If you’ve ever come within 10 kilometres of someone pitching a franchise, you’ve heard some sort of statistic about how franchises are four or five times more likely to succeed than an independent.
Hooking up with a good franchisor has made tens of thousands of small business owners prosperous and not just those lucky enough to land the first Tim Hortons franchise in town.
Most franchises don’t come with a ready-made clientele and an instantly recognizable brand name: their owners have to build their businesses one customer at a time, just the same as any other schmo.
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So what’s the secret of successful franchising and does it have it lessons for farmers?
For an answer to the first question we turn to Martin Fielding, who started Enviro Masters Lawn Care near Toronto and now has a national chain of 50 franchises, some with more than 2,000 customers and $500,000 in yearly revenue.
Their success has little to do with gardening skills.
“Anybody can grab a shovel and plant trees or do lawn care Ñ that’s easy,” Fielding said.
“Most people get into business because they know how to do the work. They go, ‘oh, I know plumbing or I know landscaping, I’ll go into business for myself.’ What they don’t realize is that knowing how to do the work is just 25 percent of the business.”
Enviro Masters’ earth friendly approach to lawn care is a good hook, but what Fielding offers is a system and training in how to use it. The emphasis is on marketing and the company has manuals on everything from how to run a successful flyer campaign to how to respond to typical customer questions. It takes new franchisees into the field to show them everything from applying organic fertilizer to chatting up customers during sales calls.
“Our job is to make sure you know what you’re doing, that you know how to run the business properly and that you make money doing it,” Fielding said.
The other big component is goal-setting. New franchisees write three, five- and 10-year goals for revenue, number of customers and number of employees.
In the first couple of years, franchisees are allowed to spend much of their time doing physical work as they build up a base of clients.
But at some point, Fielding, with the list of goals in hand, will step in and say it’s now time to head to the next level.
“We’ll tell them, ‘you need to hire people to do certain jobs so that you can concentrate on growing the business. If you’re always out there cutting grass and landscaping, there will be zero time for you to grow the business.’ “
Fielding started franchising a decade ago and said every franchisee has not only met his goals, but done so ahead of schedule. That’s all well and good, but does this have any application to farming?
In fact, much of this is close to what Ontario farm financial adviser Mike Bossy does, and many of his clients are dairy producers, hardly the types who have to worry about marketing given supply management rules that govern the industry.
Instead of marketing manuals, Bossy urges his clients to develop what he calls operating protocols.
“It’s about how you run your farm; about what you do from the moment you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he said.
The protocols concentrate on getting the greatest value from expenditures, creating a value mindset in the entire operation, making capital investments that lower costs and making the most productive use of every asset. These protocols have to be written down.
Bossy also focuses on achieving goals and employs an in-depth goal-setting process just as Fielding does.
This is a long way from the type of work that farm financial advisers used to do. Even a decade ago, Bossy said, most of his clients just wanted him to prepare their taxes and financial statements.
Today, they want a pair of outside eyes that can spot weakness in their operation, someone with experience in building on strengths and an ally who can help them seize opportunity.
Most farmers would chafe under the franchise model, where you’re told to park your ideas at the door and just follow the manual.
But many now realize that you can go overboard the other way and that refusing to take advantage of the skill, experience and wisdom of others could leave you trailing the pack.
Glenn Cheater is editor of Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the
Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found in the news desk section at www.farmcentre.com. The views stated here are for information only and are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
