As a former franchisor, now retired, I often think back about the relationships I’ve built with our franchisees when we first got going. It seems to me that our first 25 to 50 franchisees were all on my speed dial, I knew them all by name, as well as their families, and even their pets. However, as the franchise company grew larger and larger, I didn’t know all the franchisees by name, nor did I talk to them very much. Rather I relied on our older franchisees that I had a relationship with to feed the information the marketplace to help us modify our franchise business model to compete.

Now then, I would like to explain how old a franchisor founder can get into this trap. You see, if you are constantly talking to a small group of franchisees, they will come to you with their complaints, and you will solve their individual problems, and yet you won’t assist other franchisees with the same problem, or handle their frustrations, and therefore allow hostility to form with disgruntled franchisees, that you had no idea were out there.

Sometimes, it’s good to take some of those original franchisees and put them into more of a leadership position, making then the regional heads of larger groups of franchisees, and sort of a mini Franchisee Association within your organization. Therefore, franchisees that are having problems will go to them first, and then when those leadership franchisees get a number of complaints which are similar, they will come to you. I used to have a rule; “call three, then me,” in other words, talk to other franchisees first about any challenge you have, then if no one knows the answer call me personally and here’s my direct cell phone number.

Okay so, it’s not that I am suggesting that you need to remove yourself away from layers of management, it’s just that when the business gets bigger, you need the inflow of information, but you don’t have time to talk to each and every franchisee about their individual problems of the day, week, or month. Still, and back to the title of the article; “franchisor should avoid Special treatment.” This is very good advice because it’s so easy to do, without thinking about it.

If you are a franchisor and you aren’t seen as being unfair, you will lose your credibility in leadership, integrity, and the faith of your most evangelical brand loyalists; your franchisees. One way to combat this is to constantly be developing regional managers which shadow you as protégés, until they start to think like you, act like you, and come to similar decisions based on various situations, always considering what you might do in the same predicament. This way you can favor all the franchisees at the same time.

Still, you have to make sure that your regional managers don’t fall into the same trap. Indeed I hope you will please consider this because a franchise organization is not like a regular corporation, things are much different because each franchisee is an independent owner. They aren’t middle managers that you can command around like soldiers. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

You’re a small company with a good product. You are confident that the product can sell, but you don’t have the financial resources to hire a team of fifty salespeople to market and sell the product for you. You also don’t have the staff resources to support those that purchase the product. How do you make your good idea and good product create success for you?

Distributors can help market, sell, and support your product. Understand that you’ll give up a piece of the pie, probably in the form of a percentage of revenue generated from sales, to have distributors support you. Some of the pros and cons of using distributors include:

Pros

• If you hire a distributor already in your market, they know how to sell in that market because they will have presumably already been doing so.
• Because they have been selling in your market, they have resources established specific to effectively market and sell what you have.
• You don’t have to incur the payroll and overhead expenses of bringing on these skills to your payroll.
• If the relationship doesn’t work, you can cut it off quickly, as long as your agreement allows.

Cons

• Nobody knows your business or your product like you do, including a distributor.
• You could be only one of many things the distributor is distributing.
• Distributors may care most about the biggest fish – who will generate the most sales and profit.
• Communication with the distributor is rarely daily like it is with an employee.

Pros and cons are almost evenly distributed. The weight of each is dependent on the type of business you have and how willing or well you are able to manage the drawbacks. Distributors can and in many cases do work extremely well.

Are you ready to run a franchise but don’t know which one will be the best for you? Have you ever ran a franchise before or do you have any experience in business in general? Something that you need to understand is that starting a business is hard work and if you can do that successfully then you should easily be able to run a franchise. What most people don’t realize is that franchises have a lot of support that they will offer you and the nice thing about this is it all comes with the franchise when you buy in.

When it comes to franchises there are a lot of them out there and many of them are really good to run but there is one that stands out among everyone else. The franchise that always does well no matter what the economy is like is a clothing franchise and the nice thing is that the competition on these franchises is pretty slim. The reason why many people like the idea of a retail clothing franchise is because you can make small adjustments to what you sell and how you sell them and the best part is you will still obey the franchises requirements.

The first thing you need to understand is that a retail clothing franchise is very easy to get going and the best part is no other business out there is easier to get customers to. If you think getting customers will be hard then think about this, every person needs clothes and because of this your market is anybody that wears them. If you want to make a lot of money then you need to sell different style clothes so that you can get more people into the store, just know that the more people that walk into your store means the more money you will make. When it comes to promoting your retail store the one thing I would not avoid is word of mouth marketing because this is the one marketing strategy that really works.

Another thing you need to be aware of in regards to clothing franchises is they don’t take a lot to get going. A lot of people think they have to spend a hundred thousand dollars in order to run a clothing franchise when the truth is that number is not even close to that. My advice to you if you would like to start a clothing franchise is to simply call the franchise that you would like to inquire about and see what it costs. You really have nothing to lose by just calling so why not do it.

Another thing that you need to know about the different clothing franchises out there is a lot of them are showing up all over the place and the reason is because investors know how lucrative they can be and how easy they are to run. What most people think about business in general is that they are all very scary to get into but once you give a retail franchise a try you will see why there is nothing to be afraid of and you will probably regret that you didn’t start one sooner.