Why Take the Time

Several franchisees have emailed and asked if it is necessary to take the time to attend the upcoming regional meeting on January 23rd. Yes, it is true that everyone is busy and there is always an issue of the expense of attending these meetings.

I responded to one such inquiry as follows:

This Regional CAMPA Meeting is primarily about developing metrics for business development. It is just too easy to let time slide by and rely on the “shoot from the hip’ strategy of marketing. This meeting is about each franchised location accepting personal accountability and committing to developing a plan and then executing it.

This year is the hump year. Everyone needs to make progress toward profitability. Everyone has their own breakeven point and line to profitability. In a startup mode, everything is usually about execution on the operations side of the business. After those early times in business, the focus needs to shift to the scalability of the business acquisition model and the execution of this model. Everyone’s attention needs to be concentrated and all of your resources focused on the single most important issue facing each franchisee - execution on a basic set of metrics (without excuses), the implementation and execution on a basic set of customer acquisition metrics to achieve profitability.
It is just too easy to blame all of the things that come up during the day, week, and month on why executing on the basics did not happen. This is the business equivalent of the “dog ate my homework” excuse of our youth.

The challenge is removing the obstacles and execute on getting and keeping new customers. The meeting is centered on three issues:

1. Developing business acquisition and other profitability metrics.
2. Understanding what has to be done to execute on these metrics.
3. Removing the obstacles that will block each location from execution on these metrics and developing a plan to remove and overcome these obstacles.

This process is no different than any business, sports franchise or individual that has achieved any measure of success goes through.

Next Blog posting: The Agenda