Franchise companies must be bluntly honest with performance, both internally and in the market place. A franchisor cannot grow their brand name or build success in their system unless they are brutally honest with what is going on out there with the franchisee team. A franchise companys success must be built on honest evaluation of the System. You need to ask yourself these two questions and ask them often:

1.) Where should we focus on improvement?

2.) Do you see any weakness on the horizon?

Recently we asked six regional directors or master franchise team partners these questions and these are kinds of answers we got back.

A big area to focus on improvements would be best practices, tips and/or tricks to the trade. Everyone, included the seasoned professional can always learn new ideas from others. There could be another proprietary location on the web site with information categorized by topic. You the franchisor would not need to pay to print material, the information would live in one location and could be downloaded by the franchisees if they need a hard copy (we implemented this with the help of Kinkos).

Indeed they were correct as information like this is always a challenge for corporations because to often much of this information is stored in a persons head and doesn't get documented. Then if they leave the valuable information leaves with them. The information can come from everyone so everyone has the ability to contribute. It also reduces the burden on the franchisor.

Now we are able to direct franchisees with these types of questions to the location where they can continually learn. It becomes a living document, constantly updated to reflect what is working and what is not; similar to e-learning or distance-learning systems. Organized by category and topic makes it quicker to navigate and get to your specific concern faster. It was also suggested that we should build the Intranet system very much like the Knowledge Base Microsoft maintains on their web site. But I believe it could be organized better. Think of this as an extension of the Operating Manual. (we implemented this also thanks to Microsoft.)

Moral of the story, ask the questions, believe in the team and make it happen. You see franchising is like a family or a sports team and you all need to be in it to win it, come hell or high water. Think on this in 2006.