Best Practices for Successful Franchise Conferences Part One

A key investment for most franchise systems is their annual franchise convention.  With careful planning and a focus on what you want your franchisees to take away from the experience, your annual meeting can have a tremendously positive effect on a franchisee's productivity, profitability, and passion for the brand.

Recently, SPEAK! partnered with our good friends at Franchise Business Review and Ingage Consulting to conduct the first of its kind Franchise Conference and Meetings Survey.

We are excited to report that the results are in and we will be sharing key findings with you over the next few weeks.

Here are a few highlights:

• 62%  of respondents come from systems with 100 units or more
• 76%  of these systems meet annually
• 71% have at least a 60% attendance rate from their franchisees with 41% of respondents enrolling more than 81% of their franchisees to attend their annual meetings
• 59% make conference attendance mandatory
  • 20% enforce the requirement to attend
  • 12% selectively enforce the requirement to attend
  • 27% state that attendance is mandatory but don’t enforce it
• 62% run their annual conference from 2.5 to 3 days
• The most popular months to hold a franchise convention are January, April, September and October

And a question that every franchise conference organizer may find of interest…

“What do your franchisees want from the event in regards to content?”

This research is consistent with previous findings – Franchisees expect the following from their convention in order of ranking:

#1 – Time to network with their peers
#2 – Business skills training from expert outside presenters
#3 – An open forum to exchange concerns, ideas & suggestions with the corporate team
#4 – Training on new systems and products
#5 – Updates from the corporate office

We’ll continue to post survey results in the next few weeks so be sure to check our blog.  Our goal is to help create industry benchmarks and an ongoing resource for franchise conference best practices.

Have some great ideas of what makes a successful franchise conference?  We’d love to hear from you!

And if you’d like to receive our 2012 Franchise Conference and Meetings Survey white paper with the complete survey summary, drop me a note and we’ll get it right out to you.

More soon!

Katrina

PS:  If you are looking to satisfy content request #2, ‘Business skills training from expert outside presenters’ you know we’d love to help!

Here’s a recent testimonial from one of our valued clients: 

“SPEAK! helped us find the perfect keynote speaker for our annual franchise convention.  Katrina understood our concerns, was attentive and informative, and very accessible. She offered us some great options and helped us secure a fantastic speaker who had our franchisees thinking, laughing and fully engaged.  I couldn’t get down the hallway without getting many kudos from our franchisees about the session.  Doesn’t get better than that!  We’ll be sure to use SPEAK! and Katrina for future events.”

Kim McBee, Vice President of Marketing and Advertising
TBC Retail Group/Big O Tires