Top Management Story

Writen by Lance Winslow

Managerial efficiency is often the stumbling block for older operator franchisees in large franchise systems such as; mobile carpet cleaners, mobile screen repair, mobile auto detailing, Mobil oil changing or even mobile decorating and interior design. No matter how hard you work to train your franchisees once they are out of field often they are overwhelmed with business and fall down in either scheduling or sales.

In our franchising company we were able to fix this problem using creative tactics and royalty reduction incentives. From an abstract standpoint is very similar to tax incentives to give small businesses and middle-sized businesses to body from certain types of industries or to help allow for a change in overall policy by government. Below is an excerpt from a speech that I gave to a regional franchisee association within our company in an effort to help them help them selves in improving managerial efficiency;

". . .Also on the royalty reduction list will be the full cost of a Franklin Day Planner, with pages and binder. If you already have a binder go buy new pages for your Day Planner, whatever brand it is. Send us a copy of the receipt. If you use an electronic version like a Palm PC, then we will trade this reduction for a copy of Microsoft Publisher for your computer (send copy of receipt)."

Additionally, we always had our franchisees write out their business and personal goals and submit them to us. And to make sure they get it; for both their benefit and ours we made optional however, we also provided a royalty reduction for this;

"If you run out of pages to write your goals, but still wish to take advantage of your $350.00 discount then we will also give you $50.00 per page off for suggestions to improve our services to you and ideas for us to streamline our system. We received great feedback last year from our Franchisor Evaluation Royalty Reduction Program and we made significant changes that have streamlined our system."

It is truly amazing what you can do with a little entrepreneurial creativity in a franchising company and I submit to you that if you are wise you will in fact consider this case study for your company. Think of this in 2006.

Lance Winslow