Everyone in franchising knows that the cost of recruiting a new franchisee has gone up significantly in recent years, and it came as no surprise to see it confirmed as one of the key findings of the bfa survey this summer.
For most franchisors, the immediate response is to look at their marketing spend, review their ad campaigns, and ask whether the money is going to the right places. That’s a sensible exercise, but one that only tells part of the story and only captures the most obvious costs.
The cost you’re probably not tracking
Think about what happens after a long discovery meeting. You need to put together a follow-up covering everything you discussed, pull together answers to the questions the prospect raised, find a relevant case study buried somewhere in your emails, and perhaps recreate a document you’ve produced several times before.
None of this is wasted effort in itself. The problem is how much time it takes when information is scattered, tasks are repeated, and the process relies on you remembering where everything lives.
How often do you find yourself searching through old conversations to remember where you left things with a particular prospect? How many follow-up emails have you written from scratch that were, in essence, much the same as ones you’d already written a dozen times?
Every hour spent piecing that together is an hour you’re not spending with prospects, answering their questions, and helping them decide whether the franchise is right for them.
The cost to your prospects
There’s another cost that’s even easier to overlook: the experience of the people you’re trying to recruit.
When a prospect has to chase information they were expecting, wait longer than anticipated for a response, or repeat themselves because the details of an earlier conversation have been lost, it can create doubt. They’re considering a major financial and personal commitment, and they’re not just assessing the franchise opportunity – they’re also forming an impression of the people and the business they’d be working with.
A single delayed email is unlikely to change someone’s decision, but a series of disjointed interactions can affect their confidence in the support they’ll receive if they join.
The good news is that making recruitment easier for your team and improving the experience for your prospects often go hand in hand. When information is easier to find and routine tasks take less effort, you have more time to listen, respond properly and give each person the attention they actually need.
Where are the unnecessary steps?
In my work with franchisors, I often find myself asking a simple question: why does this step take so much effort?
Sometimes information is scattered across different systems, sometimes a task is being repeated unnecessarily, and sometimes a process has simply grown more complicated over time, without anyone stopping to question whether there’s a better way.
These things can be hard to spot when you’re close to the process every day. What looks like an unavoidable part of the job from the inside might look very different to someone looking at it with fresh eyes, and mapping the recruitment journey from beginning to end – identifying where time is being lost, where information gets stuck, and which steps could be simplified or handled automatically – is exactly the kind of exercise that can produce some surprisingly quick wins.
If you’d like to explore where your recruitment process could be working harder for you, I’m happy to take a look with you.
