Advantages of Franchising – Clay Serenbetz

The primary advantages for most companies entering the realm of franchising are capital, speed of growth, motivated management, and risk reduction — but there are many others as well.

Capital

The most common barrier to expansion faced by today’s small businesses is lack of access to capital. Even before the credit-tightening of 2008-2009 and the “new normal” that ensued, entrepreneurs often found that their growth goals outstripped their ability to fund them.

Motivated Management

Another stumbling block facing many entrepreneurs wanting to expand is finding and retaining good unit managers. All too often, a business owner spends months looking for and training a new manager, only to see them leave or, worse yet, get hired away by a competitor. And hired managers are only employees who may or may not have a genuine commitment to their jobs, which makes supervising their work from a distance a challenge.

Ease of Supervision

From a managerial point of view, franchising provides other advantages as well. For one, the franchisor is not responsible for the day-to-day management of the individual franchise units. At a micro level, this means that if a shift leader or crew member calls in sick in the middle of the night, they’re calling your franchisee — not you — to let them know. And it’s the franchisee’s responsibility to find a replacement or cover their shift. And if they choose to pay salaries that aren’t in line with the marketplace, employ their friends and relatives, or spend money on unnecessary or frivolous purchases, it won’t impact you or your financial returns. By eliminating these responsibilities, franchising allows you to direct your efforts toward improving the big picture.

Improved Valuations

The combination of faster growth, increased profitability, and increased organizational leverage helps account for the fact that franchisors are often valued at a higher multiple than other businesses. So when it comes time to sell your business, the fact that you’re a successful franchisor that has established a scalable growth model could certainly be an advantage.

Staffing Leverage

Franchising allows franchisors to function effectively with a much leaner organization. Since franchisees will assume many of the responsibilities otherwise shouldered by the corporate home office, franchisors can leverage these efforts to reduce overall staffing.

5 Business Tips Every Entrepreneur Should Know

The biggest problem founders and small business owners have is that they’re experts in their field and novices in what it really takes to effectively run a business. That’s what usually trips them up, sooner or later.

The problem is probably you.

When I was a young manager, my company sent us all to a week of quality training where the most important concept we learned was that 90 percent of all problems are management problems. When things aren’t going well, the first place to look for answers is in the mirror.

Listen to your customers.

It boggles my mind how little most entrepreneurs value their customers when, not only are their feedback and input among the most critical information they will ever learn, but their repeat business is the easiest business to get.

Trust your gut.

This phrase is often repeated but rarely understood. It means that your own instincts are an extremely valuable decision-making tool. Too often we end up saying in retrospect and with regret, “Damn, I knew that was a bad idea.” But the key is to know how to access your instincts. Just sit, be quiet, and listen to yourself.

Know your finances inside and out.

If you don’t know your revenues, expenses, capital requirements, profits (gross and net), debt, cash flow, and effective tax rate – among other things – you’re asking for trouble. Big trouble.

Learn to say “yes” and “no” a lot.

The two most important words business owners and founders have at their disposal are “yes” and “no.” Learn to say them a lot. And that means being decisive. The most important reason to focus – to be clear on what your company does – is to be clear on all the things it doesn’t do.

How Change Management Is Bigger Than Leadership

If an organization needs to undergo significant change, that’s a leadership issue, right? Old dogs will learn new tricks when the lead dog — or ape, or penguin, depending on the management fable of the moment — shows them off. Leaders need to craft compelling elevator speeches, relentlessly deliver the message of change, and above all, walk the talk.

That is all well and good for animal packs, and it helps with humans, too. But by itself, the lead-animal theory is woefully insufficient for changing large organizations or large parts of organizations. Leaders modeling behavior and talking the case for change can indeed help enterprises transform. But how often is that corporate alpha dog actually sitting among the pack? Most people in large organizations catch a glimpse only briefly, via dispatch or WebEx or the rare visit. Soon, the appearance fades and the banners droop. The workers, the managers, and even the executives look around to see if their environment has changed, if the tried-and-true behaviors that made their world work will continue to do so. If the environment has changed, fine; it’s time to adapt. If it hasn’t, then why bother to change?

How, then, does one lead the changing of an organization, whether it is a company, business unit, service line, department, or work unit? By changing the work systems that comprise the work environment around the people whose behavior is supposed to change. Therein lies the key to successful, embedded, and sustained change: alter the environment, and people will adapt to it. Call it a species strength. We behave based on the reality around us.

Eight aspects comprise our world at work and, therefore, patterns of behavior at work: organization (organizational chart), workplace (its physical or virtual configuration), task (work flow or processes), people (specifically the skills and orientation), rewards (and punishments), measurement (the metrics employed), information distribution (who gets to know what when), and decision allocation (who is involved in what way in which decisions). A skilled change leader can convert these eight aspects into eight levers for change.

3 Mistakes to avoid in a startup

You know that feeling when you’ve put in eight, nine or even 10 hours at the office and yet your task list is just as long as (if not longer than) it was when you arrived at work that morning. You’re tempted to try yet another task management app, or spend more of your valuable time Go-ogling ‘how do I get more done?’ in a desperate search for the silver bullet of productivity.

We’ve got the answers (no Google needed!) and even better—we know that these answers will actually help you get more done each and every day. When it comes to the pursuit of accomplishing more, we’re often our worst enemy. I can tell you that these mistakes would have torpedoed my career if I hadn’t fixed them.

Delegation:

I hired my first virtual assistant at just five hours a week. Five hours doesn’t sound like much, but the mental relief and refreshed energy I felt was immediate. Learning to delegate the tasks I didn’t like to do or wasn’t great at doing has been the biggest boost to my leadership I’ve experienced in my career. Whenever you’re sitting down to tackle something, ask yourself—‘Am I the best person on my team to be doing this particular task right now?’ And if you hesitate for even a moment in your answer, delegate it to someone else! Get over the perfectionism (‘No one else can do it as well as I do…’) or the pride (‘I’m not important enough to delegate tasks…’) and start delegating as soon as you can. Believe it or not, there are people around you right now who absolutely love doing the things you hate. And because they love it, they’re going to produce even better results that you could.

Don’t think you don’t have time to learn.

When I was desperately trying to find more time in my day, blocking out time during work hours for learning and development seemed like a luxury I couldn’t afford. But the opposite turned out to be true. When I was disciplined in earmarking time for reading, networking and exploring my industry, I found my mind brimming with new ideas and new ways of tackling my work that led to increased productivity. Thinking ‘I don’t have time to learn’ is a trap. Truly innovative leaders, the ones who are consistently finding new ways to meet market demands, make learning a priority.

Ditch the perfectionism.

Perfectionism often equals procrastination. Procrastination equals increased stress, short tempers and dissatisfaction with whatever you finally manage to produce. Time spent obsessing over small details is really time wasted. Once you learn that good enough is okay, you’ll free up a significant chunk of your day. I tell my team that 80 per cent perfect and finished is miles ahead of 100 per cent perfect and two weeks overdue.

4 Practices to Make You Confident

Organize your business.

Creating a clear roadmap of where you are, where you want to go and how to get there will make you more confident by grounding you in reality and action. Write down your goals in the form of daily to-do lists, weekly task-based schedules, monthly progress reports that track your successes and an annual business plan that evolves alongside your professional development.

Stay healthy.

Succeeding in business requires hard work, and that takes energy. Increase your energy by paying attention to the essentials: diet, exercise and rest. Eat nutritious foods, including balanced meals and nourishing snacks that make you feel refreshed and ready for your next challenge. Stick to an exercise routine that replenishes you, whether it’s individual activities (like walking, biking or working out at the gym) or group sports that build your confidence as part of a team that works together towards a common goal. And get a full night’s sleep as often as possible so you wake up every morning with a get-up-and-go attitude.

Practice power poses.

Here’s something you can do this every minute that will make you feel more confident right away, courtesy of social psychologist Amy Cuddy. Her research shows that we can feel better about ourselves simply by changing our stance.

Rid your life of negativity.

If you want to live a positive, joyful life, you cannot surround yourself with negative people who don’t support or encourage your happiness. There will always be consistently negative people who constantly try to bring you down. Don’t allow these people to sap your confidence. This may be easier said than done, especially if you work with naysayers. Try to distance yourself from anyone who isn’t good for you or your business. Make it a daily practice to focus on cultivating new, positive relationships and let go of the negative ones.

Steps to Starting a Small Business

Starting a business is exciting, heady stuff, and it’s not for everyone. Here’s some guidance to help you determine your entrepreneurial talents, whether you’re ready to join the ranks of small business owners and the next steps.

Why Start a Business?

For some, entrepreneurship is inspired by the need for autonomy, like in Jayson DeMers’ case. The founder and CEO of Audience Bloom, a Seattle-based SEO agency, was 24 years old and working a full-time job at an online-marketing agency when he began a side business

For others, starting a business comes from solving a problem in their own lives, like it did with Sujan Patel, the vice president of marketing at When I Work, an employee software scheduling company. Last year, Patel, 30 years old at the time, created two marketing tools to save himself time and effort in his job. After telling friends, who were also in the marketing field, about his tools, he discovered they were willing to pay him money for access to them.

Are You Ready?

While you may feel a sense of urgency to quit your job and get your business started, don’t quit just yet. How long will you be able to cover your regular expenses as you build your business? Do you have to keep your job as you work your business on the side? It’s time to assess your life situation to help you figure out the best way forward.

Sara Sutton Fell was in her third trimester of pregnancy and had lost her job shortly before she started her business, Flex Jobs, an online career site with flexible jobs that include telecommuting and part-time work. Starting a business while pregnant is not something she says she’d recommend, but her business idea resonated so strongly, Sutton Fell felt compelled to do so.

Rules for Being a Great Leader

Great leaders aren’t born, as some people suggest; instead, they are shaped over time. And, while what makes a “great” leader in one application doesn’t always apply to others, there are some general rules that all great leaders follow.

Talk less. Sometimes saying nothing is better than saying just anything.

Listen to your team. Always listen to what your team has to say, even if you don’t like it.

Be an example. Be the type of person you want your team members to be.

Be passionate. If you aren’t passionate about your business, you’re in the wrong business.

Be consistent. Be consistent in your behaviors so your team knows what to expect from you.

Have fun. Take the time to have fun with your team.

Stay in touch with your emotions. Don’t be a robot – let yourself feel.

Be approachable. Let people know they can trust you, and open your door to anybody who need it.

Return favors. If someone helps you, make it your responsibility to pay back the favor — even if it’s years later.

Stay in touch. If team members leave or change roles, stay in contact with them.

Know your limits. Don’t extend yourself beyond your means.

Boundaries of Social Entrepreneurship – Clay Serenbetz

In defining social entrepreneurship, it is also important to establish boundaries and provide examples of activities that may be highly meritorious but do not fit our definition. Failing to identify boundaries would leave the term social entrepreneurship so wide open as to be essentially meaningless.

There are two primary forms of socially valuable activity that we believe need to be distinguished from social entrepreneurship. The first type of social venture is social service provision. In this case, a courageous and committed individual identifies an unfortunate stable equilibrium – AIDS orphans in Africa, for example – and sets up a program to address it – for example, a school for the children to ensure that they are cared for and educated. The new school would certainly help the children it serves and may very well enable some of them to break free from poverty and transform their lives. But unless it is designed to achieve large scale or is so compelling as to launch legions of imitators and replicators, it is not likely to lead to a new superior equilibrium.

The difference between the two types of ventures – one social entrepreneurship and the other social service – isn’t in the initial entrepreneurial contexts or in many of the personal characteristics of the founders, but rather in the outcomes. Imagine that Andrew Carnegie had built only one library rather than conceiving the public library system that today serves untold millions of American citizens. Carnegie’s single library would have clearly benefited the community it served. But it was his vision of an entire system of libraries creating a permanent new equilibrium – one ensuring access to information and knowledge for all the nation’s citizens – that anchors his reputation as a social entrepreneur.