Franchise Recruitment Made Easy.
Are you struggling with franchise recruitment due to a lack of time?
Are you stuck in a bit of a rut with it and don’t know what to do?
Introducing
Outsourced Franchise Recruitment
Outsourced Franchise Recruitment is when you hire an experienced franchising professional to handle your lead generation, management and sales needs from start to finish.
Whether you’re a new or established Franchisor, with a little or lots of experience in this area, your time is valuable and often in short supply. By outsourcing this task to someone who knows the ins and outs of the franchising world, you not only free up your time to spend on other things, but you also hand it over to someone who will get results.
Typically, taking on a permanent staff member in this type of role will add significant time, training and cost. Save on those and consider hiring a franchise professional who will drive your franchise recruitment and work with you often at a fraction of the cost.
Franchise recruitment is a challenge and can be time-consuming. Outsourcing is a great cost-effective solution to ensure you continue growing your business in all areas.
Let’s talk. Learn how I can help drive your franchise recruitment
Every franchise recruitment strategy needs three things
1
Story and content
People relate to stories, it helps create emotional resonance and consistent content about anything related to your business and spun for a franchise promotion angle is important. The franchise business that focus’ more on content marketing and telling their story will win. And you have to be consistent!
2
Lead generation tactics
You’ll need goals, a budget and a strategy. Once you start generating leads, you’ll find out how many you need to convert one into a franchisee and then you can review and iterate your goals, budget and strategy again. When you’ve got the franchise recruitment machine working lead generation becomes easy to understand and repeat.
3
Funnel management
You’d be surprised how many well established franchise business’ actually have poor funnel and lead management in place. So, if you can get this bit right to ensure you drive the process forward, franchise sales will happen. Using a simple CRM system can be helpful. Perhaps you have access and invested in a more automated and complex system for your needs. Either way, finding what works for your business is key.
I love nothing more than helping franchise brands grow and recruiting franchisees is a fundamental aspect of that growth. Let’s see if we can realise your franchise business potential.
We’ve worked with many consultants and experts in the franchise industry and few rival Andy. He’s hardworking, smart, positive and brimming with integrity. His knowledge of franchising will help make your franchise a huge success.
The Four Keys to Franchise Recruitment Success
1. Strategy and goals
You’ll need to put time aside to set some goals and targets for your business if you haven’t already. These need to be specific and something both realistic and challenging at the same time. Once you have goals, you’ll need to look at how you will go about reaching them. What content have you got currently, what budget have you got to generate leads, what method of lead management will take place and what are the steps and process for driving this forward. It won’t drive itself!
2. A realistic budget
You won’t generate leads without some investment in marketing activities. The same can also be said of the cost for someone to manage recruitment, whether that be your team of an outsourced expert. If you have experience generating leads previously, you may already know or be able to gather data to help define a realistic budget. If not you may need to commit to some trial and error to see what channels work best for your business.
3. Strong Process
Without a plan in place to generate leads, follow them up and drive the process of securing them as a franchisees, you will struggle to grow the network. You also must understand that some leads generated won’t actually want to interact with you immediately and may not be ready to commit to taking on a franchise in the near future. It’s not uncommon for some leads to come back a year or so later and declare their interest again so have a process to follow and don’t give up on leads until they’ve declared they no longer hold an interest.
4. Focus
I cannot say enough, if you have a to split your working week across numerous business areas (or even numerous businesses) and try to manage this as and when you can, it won’t work. Not as well as it can. You need to dedicate your time and focus to franchise recruitment to get the results. This is where outsourcing may become appealing.
My first impressions of Andy was that he was a very qualified professional who knew his stuff! And boy was I right. Andy is extremely experienced in the children’s activities sector and has given me invaluable advice and support in my first year of being a franchisor. What I think makes Andy really good to work with is the way he comes across very down to earth and extremely approachable. No ask is too much he goes over and beyond to help. I would highly recommend Andy to anyone either looking to franchise their business or even an experienced franchisor needing advice or recommendations into their franchise. I just wish I had met Andy earlier in my franchise journey!!
So what is
Outsourced Franchise Recruitment?
Outsourced franchise recruitment is where you essentially take on someone to handle, focus and drive that side of the business. Using a Franchise Consultant to do this is often a good choice. They know how to drive the process, they have experience in dealing with different types of leads and save you significant time getting people to meetings and signing agreements.
So, how does it work?
STRATEGY MEETING
This is where we review where you currently are with your franchise recruitment. We set some smart targets and figure out the best point of attack. We also see if we need more materials and put together a budget and plan to start recruiting franchisees.
1
LEAD GENERATION
2
LEAD MANAGEMENT
Once the leads start flowing in, they’ll need to be managed using a CRM system of some kind. Through a process of phone calls, emails, question answering, application forms and more, we’ll get each qualified lead to meet you.
3
MEETING & DISCOVERY DAYS
Once they’ve formally applied for a franchise, they’ll need to meet the Franchisor in person to find out more on the opportunity. This can be one-to-one or in a group setting. This is carried out by the Franchisor’s team.
4
LEGAL AGREEMENT
5
HANDOVER
6
Let’s talk.
Learn how I can help drive your franchise recruitment
Any Questions?
Here are some answers to some frequently asked questions. If you can’t find what you’re looking for get in touch and I’ll do my best to answer all queries.
How do I find franchisees?
There are lots of ways to recruit franchisees, which we will go through in lots of detail during the strategy meeting with the best methods for your model discussed. Generally, I’d always recommend having an ‘Opportunity Website’ which you drive traffic to. This can be through content marketing, social media, pay-per-click campaigns, online directories and other methods. Once you start driving potential franchisees to your website, following some simple steps and a proven process you’ll soon start engaging with qualified and interested leads.
What materials or content do I need?
You’ll ideally have a ‘Opportunity Website’, an Information Pack they can download and a presentation to show them at a meeting or Discovery Day. Any other ongoing content marketing is a bonus.
The materials need to be professional, well designed and offer value to people interested in your franchise. Remember, if you are in a congested market and competing against others then you need to be able to ‘rise above the noise’. Strong content plays a key part in this.
How much should I budget for franchise recruitment?
This is quite a difficult question to answer unless you’ve franchise recruited before and have data to hand to understand your ROI on channels, cost per lead, cost per buyer etc. There is usually an element of trial and error to start with while we find exactly where your ideal franchisees are. You will need to be comfortably spending some money on marketing the franchise in order to test different methods. Once we find what is working, start converting leads into franchisees, it’s much easier to know how much to budget going forward linked to your targets.
Do I really need an 'Opportunity Website'?
My short answer is, ‘Yes’ absolutely, but like anything it’s up to you.
The issue with having just one page dedicated to it on your main consumer website is that’s it’s simply not enough information (research suggests potential franchisees want at least 30mins + of information/video to digest before they even contact you). The other issue is that the people visiting your main consumer site are not your ideal franchisee/’reader’, so targeting them through just one site in 2020, isn’t best practice.
How much does outsourced franchise recruitment cost?
I charge a monthly retainer fee to manage your franchise recruitment + % commission on each successful franchise sale. There are no lengthy contracts involved, so you would just need to give 30 days notice to cancel the arrangement if you decide to start managing it in-house or stop recruiting altogether.
Typically if you hired a Franchise Sales Manager, you’d be looking at a minimum yearly salary of £25k base + commission so it’s a relatively small cost to outsource in comparison.
Contact Us to find out more information.
What if I just want support to get going?
The key to my work with clients is getting them where they need to be so they can hit their targets and goals. If that is just a matter of being an outside set of eyes to offer some initial guidance, then I’d love to help and support you in this way.
We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with Andy for the past few months. At such a critical stage of growth in our business, we’ve really found his support to be invaluable. He’s very skilled at listening to our business challenges and suggesting solutions as well as offering advice on franchising best practice. He also spoke to our network of franchisees and senior staff at an annual training event and was extremely well received by all.
He spoke passionately and professionally about high performance in franchising and this we know will stand our network in very good stead moving forward. We look forward to continuing our work together and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend his services.