Operating a successful franchise necessitates continual growth to thrive. Evaluating current processes and ensuring they support your business goals allows the organization to identify potential areas of improvement. While technology plays a vital role in the transformation of processes, focus should also be placed on how people and processes interact with that technology to impact business outcomes. Optimizing processes across all major functional areas of the business will allow for better transparency, improved efficiency, and more strategic decision-making.
Start by Identifying Core KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) can help companies better assess and comprehend the state of the business, so leadership can implement the correct actions to influence successful outcomes. The “right” KPIs may look different from company to company but should address the following considerations:
- Concentrate on leading vs. lagging indicators: Leading indicators are predictive measurements, such as membership enrollments, that can predict sales and revenue for the next few quarters. Lagging indicators are measurements of known outputs, such as actual sales figures from the last year. While lagging indicators reveal the current state of your business, you cannot impact them in any way – they already took place.
- Create compelling benchmarks: By establishing benchmarks, you set expectations for your business to assess progress and make any necessary adjustments.
- Be relevant to your franchisors and franchisees: For your KPIs to be effective, they must be indicators that owners and franchisees care about — such as sales, costs, and cash flow. Because these KPIs affect the success of individual franchises and the overall business, they are most likely to drive appropriate behaviors.
Align Actions to Drive KPI Behavior
Once KPIs are established, a collaborative approach is needed to implement appropriate action. Some of the actions to get this accomplished may include:
* Learn best practices from experts. Seek guidance from internal and external experts who can suggest unique actions specific to your business model.
* Test those best practices across your franchises. Owners must test best practices within a specific environment to evaluate if the actions work for that business.
* Adjust best practices based on your experience. Based on your efforts, make necessary adjustments in processes to achieve the right outcomes and implement them across the system.
* Engage through training and coaching. Integrating these best practices into future training efforts will help the entire organization accept and apply them.
Once best practices have been identified and made actionable, they need to be scaled for the broader franchise system. This involves developing guides or “playbooks” detailing how to administer and execute the right processes. These standardized processes that drive KPIs will allow franchises to operate efficiently and positively affect business outcomes.
Standardize and Unify Data
Data unification provides the basis of all process management. Unification or consolidation refers to connecting and accessing data from all an organization’s disparate systems, interacting with data as if it came from a single source.
Franchisees have a specific set of concerns. They need to keep costs down and minimize turnover, especially for employees they have invested training dollars in. They need to standardize processes and ensure compliance. They are 100% focused on profit and margin but need to deliver optimized solutions to facilitate their business flow.
Corporate franchisors typically provide their franchisees with SOPs, policy manuals, and training resources to assist with their operations. However, franchisees also have valuable observations and practices that need to be captured and added to the record – both for their local organization and the overall franchise system as a whole. The key for franchise organizations is to gather information from all locations and put it into an easily accessible system that drives consistency and transparency.
Through a proactive and forward-looking approach, the KLONE Organizer captures existing knowledge from all sources and consolidates it into an intuitive and searchable platform. KLONE can then develop processes to streamline getting future information into a knowledge base for the entire franchise organization.