Challenge Your Franchisor Problems

Every day thousands of franchise owners experience the same problems and worries. Some of these challenges are pretty easy to overcome while other require a serious approach and hard work.

Detecting a problem is always the first step required to successful solution. Many franchisors fail here – they are either unable to detect the real cause for the problem or don’t address it in an appropriate way. Here is a selection of some of the most notorious franchisor problems along with the most appropriate solution for each one.

A list if franchisor problems and how to challenge them.

• Royalties payments. Many franchise business owners find it really difficult to control their royalty payments. Usually they need to way until the end of time, see the sales information of each store, calculate the royalties and than wait for payments to be made. If there is a large number of units, checking them all may really become problematic. A good way out of this is to try systemizing and unifying things as much as you can. Start to use software that will help you compile sales data and track payments.

• Communication. Often franchise owners feel their franchisees are reluctant to communicate effectively. Even if they can sense the problem, it is somehow impossible to open a good line of communication with the franchise unit owners. This problem can quickly lead to a business disaster. The solution is quite simple. You should train all your personnel to be able to detect some of the most common problems a franchisee may experience and approach them for a discussion and advice. If this doesn’t work you should be able to step in and open a conversation with any of your unit owners. Another approach is to use the services of a franchise counsel. These services have becoming very popular and they can really help when communication issues appear.

• Poor sales. If you detect that the sales of any of your franchisee have dropped, you need to step in and take action right away. There may be several reasons why this particular unit is not performing. The reason may be connected with competition, with poor customer management, poor product quality and so on. While the competition factor is somehow hard to tackle, the other two reasons actually point to incompliance with the franchisor operations manual and your business practices. Don’t jump to any conclusions before you reach the root of the problem. For example if your franchisee has lowered customer service, you need to try to understand what led to this situation rather than just shut the unit down.

There are much more potential problems a franchise owner could face. Rather than seeking ready made solutions, franchisors should learn how to prevent problems from occurring and how to tackle the issue in the best possible way. The strongest weapons in battling problems are the ability to detect problems early on, to teach your team to take action as soon as the problem arise, help all franchisee unit to perform as best as they can.