Business Development from the Franchise Perspective #3

You have got your company all up and running. You have been churning profits healthily. You have made some research and plan for your business expansion with your suppliers backing you. You have log on to the net and see the possibilities and the facts about franchising and how it can drive your business into the next millennium. You decide that its time for you to pick up the phone and call that "Franchise Consultant" that have been bugging you and share your plans.

Now hold our horses cowboy. Now getting a consultant to execute the job is fine. What you would want to know is, will "he" (some "consultants" is a one-man-show operation) do a good job.

Here are the list of things that you need to find out about your consultant / consulting firm.

#1. Office. Does your consultant have an office space. Visit your consultant in his office and see if its a genuine setup. Meet up with the team (if any). Get to know them and learn what they do and will they be a team member in your project.

#2. Your Consultant. Get to know your consultant. What are his / her experiences. Often, you should be able to get a brief idea of his or her knowledge through your discussions / conversations. Is he certified? Is he part of any government association or agencies? This may be trivial at first, but a certified and credible consultant will go along way to give you good service.

#3. Consulting firm. Check the background of the consulting firm. How long have they been in business? Locally and / or internationally. What is the their unique identifier or what makes them different from the other consulting firm. What kind of services have they got to offer? Are they providing an end-to-end service or are they outsourcing some of the processes to another company? Get to know what are their past projects. Although it is not possible to get your hands on their past clients completed documents, they can definitely show you a sample.

#4. Franchise Process. Get to know in detail what are the processes that will be involved in Franchising your business. What are the specific steps and the deliverables from you and most importantly from the consulting firm. Find out how long will the consulting firm take to get the job done. do they have a proven franchise system?

#5. Price. Ofcourse... "When you pay peanuts you get monkeys" Being expensive does not determine that the consulting firm will do a good job. But a rock bottom out of of the ordinary price smell fishy as well. Get a quote from the consulting firm after you have a through discussion. From there, make sure that the price is firm. Ask them what will be the coverage and ask them to put it in writing. Sometimes, the price is low due to some process being skipped and when you want to include it, a snowballing cost is incurred and at the end of the day, you are paying alot more.

Which ever consultant that you go to, I do believe these few points apply. Having said that, you have to be comfortable enough and should trust you consultant. A business expansion project is essentially a huge project and may take months to complete and all of the time, an expensive project.

Identify contact persons (yours and the consulting firm), this should enable smooth communication and exchange of information. Communicate to have a checkpoint meeting often to identify issues and road blocks before they get out of hand. Communicate clearly your expectations and objectives and have your end result in mind.

Do not make assumptions and leave it to the consulting firm to explore and make the decisions. Decisions should come from you, the business owner as you very well know how the business should be run.

Next post, we will discuss about post implementation issues and activities.

1. Reporting
2. Relationship Building
3. Support to your Franchisees
4. "Selling" your franchise