I love mentoring people and helping them grow their businesses, so I do my best to keep in touch with my candidates even after they’ve signed their franchise contracts. Through these relationships, I’ve noticed that the franchisee’s mindset is often the distinguishing factor between successful and unsuccessful franchise owners. But what makes a successful franchisee mindset? I’ve seen four key characteristics that top-notch franchise owners tend to have in common. Here’s how you need to think if you want to succeed like them.
Know That It’s All About You
When you work in the corporate world, you’re often conditioned to think about everything in terms of competition: not just competition with other companies, but also competition with other departments and employees within your company. So if you come from a corporate background into the franchise world, as I did and most of my candidates do, you may be thinking in terms of competing with other franchisees.
Franchising, however, is much less competitive. In fact, good franchisors size their territories so that owners within the same network aren’t competing with each other. Instead, the owner network is a support benefit of franchising, with franchisees offering advice and encouragement to each other.
So instead of a competitive mindset that puts you in opposition to others, a successful franchisee mindset focuses on competition with yourself. Seek to one-up yourself by continually deploying your skills at maximum effectiveness and improving them whenever you’re able. The franchise business system already incorporates all the elements that win customers, so just follow it as closely as possible, and you’ll be in good shape.
Don’t Overthink Decisions
I sometimes see new franchisees flounder when it comes to making decisions, whether that means choosing where to locate their business, picking employees and vendors, or choosing among marketing options provided by their franchisor. Sometimes this is because a franchisee is an ideas-oriented person (as are many entrepreneurs). When faced with a decision, their brain just keeps spinning out ideas for what to do, rather than picking a path and moving forward. Other times, it’s because the person is not accustomed to the freedom of franchising. They’ve always worked in a corporate environment where someone was looking over their shoulder and telling them what to do. Either way, when the owner struggles to make firm decisions, the business suffers.
If this is a challenge for you, there are a couple of solutions I recommend. One is the 80 percent rule, a common principle followed in business decision-making. It recognizes that perfection is simply not possible in a constantly changing economy, but 70-80 percent is usually enough to achieve excellence. So once you have 70-80 percent of the information you need to make a decision, make it and move on.
The other option is to weight your decisions based on how irreversible they are. If a decision would be extremely hard to reverse (e.g., where to locate a brick-and-mortar storefront), collect more information and take more time to make it. If a decision is easy to reverse or remedy (e.g., choosing a cleaning service for your facility), make it more quickly and be willing to move forward with less information. This way, you save your time and brainpower for the choices that have the greatest impact on your business.
Have an Attitude of Accountability
Almost everyone has heard the old saying “Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes.” I’m going to add one more item to that list: mistakes. Humans are not perfect, so I never expect perfection from myself or my employees. Instead, I expect myself and my employees to have an attitude of accountability. This means admitting those inevitable mistakes and, most importantly, learning from them.
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of hard work, preparation, and learning from failure.
Colin Powell
A successful franchisee mindset incorporates this attitude. Especially as a new franchisee, you will mess up. You might hire a bad employee, say something that upsets a customer, or bungle a marketing campaign. It happens. But with an attitude of accountability, you can recover.
When mistakes happen, accountable franchisees don’t focus on blame. They ask, and encourage their employees to ask, “What happened here? What can I learn? How can I fix this issue or do better next time?” By answering those questions, they add to their store of valuable information and become better business owners over time.
Be Humble Enough to Work With Others
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, franchising does not typically involve the kind of cut-throat competition you’ll find in the corporate world. Instead, franchising is a very collaborative industry. Franchisors expect their franchisees to follow the business system and to collaborate with the brand and each other. The goal is for everyone, not just you, to succeed.
In other words, franchising takes a certain amount of humility. You have to be willing to follow a business system developed by someone else and forego the glory of creating a brand-new, successful idea from whole cloth. You have to recognize that you’re not the one with all the answers. Though you’ll have much more freedom than in a corporate environment, you will have to go along with certain rules and processes. In exchange, you get to skip the painful (and expensive) process of figuring out operational efficiencies and product-market fit. And you gain a fully supportive ecosystem to boost your business’s chance at success.
Not everyone has what it takes to develop a successful franchisee mindset. But if this sounds appealing to you, my co-consultant Lauri and I are here to help you take the first step. We even do it for free! Book a call with one of us today to get started on your success story.
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