A franchisee who has FAITH in their franchisor, arguably, owns one of the best relationships in business. A franchisee who doesn’t have faith in their franchisor has one of the worst relationships in business. Faith is an extremely valuable thing in the franchise world and both franchisees and franchisors should work hard to establish it, keep it and guard it jealously.
It takes about 30 to 60 days to properly research and buy a franchise. During this time both franchisee and franchisor should be trying to find out if they can have faith in each other. They should be looking for things like commonality of interests. Faithful follow thru. i.e. it doesn’t take very many missed phone calls or meetings for one side to lose faith in the other; and, anything else that indicates whether or not you can believe in each other.
As a franchisee you should be wary of a franchisor who is not interested in you personally. If you become a franchisee of their system you have the ability to be an awesome asset for them and you have the ability to be a horrible nightmare. If they are as concerned about bringing you in as you are concerned about buying their franchise this is a good indication that they have the type of integrity that you will be able to believe in.
As a franchisor you should not let the sales process slip away without establishing faith with your prospective franchisee. The whole point of your sales process should be to establish whether or not you can trust them with your valuable territory and to establish whether or not they can trust you with their career. If at the end of the sales process both sides feel like they can believe in each other this might be a good match. Never, ever take a franchisee on just to get their franchise fee. In the long run it will cost you much more than you ever receive in that initial fee.
Once a candidate becomes a franchisee with faith it is time to put that to good use. Because the franchisee believes in both the concept and the people they are much more likely to implement all of the franchisors systems with integrity. They won’t just pick and choose the systems the franchisee either likes or have been proven to them. Pick and choose franchisees never develop their full potential because the systems they develop are always at odds with the franchisors.
To summarize it behooves both the franchisee and the franchisor to spend a lot of their focus in the sales and research cycle on establishing faith with each other. Then, a good decision can be made on whether or not they are going to believe in each other once the sale is complete and it’s time to move onto implementing the franchisor’s system.
Lance Jensen, CEO
Global Garage Flooring
