Another key resilience approach is strong relationships with suppliers and partners. Franchising is unique in that Franchisees are in essence both clients and suppliers as well as key partners. This creates a unique relationship that can provide a high level of mutual benefit and a platform for resilience for both parties.
Franchising is a long-term (5 years minimum) approach in which the success of each party is dependent on the success of the other. This sets up an understanding and a framework for business cooperation and alignment. When a challenging event takes place you have these relationships which you can leverage so that there is a better outcome for all.
An example of this is during the current COVID-19 business challenges we were able to:
- Better understand the marketplace in all location by on the ground intelligence and connections
- Work together to provide mutual support and develop a strategy to best handle the key challenges
- See clear market trends in the various locations which enabled us to better plan and manage the process as business began to get back into more of a normal approach.
This enabled the business to continue to operate profitability and actually experience growth in revenue and profitability compared to the previous year.
We prefer as many businesses do to generate the majority of work through centres of influence and network referrals. Franchising is the ultimate enabler of this as you will have a local business operator who is a member of the community and is able to build strong connections and networks. We have developed an approach to ensure all our franchisees are able to do this and grow their business using the referral approach. There is nothing as powerful as a local invested business owner who can build trust and credibility – this is a critical function of a Franchisee.
Building a business that drives revenue through relationships is far more resilient than one that relies on impersonal online leads or other direct sources. There are two reasons for this.
- Competitors can invest money and impact your online lead generation regardless of the platform. Whether it is Facebook or Google, this happens, and the other risk in which these organisations make changes that you don’t have enough control over, which can totally destabilise your revenue.
- From our experience leads and clients from online sources tend to be far more price sensitive. They may not fully understand the difference in your service and offering and their entire focus is on price. Where we find that work from referrals has trust, credibility and value embedded and rarely ask about price.
You can imagine that having 100’s of long-term fully invested Franchisees who are not only independent motivated business owners but fully trained business development professionals provides you with a distinct advantage in the marketplace and supports stability and resilience.
We see that the two key functions for Franchisees; execution – delivery of the product and service and, building the business. This is what generates revenue for them. In the Invizbiz approach, we aim to create frameworks in which their lower value activities are handled by the Franchisor.
So in conclusion you can now better understand how a well-designed and rolled out franchisee model can better support you in creating and evolving your Ideal Business Model. The key is to ensure that it is right for you and your business and will get you on the road to achieving your Ideal Business Model.