular franchise model has stood the test of time and succeeded. Buying a franchise provides you with a tried and tested business where proof of success within the network can be identified. You should expect to follow the framework your franchisor presents to you, but you also need to create structure, on a local level, within your own workplace.
Structure to the working day is another key element to success, and the people you employ and work with need to know – on a daily basis – what they need to be doing and when. Having a day-to-day, weekly and monthly plan that is adhered to will ensure all areas of the operation are covered and nothing gets forgotten.
5 – Targets
No matter what type of franchise you run, you need to set yourself targets in order to succeed. As a starting point, it may be that your franchisor sets some parameters and KPIs as part of your franchise agreement. On top of this, you and your team need to agree on SMART targets to measure the development and success of your business.
The type of targets you set to measure progress can depend on the nature of the business you are involved in. Those running a Driver Hire franchise will find the following measurements on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis will help them to keep a focus on what is important:
- Sales activity
- Candidate registrations
- Sales revenue
- Margin levels
- Profit and loss targets
Numbers do not lie and must be watched closely. A franchisee – with the right team and environment – that is focused on individually achieving all of their targets and utilising the experience of their franchisor will, without a doubt, ensure a successful business.
