Present & Discuss Benchmarking Results – Best Practice #12
Many franchising companies will benchmark certain areas of the franchisee’s business. They may benchmark a little, for example. just sales results, or they may benchmark a lot – covering a multitude of sales, sales composition, labour, gross profit, expense areas and have a wide range of productivity and profitability metrics. Customer satisfaction indicators should be and often will be within those metrics.
In our experience, sometimes this information (or selected information within) will be available in time, ranging from real-time (i.e., right in the moment), through to hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, yearly, or, frankly, ad hoc.
Companies also vary on how this information is shared, ranging from only the franchisor viewing everything, to franchisees also viewing all results and for all units / stores.
Onto the point here, which is the presentation and discussion of benchmarking results. This is something that is not often done well and forms a really important and positive opportunity for franchisors and franchisees to learn together, identify insights, and take positive actions for their businesses.
Worst case, this information is just provided to franchisees – or, put differently, they just have access to this information.
Clearly, to bring this information to life requires presentation, discussion and facilitation – often by a well-trained field manager. The field manager can bring their experience and expertise which has been developed overtime, and no doubt benefited from several field manager capability developing workshops – available in many countries.
Working with the franchisee, a field manager who understands the metrics well, can help franchisees put metric areas into perspective, understands how strengths and weaknesses are identified, understands likely priorities and actions, and is well placed and trained to help take the franchisee on a performance and relationship-improving journey. That journey then includes reviewing benchmarking information together, generating insights, identifying objectives and actions and updating their business plan.
That field manager can then help facilitate the franchisee in making the link to implementation; in other words, the franchisee is clear on a range of impactful actions they can take in their business and understand how those flow back into their business plan objectives. And they are motivated to do them.
Most importantly, the franchisor plays a role in helping bring this benchmarking information to life and helping to interpret what it means and how it can be used in decision-making. Franchisors can also organise franchisee performance group workshops to provide a similar (often complementary) role.
About the Franchising Best Practice 500 Series
This is part of a series of franchising best practices. Franchize Consultants is sharing and publishing these best practices weekly for the betterment of franchising. We know that better knowledge and execution of franchising best practices leads to bigger and more valuable franchisor and franchisee businesses.
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