Keeping Your Eyes on the Franchise Prize

“For many businesses that are delivering a localized product or service, the (franchising) model is still one of the most effective.” (Inc.)

When seeking to expand the business, entrepreneurs are often faced with multiple options. They can add new products or services, cross-sell/upsell to existing customers, expand into new territories, target new market segments, adopt new delivery models, acquire another business, or any combination of the above.

Each of these, though, does require a considerable investment in time and money, and is often associated with a certain amount (sometimes a lot) of risk.

There is another approach to expansion, though, that is designed to enable growth while minimizing cost and risk. This is franchising.

“The primary advantages for most companies entering the realm of franchising are capital, speed of growth, motivated management, and risk reduction — but there are many others as well.” (Entrepreneur)

To elaborate:

• Access to capital to fund expansion (without the risk of debt or cost of equity)
• Motivated management, by putting business owners in place vs. just managers
• Accelerated growth, where franchise management executes many of the required tasks in parallel
• Greater profitability, through an organization that is leaner
• Reduced risk, where the franchisee must take on the investment responsibility for the operation

But There Are Some Pretty Big Obstacles out There Too

However, as is always the case with business – the path to achieving benefits is never without its hurdles.

When it comes to franchising, among the most common hurdles are:

Establishing an enabling infrastructure

Ensuring the success of the franchisee requires the support of the entrepreneur on several levels, including strategy, infrastructure, workflows, and more.

“Franchisors will likely need to add operational support and training staff, technology, marketing, and administrative support to their internal team.” (allbusiness.com)

Before onboarding the first franchisee, it is critical to audit all the relevant processes and systems that are required for powering the business, and to create ‘operational’ templates that franchisees can adopt and execute seamlessly and with ease.

Ensuring brand consistency

One of the most important aspects of ensuring the success of ongoing expansion, as more and more franchisees are added to the business – is to make sure that each customer and prospects identifies the business regardless of where it is encountered, whether at the storefront, on social networks, local advertising, what have you.

Changing any aspect of the brand on any channel or with any marketing asset will confuse customers and wholly undermine the effort.

“When a franchisee purchases a franchise, he or she is also buying the brand. Maintaining and strengthening brand identity, though sometimes difficult, is vital to franchise success.” (Entrepreneur)

Empowering franchisees with the tools to grow the business

Once you have the “basics” in place – with systems, processes, and brand consistency, it is crucial to provide franchisees with the right tools to raise awareness, generate leads, and inspire prospects to buy your products or services.

Running a franchise is not just about collecting a franchise fee. It’s about driving empowered, self-fulfilled, fiscally successful franchisees.

Take the Short Way Home

So, what can you do to overcome these hurdles?

You got your franchise platform. You’ve got your franchisees. You’ve trained them, given them access to the company network and business support systems provided them with logo files, and they’re ready to go.

But . . . what about:

• Establishing that enabling infrastructure?
• Ensuring brand consistency?
• Empowering franchisees with the tools to grow the business?

Video is the most powerful marketing tool – but has been too complex and expensive to localize and customize – until now.

For, when you bring video creation in-house with templates that are easily replicable, supremely branded, and look like they were professionally made – then you’ve basically “killing three hurdles with one tool.”

The idea is that with video they can grow the business by capturing the attention and engaging with the target customer. For, as we all know – video is the most effective type of marketing content for capturing and securing attention.

But it’s not just about giving them ready-made videos. It’s about giving them access to a video creation tool that enables them to leverage pre-existing templates that they can customize to their local audience’s needs, i.e. empowering them to grow the business.

While, at the same time – each video and video template is pre-populated with all of your brand assets (colors, fonts, logo, etc.) – so that you can ensure brand consistency.

It’s sort of a 1-2-3 punch (for 1-2-3 hurdles) – a video creation tool that is part of your enabling infrastructure, helps to ensure brand consistency and empowers franchisees to grow the business.

Wochit Shortcut for Taking the Express Lane to Video Success

Wochit Shortcut, designed to be the simplest-ever video creation tool. enables franchisees to create stunning videos while franchisors can create storyboards using Studio to express all of their creativity, with confidence that all franchisees will stay on-brand.

After creating templates and centrally managing them with Studio, Shortcut enables users to create new videos effortlessly to promote the business – as easily as they write emails, while always maintaining brand consistency.

Needless to say, it’s a powerful 1-2-3 punch for any franchisor and their franchisees.