Franchising has been around since the 1970s, so nothing is new anymore — right? Wrong! The Franchise Council of Australia (FCA) has just launched a project that we believe is a world first in franchising: The Franchisee Success Club. By Steve Wright, executive director of the Franchise Council of Australia.
You might find it surprising, I certainly do, but the truth is there is not a franchising representative organisation anywhere in the world (to my knowledge) which has a success club for franchisees. In Australia, we’ve changed all that.
Of course, we acknowledge, and actively promote, prize winning franchisees, both within franchise systems, and at state and national levels. As the representative body for the whole franchising sector in Australia, the FCA is the primary exponent of this, through the FCA Excellence in Franchising Awards.
The FCAÕs role is to promote the sector; to help people to get into franchising and to help ensure they do as well as they can while they are in it, and even as they are leaving it. The Franchising Excellence Awards are the way we showcase those who are having a go and are doing well. It is a really useful way for franchisees, and prospective franchisees, to both see how the strong performers do it and to benchmark themselves to try to emulate the achievements of the winners.
While I have been executive director of the FCA, I have put as much emphasis as I could into making sure people in the sector take the opportunity to celebrate success, both within their own franchise systems, but also through state and national recognition in the Franchising Excellence Awards.
The FCA Awards is a demanding process. It is designed that way to ensure the entrants get the benefits of rigorous self assessment so that they can actually use that assessment to improve their businesses. Entering the awards and studiously going through the self examination required is what delivers the benefit. Winning is, of course, great, but it is the cream on the cake, not the cake itself.
A by-product of this is that not everybody who would like to enter feels they have the capacity, the time or resources to do their entry justice. As a result, many simply donÕt enter. For all those people, the answer is the Franchisee Success Club.
Everyday achievements
The aim of the club is not to replace the awards process, it is to complement it. The awards celebrate the deeds of the high achievers, the standouts. The awards are about state and national benchmarking; setting the most notable achievers from across the country against each other to determine who is the best in the particular field in question.
But we all know there are outstanding achievements going on inside franchise systems every day. ItÕs just that in most cases, the only people who get to hear about them are people within those individual systems. The Franchisee Success Club intends to change that.
It aims to bring acknowledgment and national recognition within the reach of any franchisee anywhere in the country.
At the FCA, we are proud of the fact that our Excellence in Franchising Awards program has tremendous reach, and highlights achievement in many important areas, not just financial success. The awards focus on other areas including community involvement, promotion of women, and other categories reflecting a contribution to the sector.
With the Franchisee Success Club, we are now seeking to extend the reach of acknowledgment even further. Many franchise systems in Australia are in the developing stage, having not yet reached what many call critical mass for their long-term success. For most of these, the desire to acknowledge individual achievements within their system may be strong, but the opportunities to do so outside the system appear weak. This is where the Franchisee Success Club comes in.
Club criteria
The club will allow franchise systems to nominate individual franchisees on the basis of the same type of criteria we use to confirm that a particular business is a suitable entrant worthy of consideration for the Excellence in Franchising Awards. These are criteria such as profitability, efficiency, customer service, improved sales, community consciousness, constructive contribution to the franchise network and so on.
Participants are required to have made notable contributions or improvements in such areas and their efforts confirmed by their franchise system owners or managers. It will not be difficult to enter; business details and a 100-word summary of the reasons for the nomination will be the basic requirements.
To preserve the integrity of the process, the FCA will reserve the right to knock back a nomination. The first 500 entrants to the Success Club will be admitted free; thereafter a $20 entry fee will apply. We are keen to see not only 500 franchisees in the Success Club, we would like to move quickly to 1000, as 2011/2012 progresses.
I have no doubt that there are at least 1000 great stories out there among our nationwide franchisee community. An important part of the Franchisee Success Club is the telling of those stories. We want not only to acknowledge the achievements of ordinary people in our sector, but also to inspire others so that they too can create their own success story.
For many the success story will be one of business achievement or improvement. But that is not all we will focus on in the Franchisee Success Club. Those who have triumphed over some form of adversity — business, or personal which relates to their business — will also be very much a part of the Franchisee Success Club.
It can be a rocky road to success in business. It is hard work and nobody is exempt from that hard work. Not everybody succeeds. In the non-franchising small business market, 45 percent of businesses go out of business in their first two years. That number rises to more than 60 percent in four years.
The difference with franchising is that through the hard times — and the good — you are not on your own. You are part of a network that can support and encourage you. It will be the aim of the Franchisee Success Club to draw out some of the ways in which the community cares for the people within it. Some members of the Franchisee Success Club may be acknowledged purely because of the effort that they put in to help others in their system, or outside it.
It is going to be terrific to see just what the Franchisee Success Club delivers.