Your success as a franchisor is dependent on the success of your franchisees. You want to help them as much as you can, but they also need to run independent businesses. That can be a tricky balance to achieve. Here are 5 ways you can help franchisees succeed:

1. Leverage your Top Franchisees. Your top franchisees have great experience and know-how that can benefit the rest of your franchisees, especially new ones. An article titled, Creative In-Sourcing Boosts Franchisee Performance suggests using your best franchisees as a cost-effective support network. Providing franchisees with access to one another for internal communication and collaboration can lead to quick knowledge sharing and support.
2. More Coaching. Franchisees look to you, as the franchisor, for guidance and expertise. It’s now easier than ever, and very low-cost, to offer online training and support materials. Webinars, for example, are an inexpensive way to share best practices with all franchisees simultaneously. Webinars can be live but also recorded for future use.
3. Customer Relationship Management. Franchise success is dependent on strong franchisor-franchisee relations. A good customer relationship management (CRM) tool can enable a good relationship. Franchisors can track their franchisees and the value they’ve provided, and franchisees track their own direct customers and what they’ve done for them. By leveraging CRM to help manage the franchisor-franchisee relationship and the franchisee-customer relationship, everyone is more aware of what’s going on and how they can help more.
4. Sustained Marketing Support. Franchisors can continuously provide unified marketing support to franchisees. As Darryn McAullife at National Australia Bank points out, “Brand awareness and marketplace visibility helps the franchisee attract every discretionary consumer dollar on offer to maximize revenue.” In tough economic times many franchises cut their marketing budgets, but the counter-intuitive and better option is to keep spending and help drive more franchisee brand awareness to customers.
5. Streamline Operations. A new franchisee has a lot to do just to get started. For new franchisee owners it’s a big step, and sometimes a scary one. Franchisors can make the process of becoming a franchise owner much easier by providing the right tools and operational guidelines. You, as a franchisor, can provide a “franchise-in-a-box” with the proper software and procedures, so the new franchise owner can hit the ground running and focus on running a successful business, not spending too much time and money setting it up.