C-Suite Network™

Menu
Search
Close this search box.

Author: Evan Hackel

A dynamic, innovative, thoughtful and inspiring leader with 30 years of experience in franchising, distributed networks and cooperatives. Successful history of: (i) turning around a $700 million distressed franchise system into a $2.0 billion revenue business in four years, (ii) reviving and re-energizing a $3.5 billion revenue franchisor and (iii) founding three franchise systems. Experienced corporate board member.

Currently, a consultant to some of the largest franchise systems in North America. A franchise industry leader, widely published, keynote speaker, member of the New England Franchise Association Board, and Co-chair of the International Franchise Associations Knowledge Share Task Force.|A dynamic, innovative, thoughtful and inspiring leader with 30 years of experience in franchising, distributed networks and cooperatives. Successful history of: (i) turning around a $700 million distressed franchise system into a $2.0 billion revenue business in four years, (ii) reviving and re-energizing a $3.5 billion revenue franchisor and (iii) founding three franchise systems. Experienced corporate board member.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

Low-Cost Ways to Boost Training Results

How much does it cost to breathe fresh life into an under-performing training program? Is it even worth trying, or do you need to discard what you have and start designing all over again from the beginning?

Many companies assume that it cannot be done without incurring enormous expenses. But that is often not the case. In fact, dramatic improvements can often be achieved by making simple changes. Here’s a case study that proves the point.

The Problem: People Weren’t Invested, Training Wasn’t Delivering

Back in 2014, a franchised national restaurant chain had a training program that wasn’t delivering results. Only 25% of franchisees were using the training. Employees disliked it. And even worse, training was doing little to increase customer satisfaction levels. So Tortal started to ask questions. Here are some of the comments we heard from trainees:

  • “Lessons are repetitive.”
  • “The training gives information, but doesn’t teach skills.”
  • “I can’t take time away from my job to complete the long lessons.”
  • “Modules don’t work well together; they’re just not well integrated.”
  • “The eLearning is taking too much time.”
  • “Lessons are not engaging.”

Tortal analyzed the training curriculum, and then we made some chances. We:

  • Reordered lessons to cover the most important skills and concepts first.
  • Eliminated and reduced repetitive and redundant portions of lessons, which reduced by as much as 25% the amount of time required to complete each module.
  • Made lessons more engaging by incorporating games, drag-and-drop exercises, and other interactive content.
  • Created quizzes for trainees to compete at the end of each module.
  • Enlivened lessons by using video layovers and two narrators instead of one.
  • Displayed the objective of each module clearly on all slides so that trainees knew what they are learning and why.
  • Installed a “Next Lesson” button on the last slide of each module to encourage trainees to move ahead on their own.
  • Made all training materials available in Spanish as well as English.

Results Achieved

Overall learner seat time was reduced by 25%-40% and more importantly, 67% of customers reported much higher satisfaction levels.

Improving training doesn’t necessarily mean discarding older training programs and starting from scratch. A range of small but wise changes can often boost ROI and turn under-performing training into great.

 

 

Categories
Growth Operations Personal Development

Four Ways to Learn Much More from Customers

Are your customers and clients telling you what you really need to hear? Or are they holding back and not telling you about issues that you should address?

If you’re not sure, I would recommend taking some steps to open up new and more Ingaged lines of communication.

Be Careful about Surveys 

Many companies like to distribute surveys and questionnaires to their customers – and with good reason. The data they collect can be easily analyzed.

Yet surveys have limitations. If you only ask customers 12 yes or no questions, you are only going to get 12 pieces of binary data – and only about the issues that you defined and put on the survey. So be sure to include some open-ended questions that allow your customers to record their experiences, emotions, problems and provide other “softer” responses. Just one comment from one customer could be something you really need to hear.

Create Customer Advisory Councils 

Invite your high-value customers to become members in advisory councils. They offer one of the most effective ways to break out of the kind of tunnel vision that can prevent companies from hearing what customers are thinking.

 

[eut_single_image image_type=”image-link” image_mode=”medium” image=”32023″ link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fc-suitenetwork.com%2Fexecutive-membership|||”]

Build Personal Lines of Communication to Important Customers

Take a little time to get to know your most important client contacts. If you can pick up the phone every few weeks and ask them, “How was your last order?” or, “Is there anything we can do for you that we’re not doing already?” you will hear comments that can help you keep customers satisfied and loyal.

Keep Gathering Information about Customers from Front-Line Employees

They are uniquely positioned to tell you about how customers are reacting to your products, what their concerns and issues are with what you are selling – and lots more. It is interesting to note that in their confusion and rush to develop new marketing solutions, many companies overlook this vital source of intelligence.

To learn more about communicating in ingaged ways . . .

Today’s post is adapted from information in my new book Ingaging Leadership Meets the Younger Generation, which contains more ways to use communication to improve the performance of your organization. I invite you to read it and explore more.

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

How to Know if a Company Has a Positive Culture . . . or a Negative One

When you visit a company with a poor corporate culture, tension permeates every level. You will see grim faces, and you will likely notice many offices with closed doors. You may feel uncomfortable, without knowing why. The reason you may feel uncomfortable is because everyone who works there is uncomfortable and disconnected.

And when you visit a company with a positive culture, you will know that too. Before you even enter the door, you will feel a positive energy coming from employees in the lobby or the elevator. The receptionist and people waiting in the lobby seem happy to be there. And when you go through the door and your meeting starts, things become even more energized and positive.

Please note that even if you are attending meetings remotely at the company, you will experience similar things, only on a smaller scale. But positivity can always be felt, provided it is an integral part of company culture.

Here are some key indicators that can alert you to whether a company has cultivated a culture of positivity.

Organizations with positive company cultures often:

  • Have a high level of ethics
  • Are committed to community, the environment, and other like values (i.e., a sustainability mindset)
  • Enjoy an atmosphere of teamwork and camaraderie
  • Have a shared sense of community
  • Encourage creativity and thrive on innovation
  • Promote risk-taking
  • Are customer-focused
  • Keep employees’ families in mind and promote a positive work/life balance
  • Foster a positive approach and sense of fun
  • Provide generous benefits
  • Encourage employees’ personal and professional development
  • Embrace continuous learning
  • Create opportunities for growth and advancement
  • Have strong and shared core values
  • Promote technological innovation
  • Are fiscally realistic

Walk into a company with a positive culture and you will see happy, relaxed people working hard and without tension. You’ll hear people who are sharing ideas, consulting each other, and laughing. There is a sense of openness, and you will feel relaxed and welcome.

Organizations with negative company cultures often:

  • Maintain false communication where everyone “weighs in,” yet few feel heard and results are delayed
  • Neglect collaboration
  • Ignore unhealthy and, in some cases, illegal behavior such as sexism, male dominance, racism, intolerance, emotional and physical abuse
  • Disregard disruptive internal competition and sniping
  • Suffer from minimal employee loyalty
  • Lose time and money to low productivity and high turnover
  • Have unnecessary hierarchies
  • Lack a healthy life/work balance
  • Tend to be rigid and continue to do things “the way we’ve always done them”

This article is adapted from my new book Ingaging Leadership Meets the Younger Generation. 

 

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Effective Delegation Strategies for Franchise Success

All successful business people have to learn to delegate. But I would argue that delegation is especially critical for franchise owners who want to own more than one franchise location, and who would like to see all their franchises succeed and grow.

I would also argue that many franchise owners have an especially difficult time learning to delegate to others. Many tend to fall into a pattern like this . . .

An owner starts by buying one franchise and works extra hard to make it successful. That owner learns that in order to succeed, it is necessary to stay on top of every detail of running the business. That owner can have a very difficult time transitioning from being the owner of just one location to being the owner of several or many. And similar difficulties can emerge even in one location if it starts to grow.

One supervisor cannot be hands-on in multiple locations, or in one location when it reaches a certain size. At a certain point, the owner has to hire competent employees, trust them, and delegate responsibility and work to them.

That poses a contradiction for many owners because the same style of supervision that brought success earlier on has to be left behind.

Steps to More Successful Delegation

First, have a clear vision and expectation of the roles you are hiring for. Perhaps you’re hiring a person whose job will be to open up new locations. Or perhaps you’re hiring a person whose job will be to hire and help you staff up – in other words, to be your HR manager. Or maybe you’re hiring someone who will be a retail and sales manager. To succeed, you need to hire people who have the experience, aptitude, and skills to handle the specific tasks you need done. You can then delegate those tasks to them and loosen your control over many details. You can then stop micromanaging and start to concentrate on bigger issues of expanding your business.

As the expression says, you can stop working in your business and start working on your business.

Second, hire people who can be delegated to. Does their experience indicate that they have been in the past and that they are open to input and suggestions? During interviews and screening, do they demonstrate the kind of a cooperative, personable and enthusiastic attitude that tells you they will be open to being delegated to?

Third, hire people who understand and communicate well. You can get a sense of this in interviews. When you explain a current challenge or set of expectations, is the candidate quick to understand and grasp the essence of what you are saying? Is he or she able to listen well and ask questions until a solid level of understanding is achieved? Pay attention to this issue. Hiring managers and then having to explain things repetitively to them is a frustration that can convince you that it is necessary to micromanage. And that is something to avoid.

Fourth, provide excellent training in the critically important skills the job will require. Often, franchise owners like to hire managers and other employees who have lots of prior, applicable experience. Those owners expect that a new employee’s previous experience will take the place of training – in essence, that the employee will arrive on the job “pre-trained.” There may be some truth in that. However, it is always more effective to carefully define the skills your new hires should have, develop metrics to measure them, and to train those abilities.

And Think about Relatability

As you meet with possible hires, ask yourself, “Is this someone I can relate to . . . someone I can see working with closely in the years ahead?”

One way to increase the likelihood of productive, long relationships is to consider offering very promising employees an opportunity to work their way toward limited partnerships in your franchise.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is a 35-year franchising veteran as both a franchisor and franchisee. He is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal of Ingage Consulting. He is a speaker, hosts “Training Unleashed,” a podcast covering training for business, and author of Ingaging Leadership. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanspeaksfranchising.com. Follow @ehackel or call 781-820-7609. Why not have Evan Hackel address your group about franchising success?

Categories
Growth Personal Development

The New World of Franchise Sales

 

Why do people buy franchises? Even though everything has changed since Covid struck, the fundamental motivations for buying a franchise have not changed.

  • First, people who buy franchises want to make money. They need to believe your franchise concept is able to provide them the return they need.
  • Second, they want to do something they would enjoy. They would like to make money by doing something they enjoy doing, with a company they love. (Remember that sometimes and for some people, making money is more important.)
  • Third, they want to lower the risk of owning a business. To convince them that owning your franchise carries a low chance of failure, show them that you have systems and processes that have been perfected.
  • Fourth, they want to partner with other owners who will share their journey. When they become part of your franchise, they will be connected to a community of other owners. They don’t want to be lone wolves.

How Has Selling Franchises Changed During the Pandemic?

Everything has changed. People like to say that in six months, we have jumped ahead six years regarding the way people accept and use technology. And that is true. You need to sell to prospective buyers by offering virtual, not face-to face experiences.

Convincing People to Buy in Virtual Settings

Pre-pandemic, franchise sales meetings were expansive, especially in larger franchise organizations. Potential buyers arrived at a central location, sometimes flying in, and checked into hotels. On the evening when they arrived, they would attend a meet-and-greet where they would make personal connections with other prospective buyers, with current franchisees, and with your company representatives. The next day, people would attend a day-long session. Those days were long, intensive experiences.

Now, all that has changed. It just doesn’t work to have potential buyers spend an entire day in an online meeting, and you shouldn’t expect them to. But you can still ingage potential owners around their four fundamental motivations for buying by segmenting the sales experience into shorter virtual meetings.

What is a good way to schedule and organize these shorter sessions?

  • First, replace the meet-and-greet pre-event meeting or dinner with shorter, virtual social time. People still need to connect with each other. Yet simply setting up a mass virtual meeting could be overwhelming. I would recommend having virtual social meetings that include only four or five prospects, moderated and facilitated by a few people from management. Prospects can introduce themselves and say a little about their background. But mostly, they simply socialize. Make them feel comfortable. This really helps them feel that even though they own their own franchise, they are part of something bigger.
  • Second, organize your discovery day into micro virtual meetings where they learn about each part of your company. In these sessions, allow small groups of prospects to meet the key people in your organization. There is no need to schedule these sessions nonstop, one after another. Thanks to the power of virtual meetings, you can spread them out to allow more leisurely, effective learning. The first meeting can give an overview of your history, your products, and your organization, and can feature presentations or videos that feature testimonials given by successful franchisees. Follow-up meetings can explain your training, your marketing support, onboarding, franchise consultants, etc. This part of the process should help the franchisees determine whether they would enjoy running the business and if they can get a sufficient return.
  • Third, allow prospects to take some of your training, so they can see how great it is. This allows them to see first-hand that your company’s training will be there to help them both master your systems and to train the employees they hire to run their locations. This powerfully demonstrates that your franchise is there to assure the success of every owner. It greatly helps with their need to feel that there is greater safety in operating a franchise than being on their own. Additionally, topics you would cover in meetings can be covered not there, but separately via training.

And One More Consideration . . .

If a prospective buyer tells you that he or she would prefer to learn about your opportunity on a phone call instead of in virtual meetings, that’s a negative indicator. It tells you that person is not “there yet” from a technological point of view. As you add new franchise owners in today’s world of doing business virtually, you want owners who are fluent with technology – completely up to speed.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is a 35-year franchising veteran as both a franchisor and franchisee. He is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal of Ingage Consulting. He hosts Training Unleashed, a podcast covering training for business, and author of Ingaging Leadership Meets the Younger Generation. Evan is a registered C-Suite Network Advisor. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanspeaksfranchising.com. Follow @ehackel or call 781-820-7609.

 

Categories
Growth Personal Development

Wisdom for Franchises . . . Your Potential Franchisees Have Changed, Have You?

More and more of your potential franchise buyers today are members of Generation Y and Generation Z. Do you understand them? Are you sure you are selling to them in the most effective ways possible?

Just to review, members of Generation Y (who are also called millennials) were born in the 1980s and 1990s and are roughly between the ages 30 and 40 today. Members of Generation Z were born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s. The older members of this group, who are about age 25 today, are out there shopping for franchises today too.

If you think back on the people who have visited you at franchise expos and met with members of your franchise sales team lately, you will realize that a growing majority of your potential franchisees are members of Generations Y and Z.

But are you talking to them in the right way?

What Has Changed?

A great shift has taken place in the way members of those generations shop for franchises, compared to how members of older generations did. In brief, here is one thing that has changed . . .

  • Members of Generation Y and Generation Z do a much larger percentage of their buying research online. They are likely to know a lot about you before they even talk to you.
  • Members of older generations, including Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) still prefer to learn about you by having conversations with real, living people. 

Members of both those groups will drop by to speak with you at franchise expos. They will call you up. And if they are interested, they will want to sit down with your representatives to make the most informed buying decisions possible.

The difference is that potential franchisees from Generation Y and Z will usually know a lot more about your franchise before they have made those contacts. They will often tell you, “I have read everything on your website, and I need you to tell me more.”

How can you do a much better job recruiting those members of Gen Y and Z?

Provide a Deeper Level of Information Online

On your website and your social media channels too, be sure to provide:

  • Testimonials from your current franchisees.
  • Deeper information about who you are, what you sell, how your systems work, and more.
  • Information about the unique technology you use, because technology “speaks” to members of those younger generations.
  • In-depth information about the training you offer, because when potential franchisees understand that you offer exceptional training, they feel more confident that they will know how to succeed if they become your franchisees.
  • Still more information about your annual franchise conventions, the systems you use to communicate with franchisees, and more. The more information they know, the more confident they will feel about coming on board.

What About Securing Your Information?

I have sometimes heard franchise executives say, “I hesitate to put too much information about our system online, where anyone can see it – our competitors, for example. We have to protect ourselves.”

That is a valid concern, but keeping your information hidden from sight can be a mistake in a day when many more of your potential franchisees – those members of Generations Y and Z – want to know everything before they will consider joining your franchise family.

One solution to this problem is to include a questionnaire on your website that potential franchisees can fill out to request more in-depth information or a call from a member of your franchise sales team. On this form, you can ask potential franchisees to indicate their locations, how far along they are with their decision-making process, and of course to provide contact information. Once these potential buyers become “qualified leads” by filling out your questionnaire, you can start those conversations while feeling more secure about providing them with a level of in-depth information that you might not want to provide openly on your website for all visitors to see.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is a 35-year franchising veteran as both a franchisor and franchisee. He is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal of Ingage Consulting. He is a speaker, hosts “Training Unleashed,” a podcast covering training for business, and author of Ingaging Leadership. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanspeaksfranchising.com. Follow @ehackel or call 781-820-7609. Why not have Evan Hackel address your group about franchising success?

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

Why Training Plays a Critical Role in Hiring and Keeping the Best Employees

Keeping employees from quitting their jobs after only a year or two is becoming a bigger challenge for many businesses across the county. Is it a problem for you?

“The New Reality of Employee Loyalty,” an article that Peter K. Murdock wrote for Forbes, suggests that in order to keep new employees, companies should discuss their career futures with them and have three-year development plans in place. “If you can’t see where your employee will be in three years within your organization, assume they will be working for someone else,” Murdock writes. And he is probably right.

Yet because Tortal Training is a training development company, we know another secret for building employee loyalty . . .

Offer top-notch, comprehensive training for new employees

Why is training a secret for both hiring and keeping new hires? Here are some of the reasons we have seen.

  • Great training convinces new hires that you care about keeping them with you in the years ahead. If you demonstrate your willingness to invest in training employees, they realize that you believe in them and want them to be with you for the long term.
  • Great training sets your company apart from others. When job-hunters are given the choice of working for a company with a comprehensive training program and one that does not, they consistently decide to work for the company that does. It only makes sense.
  • A comprehensive onboarding program that brings in a wide variety of your new hires demonstrates that you are not a company that discriminates on the basis of background, religion, ethnicity, lifestyle or other factors. Your training program can be a vibrant and engaging experience that tells everyone, “This is a company where you belong.”
  • Training that teaches your company history and values increases the perceived worth of working for you. It shows that you are not only training people to perform specific tasks, but to join a company that stands for something. Note that videos that tell the history of your organization and that profile your leaders and customers are a low-cost way to create a compelling, value-added training experience that lays the foundation for employee satisfaction and long-term employment.

Another Way to Use Training to Encourage Retention . . .

As Peter K. Murdoch notes in his Forbes article, it is important to take the extra step of using training as a time to create long-term development plans for every new hire you bring on board. If you offer management training programs for employees, for example, talk about them. If you can identify certain hires for specific promotional tracks, talk about those opportunities during onboarding training. New retail salespeople can enter training programs to become future store managers, for example, and IT technicians can take additional training to join your team of digital marketers.

If you want your new employees to envision a bright future working for you, remember that training is the place to start. To learn more, contact Tortal Training today.

Evan Hackel is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Tortal uses strategic engagement methodologies and specializes in developing mobile training platforms for organizations with distributed workforces. Evan is also Founder and Principal of Ingage Consulting, a management and leadership consulting firm located in Woburn, Massachusetts. Evan is an expert advisor on the C-Suite Network.

 

 

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

Pre-Onboarding Wisdom for Franchises

There is such a thing as pre-onboarding. Let me make this statement about it . . .

If you want your entire franchise to achieve high levels of success from top to bottom, pre-onboarding is something you absolutely have to do.

So, what is this activity that I am recommending so strongly, pre-onboarding? It is a process in which you enroll serious potential buyers in a program that teaches them everything about your franchise that you possibly can. You give them a complete onboarding experience, omitting only the signing of final agreements and legal papers.

Why Is Pre-Onboarding Essential Today?

In the old days, individual owners often had an imperfect idea about what they were getting themselves into when they bought franchises. They went ahead and bought anyway. Many had high expectations, became disillusioned, and got out fast.

In today’s more competitive climate, franchises realize that allowing that to happen can cause irreparable damage to the entire franchise at every level, because . . .

  • It becomes dramatically more difficult to sell franchises, because potential buyers won’t consider buying one where there is a known chance of failure. And if individual franchises are failing, make no mistake about it, potential new owners will find out.
  • Customers stay away if they see one location close, and stop shopping at franchisees that are not well run. The strength of the entire franchise brand erodes.
  • The owners of failing franchisees sell their locations at low prices, or at the bottom of the scale, their franchise agreement requires. That devalues the entire franchise, with crippling results.
  • Unskilled, ineffective franchise owners become the norm in a franchise. Again, the results of that are crippling. Poor sale revenues, low customer loyalty, high employee turnover, and other problems become the norm.
  • Communications between the franchise company and individual owners are weak because they were not established early on. In your franchise, you want to make sure that your relationship with every franchisees is strong, positive, and ultra-effective. That can’t be an afterthought. It is something you need to establish and cultivate with your owners through pre-onboarding, even before they become owners.

Some Keys to Effective Pre-Onboarding

Have your strongest potential buyers . . .

  • Visit and spend a few days working in successful franchise locations, so they see first-hand how your franchise works, what makes it successful, and more. 
  • Enroll in the same training programs that you offer do your franchise owners. 
  • Attend your annual franchise convention, where they can take part in seminars, hear talks from successful franchisees, and get an informed inside perspective on what their experiences as owners will be like. 
  • Get to know with your current owners, become part of their community, and share information and insights. This helps assure that new owners come on board with realistic expectations, and helps build a community in which all your franchisees are part of something that they see are critically important to their success and to their lives.
  • Sit down with members of your franchise’s leaders, with successful franchisees, with members of your sales team, and other important people in your enterprise.

Does offering a great pre-onboarding program take time? Yes, but in the end, it saves time because your franchise owners are more knowledgeable, more enthusiastic, more skilled, and much more likely to succeed. Plus, a great pre-onboarding program makes each of your franchise locations more profitable.

So as I close this article, let me offer one final word of advice about pre-onboarding. If you do it, and do it well, it will completely transform your franchise.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is a 35-year franchising veteran as both a franchisor and franchisee. He is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal of Ingage Consulting. He is a speaker, hosts “Training Unleashed,” a podcast covering training for business, and author of Ingaging Leadership. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanspeaksfranchising.com. Follow @ehackel or call 781-820-7609. Why not have Evan Hackel address your group about franchising success?

 

 

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

Why Training Is the Key to Getting the Most from Millennial Employees

I’m a baby boomer-aged guy. When I look back at the first jobs I took when I was fresh out of college, I realize that overall, my demands and expectations were ridiculously low by today’s standards. I took a job, got a copy of the employee handbook, took it home, and read it while I ate dinner. Training, if there was any, was minimal. In my first weeks on the job, I actually expected to feel ignorant and unskilled. It seemed normal for me to bumble around and make mistakes while I learned the ropes.

And when it came to getting ahead in my new company, I expected to discover the secrets of success through trial and error. Nobody ever told me, “Here’s what we expect from you” or, “Here are the skills we want you to show us if you want to move ahead.” They only told me, “You just made a mistake, don’t do it again.” And every now and again, somebody would call me into an office and say, “We’re giving you a promotion,” usually without telling me why. I went home and celebrated with my family. But why had it happened?

In short, working and building a career in those days was more like toiling away in a black box – and people did it happily, without thinking anything was wrong.

Millennials Have Far Different Expectations

Boy, have things changed. Today, most millennial workers would object strenuously to the same kind of conditions that I accepted in my early years, and thought were normal. And if today’s millennials take a new job and discover conditions like those in a new workplace, they are going to start looking for new jobs in a matter of hours.

Ample research documents these changing millennial attitudes. One major study from Gallup, “How Millennials Want to Work and Live,” reports these findings:

  • 60% of millennials say that the opportunity to learn and grow on the job is extremely important. In contrast, only 40% of baby boomers feel the same way.
  • 50% of millennials strongly agree that they plan to remain in their jobs for at least the next year. That might sound like a big percentage, but 60% of members of all other groups plan to stay in place for at least a year. Baby boomers and others are planning on sticking around, while millennials are weighing their options.

Learning and Training Are Key to Retaining Millennials and Maximizing their Productivity

Findings like those – and you can easily find other research that reports similar findings – document that millennials are more likely to be engaged and to stay on their jobs if they can learn.

In the companies that I have led, I have seen the realities that underlie those statistics. I have also seen first-hand that training is the key to building the kind of work environment that millennials value.

Here are some of the new realities that I have seen, and my beliefs about why they are happening.

  • Millennials like to feel capable and confident in their jobs. When I was their age, I was happy to look like a rookie in my early days on a job and to learn needed skills along the way. Millennials do not feel that way. Many think of themselves as leaders – or as leaders who are waiting to be discovered. They want to look good and thrive on being able to confidently contribute from the first day they arrive on the job. The right kind of training – both for new and current millennial employees – makes that happen.
  • Millennials are usually skilled students. They like to apply the learning skills they built while they were in school. To them, learning feels as natural as eating three meals a day. As the Gallup study found, they are eager to learn. In contrast, getting baby boomers to believe in training can be a harder sell. They tend to view training as a burden, something they have to endure. Millennials say, “Wow, when can I start?”
  • Millennials are tech-friendly. Most of them love to be trained on their mobile phones and tablets, which are the most powerful training options available to many companies today. The result is better knowledge transfer, even to groups of employees who work in multiple or far-flung locations. Baby boomers, in contrast, are more tech-resistant. They are likely to freeze and resist when they hear they are going to be taking company training on their smartphones.

Training Is the Place to Build Millennial Productivity and Retention

A lot of training focuses on teaching needed skills. It should. But training can accomplish a lot more than that if you use it to establish some of the following things that many millennials are looking for:

  • Mentoring relationships with their supervisors. Gallup found that 60% of millennials feel that the quality of the people who manage them is extremely important. With that in mind, your training for new employees can set up mentoring, not reporting, relationships between them and their managers. Explain how often check-ins and job reviews with their managers will happen, and what they will cover. (I am a firm believer in frequent check-ins between managers and the employees they supervise, not pro forma reviews that happen every so often.)
  • A sense of belonging on an energized and innovative team. This is a bit of a contradiction, but at the same time millennials think of themselves as individualist entrepreneurs, they also expect to be part of an interesting team. Letting millennials get to know their teammates during training, and fostering a sense of team/group identity, can help convince them that they have joined the right organization.
  • A well-defined career path. I am a big believer in creating a personalized career development plan for new employees. (The exception being seasonal or other short-term employees who will probably not remain in your employ for long.) Another idea? Enroll new employees in management training programs from their first days on the job. In retail, for example, you can enroll them in training that will enable them to manage their own stores in two years, or after another stated period. Millennials like to know their next steps as they build their careers, and training is a fine place to explain them.

Yes, training is important to millennials. But I encourage you to think of it as more than a chance to teach skills. Millennials are the most energized, skilled, and capable generation ever to enter the workforce. Train them well and they will become your organization’s brightest future.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel, the creator of the concept of Ingaged Leadership, is a recognized business and franchise expert and consultant. Evan is also a professional speaker and author.  Evan is Principal and Founder of Ingage Consulting, a consulting firm headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts. A leader in the field of training as well, Evan serves as CEO of Tortal Training, a Charlotte North Carolina-based firm that specializes in developing and implementing interactive training solutions for companies in all sectors. To learn more about Inage Consulting and Evan’s book Ingaging Leadership, visit Ingage.net

 

 

 

 

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

The Astonishing Benefits of Mentoring Your Franchisees

I am sure you are already doing everything you can think of to support your franchisees and assure their success. You are training them and their staff, offering them marketing support, inviting them to join supportive franchise counsels, and doing so much more.

But chances are there is one more activity you should be engaged in, one that might not be on your radar . . .

You should be mentoring your franchisees

What Is Mentoring?

In the context of non-franchise businesses, mentoring is usually a one-on-one relationship between a more senior employee (the mentor) and a more junior employee (the mentee) with the goal of helping the mentee contribute more, experience faster career growth, and benefit the company.

In franchising, mentoring usually means having someone from the parent franchising company forge that same kind of relationship with a franchisee to help him or her grow, achieve greater levels of success, and contribute more to the overall franchise system.

Yet a franchising company can facilitate other kinds of mentoring relationships too, usually with very positive results. The owner of one a highly successful franchise location can mentor a new owner, for example. Or a firebrand new owner who is achieving meteoric success quickly can mentor new owners, or even established owners who might have hit plateaus in their growth.

If you are creative and take stock of where your franchisees are in the life cycle of ownership, you will be able to identify many opportunities to use mentoring to build success.

Mentoring Is Far More Powerful than You Expect, Two Experts Say

I always believed in mentoring and tried to mentor others to help them achieve success. Yet my understanding and commitment to mentoring were deepened recently when I moderated a Training Unleashed Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Mark Timm, two highly successful entrepreneurs who believe that the more you mentor others, the more success will come back to you. That outlook will bring greater levels of success to your franchise too if you mentor franchisees.

Kevin was one of the original sharks on the hit television show Shark Tank. He is also recognized as the man who invented the infomercial. Mark, who calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” has built successful companies in more than a dozen countries, from retail to wholesale to manufacturing and real estate.

They believe so strongly in mentoring that they made it the focus of their new book, Mentor to Millions: Secrets of Success in Business, Relationships, and Beyond.

Both men explain that their success was transformed when they were working with the son of Zig Ziglar. Zig was a visionary business thinker who believed “you can have everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want.”

In a franchise, the potential returns from active mentoring individual owners are immense, because of the inherent structure of franchises. Whether you mentor a franchisee to improve his or her customer service, selling skills, marketing programs – or any other aspect of the business – you cause a quiet revolution to start right there in your franchise system. That revolution can ignite a spark of change that can trigger growth anywhere in your overall franchise system.

You never know just where! The positive mentoring outlook you start can transform the culture of your entire organizational system. There is no predicting just how extensively your mentoring efforts will repay you. As I say, even a tightly targeted mentoring relationship focused on improving a few activities can result in immense system-wide improvements.

The more you support franchisees through mentoring, the more your franchise will succeed. This is more than theory. Get started today and see how far you can grow.

 

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel, a 35-year franchising veteran is a nationally recognized expert and speaker on franchising. Evan is founder and CEO of Ingage Consulting, and CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company. Evan is an active advisor in the C-Suite Network. He is also author of Ingaging Leadership, and host of “Training Unleashed,” a podcast covering training for business. Contact him here, follow him at @ehackel, or call 781-820-7609.