4 Steps to Create An Effective Franchise Training Program

Nothing beats the importance of a training program for any franchise. Whether you’re instructing your team on daily to-do’s or how to operate standard software applications, proper franchise training ensures that each location can flourish with day-to-day operations and offer a consistent experience for customers across its locations.

According to Shift, companies enjoy a 24% higher profit margin than those who spend less on training, making their investment in learning and development worth the cost. For franchisees, this could be the difference between a successful new business and a failing one.

The question then becomes: How can companies create effective franchise training for each location? Those that are starting their new business have likely committed thousands of dollars to their investment and want to make sure it thrives.

To ensure their success, here are some steps to help franchisees create the perfect training program:

Speak to franchise owners

It’s easy for franchises to take a new franchise owner’s investment and let them figure out the business for themselves. However, the lack of a good franchise training program will only increase the likelihood of locations needing help down the line.

To make sure that you have a firm grasp of what to use for training, talk to other franchisees and franchise owners about their respective positions. Pick their brains to find out what they’ve learned during their employment and what they learned at the start. 

Ask questions like:

• What are your daily activities?
• What key applications do you use?
• What do you recommend for training?

Using these questions, you can create a training program that covers all facets of running a franchisee.

Prepare content

Once you’ve spoken to other franchisees and employees, it’s time to start building training content based on their input. This content will be used for your training sessions, so make sure to use more than just a simple presentation during your training discussion.

Crafting materials that serve a specific purpose for each investment is key. If there is a new franchisee owner that wants to learn more about marketing their business, try printing out a list of approved marketing tactics that have proven successful for franchise owners in the past.

Giving every piece of content you use a purpose will remove all distractions and pointless information from your session. If you want to learn how to prepare materials that will help your trainees remember their onboarding, check out our blog post on how to create stickier training materials.

Start your training sessions at HQ

It’s Go Time! Invite new franchisees to a training session at headquarters. Start by handing your training content to franchisees (preferably in a folder to keep) and laying out your agenda for the session. This agenda should include:

• Introductions
• Objectives
• Activities

Each session should cover a certain aspect of the role. By breaking up the entirety of your training into multiple sessions, you are able to keep franchisees from burning out while allowing them to use the time within the session to ask questions.

Having an open floor to address inquiries or concerns is vital to an effective franchise training session. This will ease the franchisees into their roles and help them gain answers to their questions prior to opening their businesses.

Feedback

Perhaps the most important step of all is: Ask for feedback!

The success of a training program is tied to the success of those that it trains. Take the time to check in on your franchisees within the first few months of their work to see how they’re performing. This can be done through 1-on-1 meetings or email exchanges.

The point here is to ask what they liked about their franchise training and what they didn’t. Finding out the answers to both will help develop the program to better suit future franchisees. There should be no wasted time in any aspect of your training program, so take this last step seriously to improve your onboarding.

Overall, the value of a franchise training program cannot be emphasized enough for the sake of your business. Having an efficient and impactful process for acquainting new owners with your business will pay dividends for years to come and help your franchisees flourish as a result.

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