This article is going to cover how to help you focus on working on the brand instead of in the brand. How can you get markets ready to grow your brand by giving them the tools to be successful? Sometimes if you don’t manage the franchisees properly, things don’t go so well. Growing your brand and speed to market is about the process and the rollout, so your markets are ready to function. Today we’re going to cover how to deal with aligning the technology of process improvements, discussing the headaches of franchises and the benefits of leveraging technology across the board. These are the top six things to consider when it comes to setting up your franchise group with technology as you are growing your Brand. Let’s get started!

Setting Clear Expectations

Know what it is that you are trying to accomplish by setting clear goals and objectives. Knowing what the goals are and the why you are doing things, if it’s trying to reduce labor costs, increase sales, build a better brand by sharing what your success looks like in your brand. Where you are going and why you want to get there. Being clear in your contracts and understanding what your successfulness looks like with technology will help your franchisees grow your brand.

Build “Systems” around your System

Defining the what; Point of Sale, KDS, Menu Management, Supply Chain, Inventory, etc. that you have defined for your franchisees. Have the process and system documented.  Be sure to vet out your solutions before rolling out new technology. Constantly be evaluating and measuring. Any standard that you can go with is better that not having any standard at all.

Make Doing Business with Your Restaurant Brand Easy

Communicating and allowing the franchisees to give you feedback and build a forum where they can get their questions answered. Give autonomy to your franchisees and letting them to control a subset of their product offering. Embracing the differences across the nation when it comes to product, and enabling technology to have those options for them that they can easily manage and use.

Creating as Much Automation as Possible

Streamlining to be able to give the limited time offers, etc. Start early to help communicate with all your suppliers, for menu pricing and the engineering team that is implementing the technology that builds the automation. Becoming more efficient with deployments, that there are a lot of pieces involved enabling the Franchisee to drive limited time offers or other such deployments.

Give Enough Runway

Creating enough space so that the franchisees have enough time to implement a new LTO system or Point of Sale system. Don’t be super reactive, make sure you are planning the work to be done, and work that plan. Allows Franchisees to absorb these changes and to properly communicate with all those involved, suppliers, vendors, marketing teams, etc.

Measure Your Success: Analyze and Adjust

We hope these tech tips will help you grow your business and manage your franchisees. We encourage you to set up bench marks to evaluate and make it a point to identify four or five key performance integrators that will help you manage and measure, evaluating how well they worked.

Just a reminder, set the objective in the very beginning, figure out what it is that worked so you know how to replicate it. If you don’t know how you failed, you don’t know how to change and learn from your mistakes. Replicate what worked not what didn’t. We hope these tips will help you run your restaurant better and help grow your brand.

Listen to more on the podcast here.