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Three ways franchisors can better leverage data

Sarah Stowe

Being a franchisor is a demanding undertaking. You’re required to oversee the operations of multiple independently run businesses, while ensuring that each complies with your overall business mission.

As a franchisor, you might find challenges in managing quality control and applying compliance measures across your franchisees. Overcoming these challenges is easily achieved if you’ve got your business data down pat.

Data is the backbone of franchisor operations. By monitoring important information like your accounting, compliance and benchmarking data, you can simplify franchisee operations to drive more efficiencies and improve franchisee retention.

As you scale your franchise, it becomes more and more important to consolidate franchisee information in the one place. This can ensure that you’re across all operations and nothing falls between the cracks so that you and your franchisees can achieve better business success.

If you would like to improve the way you use data to streamline your franchising operations, make sure to follow these three rules.

1. Commit to one true source of data

Franchisors often find themselves lacking control over their data. This might occur if you’ve got multiple systems monitoring different aspects of your franchise. If this is the case, you could find yourself with out-of-date or doubled-up data, which can cost you time and money to rectify on a regular basis.

By integrating your data systems so you have one true source of data, you can streamline information so that you can spend less time on calibrating data and more time on important business operations. Using one franchise software system across all of your business operations can save you and your franchisees a lot of time and can help you to optimise all of your business processes.

2. Achieve full transparency

If you don’t have visibility over the everyday operations of your franchise and your franchisees, how are you going to know when problems arise? Achieving full transparency across franchisee operations can mean you have more control over your franchise so that fewer errors occur and operations can run more smoothly.

Transparency gives you the ability to intervene if a problem arises so that you can help the franchisees to drive more efficiencies, save time, improve profitability or manage cash flow. The best way to achieve full transparency is to use franchise software that amalgamates your data in the one place. Having real time access to data on operations, sales journeys and income means that you can easily spot areas of success and areas that need improvement immediately. This knowledge gives you the ability to rollout processes to improve performance.

3. Deliver time and resource efficiencies

If franchisees are bogged down with manual tasks like accounting and reporting they can quickly lose time on important business operations, like acquiring new customers and clients. This is a sure-fire way to limit success for the overall franchise.

At Hire Hubby, we noticed that our franchisees were spending a lot of time on humdrum tasks like quoting and invoicing. This took precious time away from promoting their business and gaining new customers. This is why we decided to automate the process.

We developed Franchise Cloud Solutions to smooth out important business processes like accounting, reporting and marketing. By automating these tasks and keeping the data in a centralised location, we have made it much easier for franchisees while simultaneously giving us the ability to easily monitor important information pertaining to customer acquisition and retention, cash flow and performance across franchisees.

This has given us important knowledge on how to improve operations so that we can help our franchisees to address problems, improve results and achieve greater success.