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What makes a good operations manual? [part one]

Sarah Stowe

Franchisees will find it hard to run their business successfully without a good operations manual – it’s at the heart of a franchise system. Here Peter Baily, director of development Asia-Pacific for OPSM, explains how an old-school operations manual was given a new lease of life.

When Peter Baily took up his role with the OPSM brand the operations manual was “pretty useless” he says, and “quite legal in structure”. Alongside building a franchise set-up he spent three to four months re-invigorating this operations document.

“It needs to be engaging, with good graphics and have smart IP with legal protection,” he says.

He makes the point that it was important to change the focus away from providing optometry guidance to include information that will help franchisees run their business.  “We assume optometrists know how to do this [optometry] but some useful business information was missing.”

EASY TO READ, EASY TO USE

Getting the format right was important, Baily says, highlighting the importance of design and consistency of content.

Each module is divided into six sections which follow a set format: an overview, an introduction to the concept, expectations of what franchisees will need to abide to and how they can utilise the information, the OPSM way, support tools, and learning links to extra training modules.

“One of the really good tests of an operations manual is whether you use it to train new franchisees. We bring it in for training and induction and work through the manual, workshopping some elements.”

OPSM’s operations manual is a fully indexed, searchable online publication.  “I absolutely believe in delivering it online. It makes it easy to update, and we don’t have to rely on franchisees substituting new pages, we can make changes easily.

IS IT LIVE AND RELEVANT?

“We do two reviews a year, one a quick look, one more thorough. As things changes, it’s a live document,” says Baily.

“The trap can be for franchisors to build a manual, and put a lot of effort into it, then it sits on a shelf for a long time and then it’s a massive job to update it,” he adds.

Baily, above, says it’s important that the document does contain legal elements. “There is obviously a legal piece to it that underpins standards in the business, but it’s important to do it not like a legal agreement.”

He has found that occasional testing of possible scenarios also helps to keep the manual relevant. “You can ask, what happens if there is a breach in OH&S legislation for instance to test if we can take action.”

HAVE YOU LOOKED IN THE MANUAL?

So how do franchisees use the OPSM manual?

“They know 80 percent of what they need to know to run their business, but they might have a question and can find the answer in the manual. If they ring us, it’s our first question, ‘have you looked in the manual?’”

  • Read part two here