EXPERT ADVICE: Evan Hackel | Founder and CEO of Ingage Consulting, and CEO of Tortal Training
Proof Positive!
Engagement Sells Franchises Evan Hackel, is a 35-year franchising veteran as both a franchisor and franchisee. He is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal of Ingage Consulting. He is a speaker, hosts “Training Unleashed,” a podcast covering training for business, and author of Ingaging Leadership. Why not have Evan Hackel address your group about franchising success? Follow @ehackel or call 781-820-7609. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanspeaksfranchising.com.
What is the one activity that every potential buyer of your franchise is absolutely certain to do before making the decision to buy? They will contact your current owners to ask how satisfied and successful they have been with owning your franchise. But what will your current franchise owners say? Will they say, “Buy this franchise, it is the smartest decision I have ever made” or, “Don’t buy this franchise, it was a terrible mistake.” If your current owners praise your franchise and explain how successful they have been, that positive feedback (referred to as “validation”) is something you absolutely need if you are going to sell more of your franchises. But how are you going to get it? Research shows that the average potential franchise buyer will call between four and seven current owners before deciding to buy a franchise. And if you have a broad-swath situation where 20% or 30% of your franchisees wouldn’t recommend you, the likelihood is high that a potential buyer will contact one of those dissatisfied owners. And if they do, the odds of selling your franchise will fall dramatically. 16 Franchising MAGAZINE USA
Engagement Is the Key to Getting Positive Validation In a massive project conducted with Franchise Business Review, we surveyed more than 30,000 franchisees about the role that engagement plays in determining how likely they are to give positive validation to potential buyers of their franchise. We built questions into the survey to determine how engaged the respondents were. We then took a close look at the top quartile of the most engaged owners and compared them to the bottom quartile (the least engaged). And the results were stunning. We found that 97% of owners in the top quartile (the most engaged franchisees), would strongly recommend the franchise to another person. Conversely, only 8%
of people in the bottom quartile would recommend the franchise. The survey also found that 81.5% of franchise owners in the top quartile described themselves as achieving a strong financial benefit from ownership, as compared to only 4.1% in the bottom quartile. I think we all know that profitability is one of the things that people generally use as a barometer of whether they are successful or not. So it follows that if you have franchisees who
