The franchise documents phase of forming a new franchise relationship can be tricky so do all you can to make your franchise documents understandable.

When you prepare the various franchise documents that must be used to bring a new franchise owner onto your team, step back for a minute. It is easy to get caught up in the challenge of preparing those many franchise documents when you are franchising a business. Creating workable franchise agreements, disclosure statements and the other types of documents take time, thought and some amount of consultation from your team of overpaid franchise lawyers.

It is easy to get in a hurry to wrap up the preparation phase of putting together your franchise documents because once you have them in the can, you can move on to the more interesting and fun steps of actually selling franchises and getting your empire growing.  There is a good reason, however, to take that step back before wrapping up the preparation of franchise documents.  These important legal documents live a double life.

The secret life of franchise documents is that they can make or break the delicate relationship that you are nurturing with your prospective franchise owners. Keep in mind that until that franchise agreement is signed, delivered and set in stone, the act of selling that franchise to that potential franchise owner is still a priority.

If you think you were intimated by the massive franchise documents you prepared and all of the legalize that was in them, think of how easily those complicated contracts and disclosure statements can scare the life out of potential franchise investor. So before you call your franchise documents done, go back and think of how they come across to the reader.  That review may lead to some revisions to put a human touch on those scary franchise documents.

Put some of the love into your franchise documents.

There are two important ways you can put a human face on those scary franchise documents.   Part of how you can make them less prone to send the franchise investors you are romancing running to the hills is simply to organize them well.  A good example is the franchise disclosure document.  There are as many as 23 different types of disclosure that can fill up that document and turn it into quite a monster for a franchise investor to read.

By organizing a franchise document like that with a simple 3 page overview and the dirty details laid out in appendices, you take the fear and loathing out of a tough franchise document.  If the franchise document is delivered both digitally and as a paper document, links to the longer dialogs can make it easy for a future franchise owner to navigate that big document and be able to come back to it and pick up where they left off.

The second but just as important tip for putting a human face on your franchise document is to write them like people write.  It is true that the franchise documents have to bow down to franchise law but that doesn’t mean they have to read like a lawyers brief. Write with some personality and remember that you are still building that relationship with that franchise owner.

It is entirely possible for franchise documents to scare off a franchise investor and that is what you want to avoid.  While you cannot make your franchise documents marketing brochures, there is a lot you can do to make them much less scary and to put a human face on those franchise documents as well.