10 Tips to Support Franchisees at the Personal Level
For a franchisee, business and personal life often blend together. While there are downsides to this, the upside is the commitment they bring to looking after their staff and their customers.
According to the world’s leading franchise business psychologist Greg Nathan at the Franchise Relationships Institute (FRI), data recently collected highlights a need for franchisor support office teams to be more tuned in to this personal factor.
Recently FRI has been measuring important behaviors by franchisor support office teams linked to franchisee satisfaction. The area where franchisor teams are rating themselves the lowest is in connecting with franchisees as people.
Here are some best practice insights that were collected from discussions by franchisor executives during various training workshops conducted by FRI.
10 Tips to Support Franchisees at the Personal Level
- Encourage them to invest time building a support network of people and to show gratitude to their family for their ongoing support.
- Encourage them to have meetings with a mentor or coach for support with business and personal challenges.
- Ensure you respond promptly to their requests for help when they need you.
- Have senior executives meet with them for quality discussions on where they are at in their lives and how you can support them.
- Provide opportunities to bring them together in face to face and virtual meetings to share their challenges.
- Ensure they are kept informed of issues impacting on their business to create more certainty.
- Show them how to delegate more effectively so they can achieve a better work/life balance.
- Get to know them as people including their family situation and their history with the network.
- Acknowledge the fact that longer tenure franchisees probably know more about the history of your organization than most of the franchisor team.
FRI’s research tells us that taking an interest in franchisees as people has a big impact on their overall satisfaction. Interested in helping your support staff hone their skills?
Join Greg and his team for an upcoming Culture of Franchising Workshop.
Give your support office team the skills to create happy franchisees.
Register today for the next Culture of Franchising Workshop presented by FRI.