How to Support Your Franchise’s Growth

Did you know that the success rate for two-year franchises is about 8 percent higher than the independent business success rate, and the one-year survival rate for franchises is about 6.3 percent higher?

To achieve this success, though, franchise owners need to be ready to address a variety of pain points, including:

• Employee misalignment
• Inconsistent branding
• Inefficient file organization and sharing
• Lackluster training

There are many proven pathways to combat the pain points and achieve overall long-term growth for each new franchise location—but to accomplish this, you must supply your franchise owners with the right assets. It’s already stressful enough launching a new location, so why make it harder?

To see success, you’ll need to incorporate an in-depth onboarding experience that covers key details about the business, as well as aspects about individual job roles. A learning management system (LMS) can support simple, streamlined and consistent training of franchise employees across all locations. Plus, a digital asset management (DAM) platform can store key assets that franchise owner can access on demand to maintain efficient brand consistency throughout each franchise. Coupled together, these two platforms can pave the way for your franchise’s long-term success.

To start, let’s go into detail on how an LMS can be leveraged to train new franchise owners and their employees.

Leveraging an LMS for Onboarding

The training that franchise owners and their employees receive right after they are brought on is critical to their success within the organization—and the quicker they can acclimate, the more productive and agile they’ll become. While franchise owners may be taught more high-level items like how to manage a store or balance a budget sheet, training their employees on everyday operations is just as important.

Training the Franchise Owner

Franchisors must invest time and resources into building a successful onboarding process. As new business owners, franchisees need to know how to lead their employees and how to manage a business.

The key components to include in your onboarding experience are:

• Set goals and expectations: The onboarding experience is not just a one-day orientation event; it’s something that goes on for weeks or even months. Set goals for new franchise owners and their locations to strive for and routinely evaluate where their progress stands.
• Job expectations: What is it that franchisees need to know about their new role? What are some key points to understand about managing a location? Be sure to include these details in this section.
• Company information: Consider adding items about your mission, culture and other important information about your organization that your franchisee should know.
• Mentor system: A mentor system can help any new franchise owner feel more comfortable within his or her role—and help accelerate the onboarding process. The best mentors can be a go-to person who can give help with job-related questions and ideas.
• Gather feedback: After new franchisees feel acclimated to their role, ask for their opinion on their onboarding experience. This can help you adjust your onboarding process, improving the experience for new franchise owner moving forward.

An LMS is a beneficial platform that can optimize your onboarding process while lowering your training costs. Within an LMS, you can design and organize customized learning modules that can help new franchise owners learn about the company, its employees and its culture. Some LMS platforms even let you monitor a franchisee’s learning progress and track which modules have been accessed—ensuring that he or she is fully committed to learning the material. Consider adding a quiz or certificate that verifies what the franchisee learned and signifies that he or she is ready to manage a store.

Additionally, if you combine your LMS with a DAM you can ensure that training materials are readily available for any franchisee—which we’ll get into more later in the article.

A successful employee onboarding program can help create efficiencies and limit the high cost of turnover. To learn more about creating an effective onboarding experience, check out our free eBook: 6 Elements of a Successful Employee Onboarding Process.

Training Franchise Employees

For franchise employees, you can incorporate elements from your franchise owner training, such as job expectations, the mentor system and gathering feedback. The main difference will be in the content they learn. Your franchise employees don’t need to know how to run the business; rather they should know how to manage day-to-day operations and how to best meet customer expectations.

Consider including:

• How to work different roles within the store, restaurant or service center
• How to talk to customers, including how to address negative feedback
• How to maintain a safe work environment
• How to work a cash register (where applicable)
• How to maintain cleanliness within the store, restaurant or service center

Rather than utilizing a binder or pamphlet—which can be cumbersome and uncollaborative—an LMS presents new opportunities for employees to learn in a fun and interactive way. Along with this, you can streamline training and create uniformity by having all employees trained the same way. We recommend adding a survey to gather feedback on the employee’s LMS experience to see how you can improve it moving forward.

If your franchise is to achieve long-term success, then investing in an in-depth onboarding experience is recommended. With the utilization of an LMS, your franchise can confidently onboard new franchisees and their employees.

Apart from training and creating onboarding experiences, franchisors need to consistently supply franchisees with the right assets to succeed; a DAM fulfills that need and can sustain productive brand management across all locations.

Utilizing a DAM for Productive Brand Management

Efficiencies in each franchise’s day-to-day operations are crucial for long-term success. By investing in a DAM platform, you can house key assets in a centralized location that any franchisee can access at any time—resulting in improved productivity and stronger brand consistency.

Within your DAM, you can store:

• Marketing materials, including brand logos, product images, menus, posters and other branded items
• Campaign materials, including items to start a seasonal promotion
• Training materials, including documents detailing the company and different roles within the store that help new store employees
• Regional sales data that each franchisee can access to check to see where their location ranks among other regional locations
• Day-to-day documents, forms and paperwork

Having these materials readily available is crucial, as wasting time looking for information can negatively impact how the franchise location is operating. Time is money, so every moment spent searching for documents can cause production levels to decrease; a DAM makes it simple to find and access files, allowing franchise employees to focus more effort on customer service and growing the location.

Additionally, select DAMs offer multi-level permissions, which is beneficial if there are franchise locations in different geographies, as each location may need different information to effectively service its customers. For example, a store located in Boston has a different customer profile than a store in Los Angeles. An admin can easily assign and give permissions to each franchisee, so they have the unique information they need.

You also need to be cognizant of maintaining a consistent brand experience at each franchise location. It’s important to ensure that no matter which location a customer visits, the experience will be uniform; inconsistent branding can leave customers confused and discourage them from coming back in the future. By readily having correctly branded materials available to your franchise locations, you can guarantee that customers will recognize the overarching brand—no matter which location they are at.

A DAM also presents more security for your franchise, as sharing high-level digital assets through email or through other online storage platforms can be risky and leave your franchise vulnerable. Not all DAMs offer the exact same security features, so ensure that you select one that stores all your assets in one location that requires permission to access.

Key Takeaways

Starting and running a franchise is no easy task—but with the right tools, any franchisee can be set up for success. An LMS makes onboarding new franchise owners and their employees a seamless process and can result in productivity increases, higher employee retention rates and better alignment between franchise owner and the organization. Additionally, a DAM can support productive brand management among franchise locations and offer your franchise enhanced security for its digital assets.

How Konvert™ can Help

The Konvert™ LMS and DAM are your franchise building tools. The success of your franchise depends on educated, trained franchise owner—and with the Konvert LMS, you can simplify training with customized learning modules and ongoing progress monitoring. You can also track the usage of your digital assets through advanced metric analysis tools, allowing you to create more content that resonates with each market.

Contact us today to learn more about implementing an effective LMS and DAM into your franchise initiatives.