Maybe you’ve reached the point where you’re thinking about bringing in outside help with your franchise recruitment. Perhaps it’s slowed down and you want to give it a boost, or perhaps it’s the opposite, and you’ve grown to the point where you need to raise your game.
There are plenty of genuinely talented people out there who can help, but the big question is: how can you be sure the one you’re speaking to is right for what your franchise needs?
The right kind of help depends entirely on what’s actually going wrong, and until you know that, nobody, myself included, can promise to be the answer.
“Franchise specialist” is an incredibly broad term. Someone who specialises in building support networks isn’t necessarily the person who can fix your recruitment, and someone who excels at high-level strategy isn’t necessarily the person who can get your recruitment systems working more effectively.
Treating the leaves when the roots are sick
The first step is working out exactly what help you need, and that comes down to identifying the problem you actually want to solve.
Plenty of franchisors would say something like “I’m not recruiting enough franchisees” or “I’ve got plenty of leads, but my conversion rate is too low.” That’s a great starting place, but the issue here is that those aren’t problems – they’re symptoms. They’re the result of something which isn’t working, and identifying those root causes is the key to understanding exactly what help you need, and where to find it.
For example, low conversion numbers, when you’ve got plenty of leads coming in, could stem from any number of causes:
- A lack of automation, so leads aren’t followed up in a timely, organised way
- No defined process to keep good prospects moving through your pipeline
- Not tracking leads in enough detail to see where they’re falling through the cracks
- Content that isn’t delivering the right message, at the right time, in exactly the right way
It might even be a bigger, strategic problem. Are the leads in your database even the right kind of people in the first place? Is there something about your model, or the way you’re presenting it, that simply isn’t landing?
All of these are problems you can do something about. The catch is that until you know which one you’re actually dealing with, you can pour a great deal of time and money into fixing the wrong thing entirely.
So how do you work out what’s really going wrong?
Sometimes it turns out to be a systems problem. Sometimes it’s content or messaging. Sometimes the issue sits further back, in the strategy or in the profile of who you’re targeting in the first place.
That’s why I don’t think the first question should be “Which specialist should I hire?”
It should be “What’s actually holding our recruitment back?”
That’s something I can help you work out. Either it’s something I can help you put right directly, or it becomes clear enough what needs doing that you’ll know exactly what kind of specialist to go and find.
