I recently hosted a round table with business owners in the Retail and Franchise segments in Sweden. One thing that strikes me every time that I meet clients that operate a chain business, is the burning need to communicate more effectively with their store locations and staff. We often hear that “communication is key” – but more specifically, I often hear about the difficulty to effectively communicate about three key areas to stores:

1. OPERATIONS MANUALS / FRANCHISE MANUALS –Folks in retail and franchising now keeping manuals in binders and sending out updates is stone age. Nobody wants binders collecting dust in the back of a shop.
2. TRAINING – I’m surprised how many business still have new hires fly in to a central head office for introductory training. Taking people out of the workplace and putting them in class rooms takes valuable time out of the work day. To not use e-learning seems plain wasteful.
3. MARKETING – With today’s customers connected 24/7 via tablets and smartphones, tomorrow’s winning stores and chains need to communicate with clients across touch points, from e-mail to SMS.

In any given year, I see hundreds of customers and prospects to discuss franchise software. A common question: What is the right approach to improve communications in a franchise? The answer is simple: You need a communication tool that supports your daily operations and provides relevant know-how. Many upstarts with limited funds  turn to document repositories such as Sharepoint or Google Documents. On the surface, that may seem like a good idea, but in reality you need something more than a tree-structure library of documents to bring your organization to life. And as many will testify, once you begin to customize your Sharepoint, you are running up a hefty consulting bill. A better solution is franchise software written specifically for the industry. Collecting business know-how in a one stop shop, the cloud based franchise software will give your staff members access to operations manuals, franchise manuals, e-mail marketing tools, recipe handling, vendor agreements & discounts, training modules and sales reporting right at their fingertips. This takes away the hard and manual labour of keeping operations manuals up to date. You can handle loyalty programs and mass mailings right from one screen. Employees can take part of important trainings. For the cost comparable to a regular cell phone plan, per store and month, your entire network of locations can be equipped with a franchise software customized to your exact specifications. What’s more, the software can be deployed in just 4-6 weeks straight out of the box. We have been working in the franchise and retail industries for more than two decades and understand processes intimately. I strongly encourage you to read these customer cases we have produced to understand how we can help your business. Please find them here:

• Customer Case: Helping Colorama Retail Network Unify Under One Retail Software Platform And Establish A Leading National Store Brand
• Customer Case: Helping O’Learys Grow from Local to Global Concept with Franchise Software and Laser Focus on Franchise Compliance

We also put together a really helpful presentation to help you understand how Franchise Software can help your business.

• Presentation: Stick to your concept – How to equip your business with know-how

This is the same presentation that I shared at the Round Table – and it was much appreciated. Hope it can help you too! Thank you!