As any franchisor knows, a substantial part of any
franchising program is the work done to abstract the successful workings of
the business being franchised such that it becomes a ‘replicable unit'
- that is, a business whose operation can be can practically and
effectively transplanted.
The cornerstone of this process is the development of a
franchise operations manual. Because the success of a franchising program is
closely allied to the way in which the operational processes of the
franchise business are captured, expressed and supported through training, a
perfunctory franchise manual which incompletely or inaccurately addresses
the requirements for expressing the operations of the business will almost
certainly doom a franchise to failure. Only a quality encapsulation of
franchise operations will allow effective setup and support of the fledgling
business.
This article sets out a working method for developing a
quality franchise operations manual and gives an insight into the
considerations and issues the franchisor will face in the process of this
task.
What should be in a franchise operations manual?
The primary purpose of the franchise manual is to support
the operations of the business - that is, to support the people working in
the business to do their jobs. A franchise manual should set out the
following inter-related aspects of an operating business:
- what the roles of the employees in the business are
- what the main processes or activity streams of the
business are
- the tasks that are performed by employees of each role
in each stream
- the performance standards that attach to the tasks and
to the activity streams
- what the mechanisms for process management and
improvement are.
Who should write it?
Because of the critical nature of this documentation, the
short answer is - the most competent resource/s you have at your disposal.
The longer answer will involve figuring out whether that is you (the
business owner), your key employees or specialists you bring in
specifically.
When should it be written?
The franchise manual will actually enable many of the
complex planning activities that go into setting up a franchise program. It
should be written first. You will see why as you read on.
The phases of writing
The process of writing a franchise manual is similar to
the process of writing any technical, reference or training document that is
aimed at an end-user who has a need to be supported to do particular things.
A franchise manual is a ‘user document' - as much as any video
programming guide or word processing manual. Writing it involves working
through the following phases:
- defining the purpose
- analysing audiences, tasks and information needs
- determining the contents
- writing the contents
- reviewing and evaluating what is written
- fine tuning and publishing.
In this article we will illustrate how these phases can be
worked through using the case of a fictitious example company - Digest
Food Services, fine food caterers.
Digest Food - everywhere!
Digest Food's operations were relatively smooth and
quite profitable. Their successful formula in catering for corporate events
in Sydney was the precondition for taking Digest Food to other geographical
centres. This is how the franchise operations manual that would help them do
it was written.
Step 1 - Defining the purpose
As is proposed above, the purpose of a franchise manual is
to support the operations of a business - which is to say, the activities
of the individuals working in it. The directors of Digest Food, in
considering how a new DFS outlet might take wings at another location,
readily appreciated this purpose - but immediately upon imagining what the
manual might contain when finished saw that the development of such a
document contained a challenge to the way their business currently operated.
Are we actually operating as efficiently as we can? In describing how we do
things now are we setting up the franchise to repeat our errors? In
confronting the formal expression of how their business operated, the
directors of DFS realised that the franchise manual had a dual benefit -
DFS could look to improve what it did at the same as it took stock of it. At
the very outset, the franchise manual project became a project of process
improvement and refinement as well as a documentation exercise.
Step 2 - Defining audiences, tasks and needs
The franchising business needs to consider the roles in
which its employees act. How roles are defined however is often a grey area.
Smaller businesses often don't extend their conception of their human
resources beyond an identification of the actual individuals working for
them, ie Fred is responsible for X, Y and Z. Separation of Fred from his
role/s is important - if or when Fred separates himself from the business
the role/s he inhabited must continue to be fulfilled.
The ‘audiences, tasks and needs' step in developing a
franchise manual involves separating employees from functional role and then
defining the characteristics of the role in terms of the business tasks the
role is responsible for carrying out. An individual employee may have a
number of roles, and a single role may be shared by a number of employees.
Conceptualising the business this way is critical to being able to transfer
it elsewhere, where others can be trained to perform its roles.
The directors of DFS developed a matrix which specified
the roles of the business and the tasks belonging to them. Around this they
were able to shade in a whole range of other important details - for
example, they specified the experience and capacities required by an
employee to qualify for employment in a role. They also were able to list
what support an employee needed in role - in other words, knowledge needed
to do their job that it was not expected that they possessed before joining
the business. These were the knowledge ‘needs' the franchise manual had
to supply. Taking the process further, the directors grouped the functional
roles within the main activity streams of the business - sales and
marketing, orders and inventory, production, dispatch and administration.
They now had the elements and activities of the business laid out before
them in a way that corresponded to how the business functioned, and they
were able to specify in a detailed way the performance levels that needed to
be defined to meet the objectives of the business plan for the franchise -
and to validate that they could be achieved.
Step 3 - Determining the contents
Armed with a framework from defining audiences, tasks and
needs, the directors of DFS listed at a high level the topics that needed to
be covered in the franchise manual. The topics were of two kinds - tasks
and information topics. The tasks were descriptions of activities carried by
employees in particular roles; the information topics provided background,
concepts and descriptions of performance standards for the business. The end
product of this phase was a detailed table of contents for the manual, and
an estimation of the amount of work involved to do the actual writing.
Step 4 - Writing the contents; Step 5 - Reviewing
and evaluating what is written; Step 6 - Fine tuning and publishing.
These steps are grouped in a block because they are
repeatable in sequence. Once the ‘blueprint' for the franchise manual
has been developed, the writing process involves an iterative cycle of input
gathering, drafting, reviewing, revising and re-drafting. For the directors
of DFS, who were keen to harness the capacities for process improvement that
the franchise manual project offered, this was an intensive but highly
rewarding period of activity. As the true nature of DFS's operations were
captured in print the opportunity for a critical evaluation of what the
business was actually doing arose. For a successful and ‘franchisable'
business, a remarkable amount of process development and refinement took
place. Numerous inefficiencies were uncovered, some costly duplications and
one or two terrifying ‘gaps', which had the potential to really derail
the smooth running of the business entirely and which were hidden by actions
that capable employees had been taking on their own initiative, unbeknownst
to the directors.
At the process end, the directors of DFS were delivered a
twofold outcome that was as valuable as it was comforting - a franchise
manual that reflected reliable business operations. From what was expressed
in the manual they were able to build a highly-convincing franchise
marketing package. They were also able to immediately and directly benefit
by improved operations in their own parent unit of Digest Foods.
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