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The following excerpt is from Mark Siebert’s book, “Francise Your Business.” Buy now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes
How to develop your sound training To take advantage of the program, you need to start by understanding your franchisee. Does this new franchisee have industry-specific knowledge? What specific skills, such as sales or management skills? Or should franchisees be treated as if they are learning everything for the first time?
Ultimately, the training program must be sufficient to enable even the least skilled new franchisees to represent the brand with the quality standards relevant to the concept.
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The best franchisor is training And invest heavily in it. Although the training provided by new franchisors is often quite informal, the best new franchisors make it a priority to develop a more formal program as soon as possible. These programs define exactly what each franchisee and their employees must learn. These training programs deliver knowledge in a way that increases consistency by specifying exactly what must be taught at each hour and how the instruction is to be delivered.
Once the new franchisor has decided on the subject matter, he or she must decide how to conduct the training. Generally, this training takes several forms.
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Training at franchisor headquarters
For most franchisors, the practical part of your training begins in your home office. This training can last several days or weeks, and for new franchisors, is often held in a hotel conference room or temporary office facility to keep costs down.
Typically, home office training begins with operating a prototype machine, touring a corporate office, and introducing staff and their roles. When formal training sessions begin, most franchisors focus on subjects that are best taught in the classroom. Dozens of topics typically included in this portion of the training include company history and philosophy, site selection, lease negotiations, pre-opening procedures, daily operations, insurance requirements, vendor relationships, reporting requirements, etc. . This segment of training often includes hands-on training within the franchise’s prototype (or a special training prototype built for that purpose).
Franchise training classes should be active and interactive. A combination of training formats such as videos (such as an introduction to key supplier facilities), lectures, discussions, and hands-on work (such as how to prepare products and provide franchise services) creates an engaging training environment for franchisees. will be born. Additionally, various studies have shown that franchisees retain more information when trainers use different training methodologies that combine visual, auditory, and tactile learning. We often encourage our clients to have their administrative staff also attend home office training sessions. Introducing multiple staff members to franchisees can jump-start the process and help build franchisee relationships across your organization.
Like all training, home office training should be accompanied by tests, assessments, and other steps to ensure franchisees can truly perform at their best.
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On-site training
The next step often involves spending days or weeks (or longer, depending on the complexity of the operation) assisting the franchisee and its staff at the franchisee’s location.
As with home office training, you will need to create a detailed training plan at this stage. Training should focus on helping franchisees become familiar and comfortable with day-to-day business operations. Franchisees entering the industry for the first time will have different questions and expectations than franchisees with experience in related businesses. One of the key purposes of an on-site trainer is to help you identify and prioritize your franchisees’ needs in the first day or two so that you can tailor the rest of your training schedule to best serve those needs. It is to do.
On-site training is an important extension of a franchisor’s pre-operation training program. New franchisees can easily become overwhelmed and temporarily forget everything they’ve been taught. Having a franchisor representative on-site (often in the form of an opening team) can help ease this transition and ensure customers get a good first impression of the brand and franchisee’s operations. The opening team helps franchisees ease into day-to-day operations so they don’t feel like they’re jumping into the deep end alone without the franchisor’s support.
Within a few days of completing on-site training, you must provide the franchisee with an overall written evaluation of their performance in the training program. The assessment should refer to both the franchisee’s strengths and areas where the franchisee needs additional work, and include a concrete action plan with a clear list of goals for the coming weeks and months. Must be.
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continuous training
For a good franchisor, the training doesn’t end when the launch period ends. This is an ongoing important part of the franchise relationship. For franchisors to remain competitive over the long term, franchisees must stay abreast of industry trends, adapt to market changes, and incorporate new products, services, marketing, and operational procedures into their business. .
With this in mind, all franchise agreements should include not only initial training requirements, but also specific requirements for ongoing training. Consider requiring periodic recertification of franchisees and their key staff members on core competency issues to minimize the decline in system standards over time due to lack of training. We recommend that you do so. Such programs may include regularly scheduled refresher training for these senior positions as well as in-depth training for all staff on new products, services, and procedures introduced from time to time. .
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