The 3 Key Areas of Franchisee Coaching

To have a successful field coaching program that positions your franchisees for success, you need to use 3 key elements of franchisee coaching – business skills, people skills, and marketing & sales.

Wise franchisors want their franchisees to be incredibly successful local business owners – that’s how the franchise system grows, revenue increases through royalties, and brands achieve an excellent reputation. 

When your franchisees come on board, you likely have an extensive training program to ensure they have everything they need to build a successful business.

Initial training and education is incredibly helpful for all franchisees – learning the specific systems and expertise to run this specific business will provide them a sturdy foundation.

But if you have franchisees that have never had experience in business (this is extremely common) it’s critical that you have ongoing franchisee coaching to support your franchisees throughout their journey.

Even if your franchisees do have experience in business, there are always more skills to learn and ongoing coaching can provide accountability and motivation to achieve more in their business. 

Read on to learn the details of each of the 3 elements of franchisee coaching – how these skills create successful business owners and ideas for implementing them into your field coach program.

Rather listen? Check out the Franchise Growth Pod episode on this topic.

Business Skills

Business skills are all the tactics and strategies that help you understand your business and position yourself for growth.

• Financial statements
• Profit and loss statements
• Metrics and KPIs
• Goal setting and benchmarks

Truly knowing your business numbers and how to analyze them is key to running a successful business – if you don’t know your numbers you’re likely leaving money on the table!

For ongoing franchisee coaching of business skills, keep in mind that everyone has different skills and we typically want to do more training and development in the areas we’re already good at.

If your franchisees are avoiding their balance sheets or don’t want to discuss metrics, try connecting back to their goals and how learning these financial skills will help them achieve their goals.

Do they want to take their family on a big vacation? Retire by a certain age? Pay off their house?

Finding out the goals that get them excited and connecting that goal directly to the numbers and goal setting in the business helps create more engagement with the ongoing business skills and training.

People Skills

Up next in the ongoing franchisee coaching, we’ve got people skills. Think leadership, empathy, hiring, onboarding new staff, company culture, etc.

We’ve seen people come into franchise systems with decades of experience in company culture, team building, and management. 

And some come in with literally zero experience in these areas.

Either way, ongoing coaching on people skills and relationship building is crucial to local business success. 

In terms of how to do ongoing franchisee coaching in this area, these are softer skills that are not always as simple to train and develop than, say, a profit and loss report.

BUT – continuously setting goals, reviewing, and assessing things like company culture, employee retention, and hiring processes helps so much over time. 

Field coaches provide necessary perspective on tough team issues, or can spot key areas of company culture that can help with retention. These are areas of business that can fall off the daily to do list of busy franchise owners and coaches can increase accountability and keep people and culture top of mind.

Marketing & Sales

Last but definitely not least, to succeed as a local business, you need to sell!

Marketing & sales are very different skills than the business skills we mentioned in section one. Business skills are all about understanding your business. Marketing & sales skills are all about lead gen, community building, guerilla marketing, and making sales.

Your average franchise system involves a lot of local networking, pitching your brand, and getting out into the community. In fact, making connections within your community is part of what makes franchising a unique and successful method of business growth! 

Most initial franchise training involves answers to questions like…

What networking groups should I go to? 

How do I get warm leads? 

What exactly is a warm lead?

What methods of marketing typically work best for this model?

How do I follow up with customers? 

But ongoing franchisee coaching involves trial and error, changing sales tactics as needed, and building out skills and goals over time.

How do you coach marketing and sales? It’s important to know when new training or education is needed, and encouraging sales and marketing will likely be a big part of your regular coaching calls.

But above all else? Accountability is key – make sure marketing tasks (particularly community marketing and networking) are in their schedule and that you’re checking back in on these tasks constantly.

Do you have more questions about how to support your franchisees? We discuss this and more in our free virtual AC Roundtables where franchisors gather on zoom to collaborate and problem-solve together.

The AC Roundtables are a free resource we offer franchisors who are seeking collaboration and peer-to-peer learning. We’ve been running these virtual roundtables since 2020 and we always love to have new franchisors join us!

Try one of our free AC Roundtables