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Franchise Conferences - The Learning and Networking Bonanza

Guest post by: Rod Young

Article Overview: One of the key features of the most successful franchise networks is the quality of their national, and now more often, international franchise conferences and conventions. These events are planned in meticulous detail, with a focused theme to drive home to delegates the key points that the franchise management want to convey. They are often used as a launching place for the next year's marketing strategy and coupled with training programs designed to permeate the current best practice into the network via the conference delegation.

Franchise Conferences - The Learning and Networking Bonanza

Learning is not limited to stand-and-deliver PowerPoint presentations or motivational speakers. The majority of the more successful conferences using the practical experience of successful franchise owners to tell their personalised success stories to the wider group, explaining with that intrinsic knowledge that only somebody working at the coalface can provide in a context that is clearly understood by the delegates listening to these presentations.

Robust question and answer sessions create empowerment among delegates who need to be heard if a strong franchisor/franchisee relationship is to involve as part of the culture of the network.

Many franchise networks have used the expertise and objectivity that the key executives of DC Strategy have developed over many years of working with a wide cross-section of franchised networks to educate franchisees on the bigger picture of franchising and provide an understanding of how their network and their franchise arrangement compare with the broader market.

Round tables of 10 or 12 delegates, each with a topic that has been researched by the franchisor prior to the conference that may be alive in the network and conveyed by the franchise grapevine are always successful.

The better networks not only encourage the attendance by the majority of franchisees, but actively facilitate the attendance of the franchisees' management staff as well. In this way, the learning from the conference is pushed deeper into the network and provides the franchisees staff with a much broader perspective of the network and the opportunities that may be available to them.

Another enormously important part of the conference is the social activities which help to nurture relationships between franchisees. This creates a sense of a broad franchise family, binding individual owner operators together under the franchisors brand and often leading to the creation of self-help groups of like-minded individuals who assist each other to overcome both business and family upheavals that may have been impossible to manage on their own.

Those franchisors that let budgetary constraints prevent them from running conferences for their franchisees are confusing cost with value. Most franchisors soon learn that the return on investment is rapidly reflected in the value that strong franchisor/franchisee relationships deliver to all stakeholders.

Like any other strategy, a good conference needs to be research, planned and executed to provide the value to both the delegates and the franchised network as a whole.

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