Fuel Growth: From Single Store to Fully Franchised

From restaurants to hardware stores, franchisors face similar challenges as they seek to fuel growth within their companies. How do you measure the needs of your customers, franchisees, and consumers and turn that data into decisions to improve your brand?

In the first episode of the Fuel Growth podcast series, Peter Holt, Chief Executive Officer of The Joint Chiropractic, joins Clint Oram, Co-Founder and Chief Strategic Officer, and Lizzy Overlund, Global Customer Experience Director at SugarCRM to share how his team successfully grew the company from a small, single-digit franchise business to a national chiropractic care franchise with over 500 locations. Holt talks about the power of franchising, the importance of listening to franchisees and consumers, and how to consider the competitive advantages businesses can exploit in their markets.

Using Existing Framework

What sets a franchise apart from other businesses? One major difference is that you don’t have to completely reboot your career to get started: “If you’re going to leave your industry and go off and do something else, where do you start? The bottom.”, says Peter. Franchising, however, doesn’t require you to mull over your career choices. As Peter states, “…all of that experience, all of that learning, all of that understanding of how to build and manage a franchise system is, quite frankly, concept-agnostic”. So, instead of requiring years of experience from a completely different industry, “you have this framework of that franchise model that carries you from concept to concept.”

Fueling Growth by Fulfilling Dreams

What fuels the growth of a chiropractic care franchise? For Peter, it’s bringing new people on board to start their own business and do what they love. “What we are is we fulfill people’s dreams because so many of us have this dream of ownership. We want to be our own boss. We want to be in control of our own destiny.”

Selling Mistakes

Starting a business from scratch is a scary notion for many would-be entrepreneurs. Franchising is one way to reduce your risks. “Franchising is the business of selling mistakes […] it’s in the very nature of the relationship [of the franchise] to help you minimize those mistakes, and those mistakes came from the experience across the entire network”, says Peter.

Listening

What’s one of the most important things you need to do for your business to survive? Listening to your customers—even more so as a franchise. “I say this to every new franchisee we have: […] every idea that a franchisee has is not a good one. […] The best ideas come from our franchisees. That’s a dynamic tension you have to tap into to keep your concept current.” says Peter.

Sharing

We learned how franchises fuel growth, but what fuels a franchisor more than anything else? For Peter, it’s helping people make informed decisions: “My purpose in life is to help people. This is what I love about franchising as I think of all the entrepreneurs that I’ve helped—I’ve helped fulfill their dreams. […] We’re helping people make fundamental decisions about their life […] Your job in this franchising space is to help people have the information they need to make a good decision, and that good decision may be ‘this is not for me’”

To find out more about the power of franchising, how powerful it can be to listen, and why it’s more important than ever to consider competitive advantages in your market, listen in on the podcast conversation here.