How to Build Franchise Training Systems

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When you franchise your business a significant element you are offering franchise investors is the opportunity to benefit from your experience and knowledge as an entrepreneur. This can only be translated to a new franchise owner through one of two ways, your time and energy or good systems.

Many of the first-time franchise models that we have worked with have incredible models but only the beginning stages of a system in place.  This can work for the first few franchise units sold, but as the brand grows, the need for systems becomes increasingly important.

How do you build solid systems to franchise your business model?

The system is in your head somewhere, we just need to let it out and get it on paper so others can see and understand those beautiful ideas you’ve created. In my time as a franchise consultant, I don’t know that there is a more painful process for most entrepreneurs to slow down and talk through every step of what they do, but it is well worth the effort.

In our process of franchising a business, one of the stages is to build out the franchise operations manuals and franchise training programs, this requires getting the intellectual property on paper.

The best way we’ve found to approach this is to break up your business model into categories so it seems more digestible.  Start with marketing, how do you get customers? Then work on operations, how do you staff the business? Job titles, work roles, customer interactions, and inventory management, one by one with a properly executed franchise interview with a franchise operations consultant you can get the content on paper and begin to organize thoughts.

Once we have the content down, then it’s time to organize and sort, we want to make the franchise operations manuals as concise, clear, and to the point as we can possibly make them. The idea is to convey the message to someone who really knows almost nothing about your business in a way that they can begin to understand and recognize the key performance indicators in your model.

Once we have the documents done, then it’s time to create the forms and reporting mechanisms needed for you as the franchisor to make sure that the franchisee is following your franchise system and abiding by your guidelines. Not entirely necessary, but we then recommend incorporating this content into a platform that makes your training content usable and teachable so you don’t have to be sending big training binders back and forth for every franchise question.

The nice thing is that once you’ve done it, it’s easy to maintain, update and continue to benefit from the work.   It’s like an investment that pays dividends!

For more information on how to build your franchise system and franchise your business, contact us.

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