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

Greg Nathan teamed up with Jan Muhleman from the USA based marketing firm, re:group, to conduct a full day “Franchise Relations Clinic” for the IFA’s Internationally Certified Franchise Executive program. The session was aimed at teaching some of the essential concepts and skills for building a healthy franchising culture and was attended by 60 franchise executives. 91% of participants evaluated Greg’s presentation at the highest level (“excellent”). Read entire post

The Franchise Times, a respected specialist magazine that monitors the USA franchising scene, has named our Managing Director, Greg Nathan, in this year’s “20 to watch”. To quote the magazine: Read entire post

We pride ourselves on keeping ahead of international trends and in November 2006 we held an international first — a Forum specifically for franchise marketing professionals that explored how they can more effectively get franchisee buy-in to their marketing programs. It was a great day with 110 franchise marketers and brand managers discussing case studies and sharing practical ideas on what works for them. Greg Nathan and Professor Bill Merriles also presented a research update on trends in measuring franchisee satisfaction with their company’s marketing programs. Read entire post

Greg Nathan presented a trends paper and two workshops to the American Bar Association’s Franchising Forum in Boston. Participant feedback indicates the workshops and paper made a significant contribution to the Forum. We are grateful to the session moderator, Leslie Smith-Porter, and the many people who chipped in with useful feedback including Bob Peterson, Jeff Johnson and David Holmes. Read entire post

Greg Nathan designed and delivered this half day program for the Franchise Council of Australia’s National Conference. As part of the program a hypothetical scenario involving the change of ownership of a franchisor company was workshopped by the audience and a panel of franchisor CEOs. Read entire post

In this keynote presentation to the New Zealand Franchise Association Annual Conference Greg Nathan presented research on what franchisees want from a franchisor and how franchisors are generally being rated in these areas by their franchisees. Read entire post

This presentation was delivered to the Western Australia Franchise Council of Australia Conference and highlighted the dilemma that franchise leaders often face in having to accommodate seemingly conflicting priorities. Twelve paradoxes were explored and a “third way” for dealing with each of these way suggested. Read entire post