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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.

 

 

 

Evan Hackel
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