How We Make A Difference

Recruiting quality franchisees is probably the hottest issue facing franchisors today. With this in mind our Senior Associate, Debb Lowe, conducted a series of franchisee selection research briefings with franchisors in Australia and New Zealand.  Read entire post

We contributed several presetations to the Franchise India Conference in Delhi. The Indian franchisors were extremely receptive. One workshop due to finish at 5.30pm didn’t end until 9.30pm due to audience enthusiasm! Read entire post

One of the highlights of our most recent Forum was the franchisee panel where six top performers from several franchise systems gave frank and honest feedback to the 110 or so franchisors in the audience on what they need to do to pick up their game! This is the second Forum we have run especially for franchise marketing professionals. And based on participant feedback it was an enormous success with 98% saying it was definitely a worthwhile investment. Read entire post

Greg Nathan and Debb Lowe conducted, briefings in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne on the detailed findings from our research project into predictors of franchisee performance. A research paper with trends and data was provided to all participants who were also encouraged to reflect on how they could use the research results to improve their franchisee selection practices. This research has of course been fundamental to the launch of our new franchisee selection tool, the Nathan Profiler. Thanks to Deacons in Melbourne and Dymocks in Sydney for hosting these events.

Ree-Anna Chatman conducted focus groups in Brisbane and Melbourne with some of our clients to seek feedback on our new franchisee selection system, The Nathan Profiler. In addition to encouragement that we are on the right track the sessions provided invaluable insights on how we can improve the system to best meet franchisor needs. Thanks to those clients who participated and to Bakers Delight who hosted the session in Melbourne. Read entire post

Greg Nathan delivered a keynote address to the FCA’s Queensland Convention on the topic “Building a Healthy Franchise Culture — Are you Up to the Challenge?” The session drew on decades of psychological research into how the behaviour and expectations of leaders shape organisational cultures and how people are subconsciously influenced, for better or worse, by the cultures they find themselves in. He also warned of how easily it is for a franchise culture to go off the rails where franchisors and franchisees see each other as enemies rather than collaborators and suggested a number of practical methods for preventing this. Delegates all received a copy of FRI’s “Healthy Franchise Culture Survey” to enable them to evaluate their own organisational culture. Greg finished on the point: “Just as one bad apple can spoil a barrel, a bad barrel can also spoil a crop of good apples!” Food for thought. Read entire post

FRI hosted an intimate morning discussion on the back veranda with eminent USA franchise attorney, Rupert Barkoff, co-editor of the text book “Fundamentals of Franchising”. An interesting group of local consultants, academics, lawyers and franchisors participated in the wide ranging discussion which covered: Read entire post

The Franchise Relationships Institute (FRI) has been conducting a major research project into predictors of franchisee success. Previous research by FRI has shown that the success which individual franchisees achieve is largely influenced by the attitudes, abilities and values they bring to the business. While there are many theories and opinions on what these factors are, there is a dearth of good quality research. Read entire post

In March this year we conducted a full day forum on Recruiting and Developing High Performance Franchisees, attended by 100 senior franchise development and operations executives from some of the best franchise brands in Australia. This was followed by two days of Masterclasses where we drilled down into teaching the skills associated with recruiting and developing high calibre franchisees. One of our goals was to challenge and elevate the thinking of franchise executives by exposing them to ideas and people they may not normally have access to.  Read entire post

Greg Nathan presented a summary of FRI’s last research to the ISOF conference at Las Vegas attended by franchising academics from around the world. This research into the “psycho-social predictors of franchisee performance” has been conducted with Associate Professor Chris Jackson from the University of Queensland. The project aims to help franchisors improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their franchisee recruitment processes and has involved assessing 800 franchisees from over 30 franchise systems on a range of psychological and performance indicators. The project seeks to further build on work conducted by FRI in this area over the past 12 years and has so far produced some ground breaking findings that will guide the development of our new Franchisee Profiling system. The information from the research is currently being compiled into a White Paper to make the findings accessible to franchisors. Read entire post