Summary
This article will help you figure out the common mistakes business owners mostly make while franchising their existing, profit-driven businesses.
Franchising, being an age-old business concept has helped many businesses in accelerating massive growth within a considerable period of time. Without making a huge capital investment or bearing any kind of extensive liability or business risks, it allows entrepreneurs to gain rapid returns by expanding their operations across multiple locations. However, it is very crucial to take the right steps to avoid any kind of mistakes while franchising your business.
Seeking professional advice from experts on how to start a franchise in Australia is perhaps you should ideally look for going through the entire process seamlessly. Following here are some common mistakes you should avoid while converting their existing business model into a franchise.
Not evaluating your business right
The most important thing advised by consultants is not to plan everything in a rush. Having said that, you should always try to spend sufficient time to assess whether it will be a profitable move to franchise your existing business. Depending on your business type, industry trends, consumer behaviour patterns, and revenue-making policies, you must evaluate whether franchising your business would help you meet your ultimate objectives.
Not helping your franchisees
For establishing a successful chain of franchise business, you certainly need to extend your help to franchisees and make them understand about your business rightly. You need to offer them the right training for understanding all the business systems of your organisation including finance, production, marketing, customer relations, purchase and sales, human resources, and much more. Knowing about your business from the very scratch would help them replicate your existing business model across several locations in an effortless manner.
Not giving due importance to the process of onboarding
By onboarding process, you need to focus on the process of attracting and choosing competent entrepreneurs as your franchisees and retain them while thinking of the steps to ‘franchise my business’. With a well-structured onboarding process, it won’t be possible for you to let people know about your franchising opportunity or what are the potential benefits they can possibly get by collaborating with you. By designing a systematic way and covering all the essential touchpoints, you will get an idea of how to orient your prospective leads to and approach them. Once you have finalised the list of franchisees, you can organise interactive meeting sessions, training programs and guide them properly for replicating your business model efficiently.
Not doing the paperwork and legal work right
Another point of high importance is to ensure that all the paperwork or legal work have been done right. However, often possible franchisors fail to notice these areas minutely and end up making crucial mistakes. As a smart franchisors, you should discuss with your consultant about all the documents need to be prepared beforehand and get them ready which, might include the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD), Operations manual, and much more. You should also be sure of getting all your intellectual properties including trademark, copyrights well registered for ensuring full-fledged security and protection of your rights. All sorts of legal obligations also need to be dealt with rightly for ensuring that the task is moving forward in the right direction.
Final thoughts!
Over the years, many businesses have entered into the world of franchising and achieved remarkable success. However, it is always important for prospective franchisors to be aware of all sorts of complexities involved beforehand and develop a fool-proof strategy for setting up a franchise. Hence, hiring professional services on how to start a franchise in Australia is what you should ideally sought after for ensuring franchise success.
The author is a well-known consultant who has earned a fair experience in guiding businesses of all sizes on how to start a franchise in Australia. Being a passionate writer, he also likes to write interesting blogs on a variety of industry topics including tips to ‘franchise my business’, benefits of franchising and more.