How Franchisors Hurt their Franchise Operators

There are many reasons why some franchisees struggle while others succeed.

Unknowingly and, in most cases with the best of intentions, franchisor too often fail to help franchisees get back on track.

Frequently franchisors actually contribute to their franchisees' struggles by:

1. Blaming franchisees. Franchisors add to their franchisees' ramp-up problems by assuming franchisees are refusing to follow the system rather than asking, "What is it about our system that results in so many franchisees not following it?"
2. Targeting symptoms. Franchisors often spend a lot of energy and resources trying to eliminate symptoms instead of identifying and targeting the real issues. Franchisors tend to focus on the outer factors that contribute to success or failure like, telling the franchisee to spend more money on advertising or to make more calls, rather than looking at the problem such as the poor quality of the calls due to the mindset of the franchisees, their lack of confidence, or the poor skills and habits they have.
3. Lack of understanding. Many field staff and support professionals have never been trained in adult learning principles and performance coaching techniques as they specifically apply to franchising. Because of the emotional turmoil franchisees go through when they invest in a business, training principles that work well in a normal environment fail to do the job in franchising.
4. Forgetting what it's like to be a novice. Many franchisors expect franchisees to be proficient after a week or 10 days of training; they make their training programs all about process and forget to teach the essence of their business. They continuously add more tools to their system and are surprised when franchisees don't use them or when they don't seem to produce the results they should.
5. Separating operations, training, and support functions into silos. When duties and responsibilities are split among different departments, continuity accountability, and effectiveness are lost.
6. Delegating training and support functions to non-qualified personnel. Many franchisors utilize non-qualified personnel to fulfill training and support functions. Regional and area developers most often lack the skills to train franchisees, especially during the first year.
7. Over utilizing e-learning. Franchising is all about relationships and these relationships are being formed during the first six months of the life of a franchisee. Franchisors relying on on-line training as their primary vehicle for training and supporting franchisees forego forming the deep connections that are  critical to the franchise relationship.

What are you doing that may be contributing to the struggles of your franchisees?

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