International Franchise Expo - IFE 2014 just finished up.
What a great franchising event in New York with over 400 hundred franchisors looking to recruit new franchisees domestically and internationally.
This year's expo had something extra and worthwhile.
Tom Portesy, MFV Expositions, Kevin Pietsch, Franchise Times, Roy Oteo, Wall Street Journal, Todd Evans, Aaron's Inc., & Greg Delks, Firehouse Subs decided to honor Greg Tanner a giant and legend in franchising.
Greg has been a franchising force for about 40 years and for my whole 25 years in the business.
You see in May this year I read Greg Tanner's article - "My Wife Doesn't Want Me Around The House" where I learned he was retiring from franchising's Aaron's Inc. North America's leader in the sales and lease ownership of name-brand furniture, appliances and electronics. However Greg is far from done with franchising and franchising is not done with him.
Tom, Kevin, Roy, Todd & Greg arranged a party within a party at the IFE exhibitor event at New York's legendary Copacabana. The perfect cover and pretext to assemble a group of franchising veterans to numerous to name in order to surprise and honor Greg Tanner for his franchising success and years of franchise sales dedication.
The party was a huge surprise to Greg. He just didn't see it coming. Greg was roasted, toasted, and honored with terrific franchising mementos of his career and contributions.
Now I'll tell you my Tanner story and why I was so happy Kevin Pietsch invited me to join in celebrating Greg's achievements. Kevin thank you.
In 2006 I was with an established child care franchisor where I was running a 39 week franchise display ad schedule in the Wall Street Journal. We wanted our messaging to break-through in the franchise opportunities section of the Journal. And I thought since we had a great Item 19 Financial Performance Representation - FPR we should use it in our advertising.
Now we all know that when you make an earnings claim with a franchise for sale offering you need to have the required disclaimer language. So in our marketing compliance process I had our general counsel ensure that our ad was compliant with the FTC rule.
We were running the ad in the Journal and it was a great success in generating qualified franchise inquiries and ultimately franchise sales increased.
We were pretty proud of ourselves and our franchise recruitment success.
And then comes a call from Tanner where he says "I see you're running some pretty exciting and aggressive display ads in the the Wall Street Journal". He went on to say "you know Joe I'm thinking that your ad might need a bit of tweaking. You see you got the disclaimer language wrong and let me tell you how I know this. A similar thing happened to me and the FTC thought it would be fun to fine our company $11,000 dollars for each time our ad had run."
My ad had run at least 20 times.
Well Greg was right, our general counsel was wrong, our president was not pleased and we fixed the ad.
Greg didn't have to help us out. It didn't benefit him one iota. But that's the way Greg is and why people who know franchising respect him so much.
Here's to Greg Tanner's continued franchising success!
