Successful franchises are, by nature of their success, large businesses. While they may operate as small businesses on a per unit basis, franchises have the resources, knowledge base, and market penetration of a larger business. Accordingly, the best franchises have figured out numerous strategies for business success that are often overlooked by small business owners. While many of these strategies cannot be easily adopted by individual entrepreneurs, here are three lessons business owners of any size can learn from the best franchises:
1. Make Your Branding Consistent
When you walk into a Burger King in Baltimore, it feels the same as the Burger King in Sacramento. While you may not have locations from coast to coast, are you making your brand consistent across your footprint? Do your social media outposts look like your web site? (Don’t look at mine; they’re still under development.) Do your print advertising campaigns carry standard brand themes? Does your product packaging tie in with the look of your store? Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but it is also the essence of great brands.
2. Implement Policies, Procedures, and Systems
Good franchises have policies, procedures, and systems in place for most major impact areas of their businesses. They have to – how else can they provide a working business model to a new franchisee that might be hundreds of miles away. While establishing systems for your business can be time consuming in the short term, the process can pay great dividends over the long run. For more on this topic, see Michael Gerber’s bestselling book The E-Myth.
3. Never Stop Marketing
Almost all franchise agreements have some sort of required regular marketing spend for franchisees. Why? Because consistent marketing is an important component of business success. Regular marketing tends to be overlooked by many small businesses. They run an ad once, don’t get the response they desired, and stop running any more ads because they “tried X and it doesn’t work.” While a poor response may be a reason to forego advertising in a certain medium, it is not a reason to forego marketing itself. Getting your name out there regularly is important. Remember, marketing isn’t discretionary; it just feels that way.
What else can the best franchises teach small business?
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