So, You Bought a Franchise. Now What?

David Roemer

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781637422724
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Franchises

Are you a franchisee or small business owner? If so, you need this book.

Are you are looking for practical advice and tools to help you achieve more success? If so, you need this book.

Included are stories and advice from franchisees and operators who have built successful franchise businesses as well as business experts. Their contributions add to the practical nature of the information.

In these pages you will learn how to:

• Achieve your goals
• Build a great team
• Have happier customers
• Make a lot more money
• Build a business with incredible value
• And much more

CHAPTER 1

What Is Your Purpose?

Profit isn’t a purpose, it’s a result. To have purpose means the things we do are of real value to others.

—Simon Sinek

I have asked hundreds of business owners over the years this question: “Why did you get into this business?” The answers of course vary from owner to owner and are usually some form of “To provide for my family,” or “To make a good living,” or even “To be my own boss.” Making more money and working for yourself are great reasons for going into business. What I learned though was that the owners who got into business for the sole purpose of making money, never made much. Certainly not as much as they could have made. And the ones who wanted to work for themselves, while happy, were not always fulfilled.

Put another way, your purpose is WHY you do something; goals are HOW you do it.

In a Facebook video on February 25, 2021, Ken Blanchard said “A purpose, a why statement is not a goal. A goal has a beginning and an end. A why statement is why are you doing this?” Your purpose or your why keeps you on the path you set from the beginning. If you ever stray from that path, reviewing your purpose immediately gets you back on track.

In his book, “Start With Why,”¹ author Simon Sinek writes that people don’t buy what you do or how you do it, they buy why you do it. People want to be part of something, a member of the club. That’s why people are so loyal to Apple they will wait online overnight to get the newest iPhone on the day it is released.

Apple started as a computer company but today it is better described as an electronics company. Why has the public essentially permitted Apple to successfully introduce and sell such a diversified array of products? The answer is that people don’t buy what Apple does, they buy why they do it. Apple’s original mission statement was:

To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind²

Nothing in there about making the best products or providing the best service or even about making computers. That mission statement is clearly about wanting to change the world and making it easier for people to expand their knowledge for the benefit of the human race. It’s pretty easy to see why people would connect with and rally around that.

On a personal level, the reason I wrote this book had nothing to do with money. Do I hope it sells some copies and I make some money from it? Of course I do. Probably not as much as my publisher but still, I hope so. My purpose for writing this book is about my WHY. After years of soul searching and hundreds of attempts to write down my WHY, I finally came up with this:

I help people be more knowledgeable and skillful than the yesterday version of themselves so that they are better positioned to realize their dreams.

While it has only been in recent years that I have been able to voice that purpose, I realize that it has been driving me for most of my career. Early on, I was completely driven by money. That’s why I left college without a diploma and went to work full time at Dunkin’ Donuts. I saw my friends graduating with a diploma getting jobs for $12,000 per year. When I was promoted to store manager, I was paid a salary of $18,000 per year. My decision to leave school was instantly justified. Then as a store manager, I was sent to a manager certification course. It was during those three weeks of training, after watching the trainers, that I realized I wanted to be a trainer too. That was when I first began to realize my calling as a teacher and coach.

Later I began working directly with franchisees as a franchise coach. I was responsible for making sure that franchisees understood and followed systems and standards. More importantly, I was tasked with helping them improve sales, service, hiring, and profitability. In essence, my job was to help franchisees be more successful. After a short time, I began realizing I really enjoyed seeing franchisees become more successful and knowing I had a small role in helping them get there. I felt like I had found my purpose in life. Over the years, I have never felt more fulfilled than when I see a franchisee achieve a goal that really mattered to him or her and know that I was there through the entire process of setting the goal and cheering the franchisee on every step of the way. To me, that is worth more than any amount of money or bonus I have earned.

Practical Reasons for Discovering Your WHY

Stephen Robles is a multiunit franchisee of Long John Silver’s. I have spoken with Stephen often in the years we have known each other about his purpose for starting his company Whitestone Foods. I had the privilege of speaking with Stephen for over an hour in preparation for this writing. The quotes that follow are from that interview.

In over 12 years as a franchisee, Stephen has seen good times and tough times. His business has been up and it has been down. Through it all, Stephen believes that what has sustained him and his organization through the bad times is being driven by a purpose. When I asked Stephen about this he said:

I’ve gone through some challenges and we all do in business. It can be anything from bad sales to people getting sick or whatever but what I’ve found is that because I am purpose driven and my organization understands what we stand for, we lock arms and work together to get things done.

Stephen’s WHY is very simple:

To Make Others Rich

On the surface, it appears Stephen is driven to make others financially wealthy. While money is part of it, Stephen is more concerned with making people rich spiritually and emotionally. One example Stephen gave me was the story of one of his people who emigrated from Syria and whose elderly mother still lived there. This team member would be gone for a month at a time visiting his mother before she passed away. Stephen was happy he could help make that team member rich with memories before his mother passed.

Another story Stephen told me was of a team member with five children who came to work for him. For some time she was the definition of an excellent team member. She worked hard, her work quality was excellent, and she fit well into the company culture. All of a sudden, things changed. Her work fell off dramatically. In many companies, she would have been given a written warning and let go if her work did not improve but not at Whitestone Foods. Stephen sensed something was wrong at home and when he asked her about it, he found out his intuition was correct. Stephen listened to her story and supported her emotionally and spiritually. He enriched her life with love for another human being, which helped her get through a difficult time. As Stephen said to me:

If I can create an environment that enriches you as a person, I’m all about that. I could have just probably fired her and just been like most businesspeople, it’s all performance based, you’re not cutting it, you’re gone. But when I hired her, she was a mom with five kids. She did corporate tax, undergrad degree in accounting, graduated Suma Cum Laude with five kids. She’s just a rock star. My goal was to make her rich, to give her exposure to the kind of accounting we do. It’s pretty simple accounting that we do, but I wanted to invest in her. So that became my little voice, you know? You’ve got to make her rich. I want the best fed, most loved employees in any industry and so that becomes what keeps me going everyday.

I don’t want to make Stephen out to be an entirely selfless person. Like you and me, he is not. Here is how he puts it:

If I can do all that (make others rich), hopefully I’ve built an organization that looks at other people, right? And part of that is how do I make Stephen rich? Again, it’s not about money. How do I take care of Stephen? That becomes why we do things. I’m making others rich by feeding them. That’s why I get up every day.

Another way his WHY plays out in everyday life is that Stephen’s people are comfortable with letting him know when he is not living up to the principles he preaches. Stephen told me that one day he was scheduled to do a performance review with one of his best general managers. The guy ran a great store with positive sales growth, positive profits growth, lived the values, and so on, but because of COVID-19 there was concern about doing anything face to face. Here is how Stephen told the story:

I want to get his review done. And I was going to do it over the phone. I got a phone call from Hanano (district manager) who said I hope you don’t take this wrong, but I just don’t think you should do a review over the phone. I would just wait and just do a face to face because it just means so much more to them when you sit down with them face to face. It doesn’t align with our values, does it? No, it doesn’t align with our values. And so I was being kind of checked by one of my people who had the confidence, I guess he felt the freedom to tell me, that, hey, you know what, you’re not living your values, you know, you’re not really loving on the people. If you really loved them, you would sacrifice, get in your car drive three and a half hours, sit down with them, love on them and show some appreciation. So I said you know what, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. So I got to get up early to make the drive.

The other thing he told me was, “The biggest test for having a purpose beyond making money is your employees.” He said, “Your employees can smell when you’re more dollar driven versus purpose driven.” The point is that no matter what business you’re in or how large or small your business is, to be successful you must connect with people on something that matters to them.

So how can you determine your purpose and boil it down to a clear statement? Like most worthwhile endeavors the process, while uncomplicated, will require time and effort. It starts with a trip down memory lane.

Finding Your WHY

When I had my coaching franchise, I had the privilege of helping a client discover his WHY. Dave Fisher is a financial consultant who today works mainly with small business owners. When I first met Dave, he had two jobs in 15 months and was bagging groceries at Whole Foods. He had been searching for a few years for a career that filled his soul, not just his pockets. He called me one day and said that he thought he made a decision and could we meet for coffee. I, of course, said sure!

The first thing Dave said to me was that he decided to become a financial planner. He said he felt like he could help people by helping them plan for retirement and improve their financial lives.

To find his WHY, Dave and I followed the method outlined in Simon Sinek’s sequel “Find Your Why.”³ First, he drew a horizontal line on a piece of paper. Then he went back in his memory and identified the events, good or bad, that had the most impact on him. The good memories he noted on top of the line and the bad ones below the line. The events that had the most impact he wrote further away from the line so that the highest impact memories were the furthest from the line. Then on another page, he wrote a few lines about each memory to describe it. As you can imagine, this can be a very emotional experience. I recommend completing this task alone as it may stir up feelings you are not yet ready to share. You also want to be free to allow things to come to you and sort out the feelings in the next step.

Once Dave had his list of high impact memories, it was time for us to meet. Keep in mind, we had set this up beforehand. I also had some homework to complete about how to best help Dave sort through his memories, how each made him feel, how strong his feeling were and why he had those feelings. It’s important to note here that while Dave and I had a mainly professional relationship, the most important factor was trust. Dave trusted me enough to hear his private stories, not judge him and ask questions to help him dig deeper into why these particular memories were so vivid and impactful on his life. The key for me to being a good partner in the endeavor was listening and staying focused on helping Dave achieve greater understanding.

As I asked questions, most of which started with the word why, Dave began to get clearer about why these memories had so much impact on him. He started realizing that the good memories all revolved around times when he was either part of a group that was involved with something meaningful or around people who were working toward a common goal. These were the times when he was happiest. He also realized that he was unhappiest when he was stuck in chaos and everyone was working at cross purposes. Out of all that came his WHY:

To bring people together around a common cause so that all achieve their heart’s desire.

As a financial consultant, Dave now fulfills his purpose by talking with people about what is important to them, their heart’s desire. So if he is talking with a married couple, he first finds out what they want most in life. This requires Dave to ask a lot of questions and find the couple’s common cause. Sometimes it happens that the couple thought they were on the same page but are not. In those cases, Dave will take a step back and try to help them discover a common cause. If he cannot, he will advise the clients to work on it and get back to him. That’s how much he believes in the first part of his WHY.

When Dave is able to help his clients voice their common cause or heart’s desire, which is most of the time, he then helps them build a financial plan that will allow them to achieve their heart’s desire. Today Dave is more successful financially than ever and more important, he is happier and more fulfilled than ever. He has found what for him is the perfect way to earn a living by achieving his own heart’s desire.

I cannot stress enough the importance of finding your why. Ideally, you will have done it before you purchased your franchise business. The likelihood though is that you did not. That doesn’t make you a bad business owner or even a bad person for that matter. It does put you in a category of most business owners who jump into business without really understanding the true reason why. You may have an inkling of why but if you are like the rest of us, you have not taken the time to look deep and figure out the real reason you are so driven to succeed in business.

Don’t waste another day without knowing your WHY. Start the process today. It may take ...