Franchise Documents: Drawing Up a Great Franchise Application

The franchise application is one of many franchise documents that must be thought through carefully. It influences the franchisor in selecting the best franchisees from what is often a wide pool of applicants. Hence, it is important for the application to elicit as much relevant information as is possible from each applicant.

One way to get a good sense of what a franchise application should look like is to buy a franchise package online. This will include a wide variety of franchise documents’ templates, along with suggestions for modifying them or personalizing them. Another way to get a glimpse at franchise applications is to simply perform a Google search for “franchise application.” The results will include actual franchise documents of this type as they appear on the websites of the corresponding franchise companies.

You should print out copies of those franchise applications associated with well-known and highly successful franchise companies. These are likely to have been drawn up by established professionals. Hence, they are bound to be top-notch documents. You should also print out the ones associated with the franchise companies that are most similar to the one you intend to form. If you want to franchise your coffee shop, then look up the franchise applications of cafes like Gimme! Coffee. Looking at other franchise companies’ franchise applications in this way will give you a sense of the different possibilities out there and get you thinking about why one variation of an application question might be more effective than another. This is a useful way of preparing to draw up your own franchise documents.

 

Basing Franchise Documents on Your Vision of the Ideal Franchisee

 

As you prepare franchise applications and other franchise documents for your prospective franchisees, it is important for you to envision the type of applicant that would make the most ideal franchisee for your franchise company. Your first instinct might be that a franchisee very much like you in character and behavior would be perfect. But this is highly unlikely to be true. Remember that the qualities that enabled you to found and run a successful business included innovation, creativity, the readiness to adapt to different circumstances and the willingness to think outside the box. These are not necessarily the qualities that would make a good franchisee. Keep in mind that franchisees must be good at following the plans and instructions that you have formulated for the franchise. Hence, you would do well to search for prospective franchisees who were good at sticking to established plans, but capable of working autonomously.