(Part 7 of the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference)

In the last weeks, I’ve been sharing my learnings of the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference 2021. In this blog post, I’ll share some recommendations for successful succession planning.

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Being away from your business doesn’t necessarily mean that you are out of the picture forever. Perhaps you want to take a break and enjoy the fruits of your hard work and labor for years and years.

To approach this topic, a panel of multi-unit multi-brand franchisees shared their best practices. The panelists were:

• Fred Burgess, who operates franchises of Marriott Hotels, Papa John’s, and Twin Peaks.
• Jeffrey Tews, who owns units from Bright Care and Bright Star Senior Living.
• Eric Denver, franchisee of Hand & Stone Massage Spa.
• Paul Booth, franchisee from Ace Hardware and a recipient...

(Part 7 of the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference)

Scott Kelly is a NASA retired astronaut. He's a veteran of four space flights, he commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on three expeditions and was a member of the yearlong mission to the ISS. It's a matter of fact, in October of 2015, he set the record for the total accumulated number of days spent in space. 

The Multi-Unit Franchising Conference invited him to give one of the keynote sessions, and on this post, I’m sharing the main takeaways he gave as part of his lecture.

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1.  Never be afraid of doing hard things

If we are always choosing to do things that are easy, then the likelihood of us accomplishing extraordinary things goes down dramatically because easy is normally not exceptional. Scott knows what he’s...

(Part 6 of the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference)

As part of the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference series, this post will help you understand where the industry stands and where it’s going, based on the insights provided by Darrell Johnson, CEO of Frandata, the premier source of intelligence data in the franchise world.

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This expert shared the analysis of their annual review of the US and global economies, and the effects on franchising in the coming year and beyond, covering seven key aspects: 

1.  Impact of Covid-19

Darrell predicts that Covid is going to be with us for at least another year, perhaps even longer, since we’re expecting a fourth round of this pandemic and less than one-half of the world’s population is vaccinated.

This will bring...

(Part 5 of the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference)

Since a few weeks ago, I've been writing about the main takeaways of the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference, to share with you valuable knowledge and ideas that you can implement in your business. Today’s entry: Scale your organization for growth with 10 best practices from a franchisee panel. 

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1. Trust your franchisor

It will be very difficult to grow if you are in constant fighting or disagreement with your franchisor. Bill Noble, multi-unit franchisee from Pearle Vision, advised: if you want to grow, you should follow the franchise systems because the brand already has the knowledge, experience, and proven reliability that the model works. 

Rather than spending your time to change something in your franchise, trust the model and the path...

(Part 4 of the Multi-unit Franchising Conference)

I enjoy attending franchise events to learn from successful franchisees and brand executives. I recently went to the Multi-Unit Franchising Conference 2021, and in this post, I’m sharing my notes and perspective on the session titled Operations Track: Protect Your Eroding Bottom Line.

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This was a panel of four franchises from different industries that shared their thoughts and experiences on how to maximize profitability and maintain quality at all your stores. They focused on three main topics: product cost, technology, rent, and labor cost.

1. Product cost

How to face the increasing cost? The panel agreed that you have to have the courage to increase prices to the point that you have your variable cost where they need to be so you can have ...

(Part 3 of the Multi-unit Franchising Conference)

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Multi-unit Franchising Conference, and I’ve been sharing various blogs with the most interesting insights for your business success. In this post, I’m sharing the advice that Nigel Travis, CEO of Dunkin Donuts from 2009 to 2019, gave on how to transform your business culture. 

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Nigel held executive-level positions in brands such as Papa John’s, Blockbuster, and Burger King, and he wrote the book “The Challenge Culture, Why the Most Successful Organizations Run on Pushback”, where he shares his management philosophy. The topic of his session moved around this mindset.

What’s a challenge culture? He clarified that it doesn’t mean that the structure or...

(Part 2 of the Multi-unit Franchising Conference)

Attending the Multi-unit Franchising Conference last August was very insightful. As I mentioned in another blog post, I decided to share with you all the knowledge I acquire there, divided into separate entries. This is the second one, where you’ll learn some lessons given by several multi-unit and multi-brand franchisees.

Missed the first one? Learn here about the keynote session: 5 Steps to Make the Impossible, Possible.

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The panel was called “Lessons from the Edge”, where four multi-unit franchisees shared the challenges they faced, and the learnings they got from these last months of the Covid crisis. Let’s review them one by one: 

Dawn Lafreeda, Franchisee at Denny's

Challenge: As it...

(Part 1 of the Multi-unit Franchising Conference)

I recently attended the Multi-unit Franchising Conference in Las Vegas, and as you can imagine, I gathered an amazing amount of information. So, I decided to divide all the knowledge into a series of entries to share everything that I learned and reflected on.

On this blog, I’ll talk about the keynote, which was given by Ben Nemtin, a Canadian best-selling author, and producer of the documentary The Buried Life. He talked about a very relevant topic for all of us entrepreneurs: how to go from impossible to possible.

Within the next weeks, I’ll be sharing the rest of the sessions, and trust me, you don’t want to miss them! Subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom of this post to get a notification on when the rest of the information is published.

Seeking Work-life Balance? Rather Aim at Work-life Harmony

I’m sure that one of your goals as a business owner is to have is to work-life balance, because you work...

You didn’t read it wrong. A lot of leaders believe in the motto “hire slow, fire fast”, but I strongly disagree because people are the most important resource in any organization. When you hire and retain the best people, you have the biggest advantage for your business.

Contrariwise, if you don’t have a strong human resource, you won’t be able to execute any process, system, or strategy to have a successful business. That will ultimately bring you struggle and overwork.

Sadly, many organizations are focused only on profitability, promising that once they make the desired profit, they’ll pay more or provide better benefits to their employees. But they have that upside down. 

In my +30 years of career, I have worked with hundreds of franchisees and I can assure you that the top-performing franchisees are the ones that put people first, not profits. That’s the key to the reach the profitability you expect.

Here are three reasons why...

When you decide to leapfrog to a multi-unit organization, your role as a franchisee evolves. It’s natural: you go from operating one unit, where you are the sole manager and you make all the decisions on your own, to being a leader of a growing organization, with multiple stores, different teams, and particular challenges that will need the design of certain strategies to get solved. But, at the same time, you can’t do all of these on your own.

The transition may be hard for some. In fact, one of the questions that my clients often ask me is: What is my role as a multi-unit franchisee? To help you avoid confusion and know what to delegate and what you should take under your responsibility, take note of the six particular roles that you have to play in your organization.

1. The Developer

When you invest in a franchise, the brand provides you with different processes and operations manual to help you duplicate the brand which I call the Brand Systems, but that’s only...