2009 Annual Franchise Development Report

The Office Visit is arguably the most important step in the franchise sales qualification process. The Office Visit goes by many names: Discovery Day, Information Day, Audition Day, Support Center Visit Day and on and on. Regardless of what you name it, it is the day for the management team and the franchise candidate to "get to know" each other beyond phone and email and decide if this is a good match for both parties.

The daily flurry of bad economic and financial news recently has made it difficult to focus on time periods beyond weeks, days, or even hours. However, I'll try to put things in perspective for the franchise community and offer both a forecast and some suggestions on how we can make the best of 2009.

There was a time when franchise site selection was as simple (not to mention as rudimentary and often random) as pushing pins in a map on a wall. Maybe they turned out to be good sites, maybe they didn't. But as technology continues to evolve and the tools are recalibrated to further refine the site selection process, the art is becoming a science.

The secret is out of the box. The mystery shopping has ended and the results have been revealed. Each year, for more than a decade now, Franchise UPDATE has conducted a mystery shopping survey of franchisors to assess their lead generation and recruiting efforts. Two methods--telephone and online--are "shopped" and objectively recorded. Each franchise organization registered for this year's annual Franchise Leadership & Development Conference by a specific cutoff date--nearly 150 of this year's attendees--was evaluated, and its data included in the study.

For me, adapting to the highly specialized world of franchise development was a laborious, disjointed journey. During the early 1980s, I searched for a road map for recruitment success that could jump start my performance and help avoid costly mistakes. But there was no drill-down guide detailing the key benchmarks to successful growth--no books I could buy dedicated to the business of growing a franchise business. After years of unnecessary trial and error, I learned through the school of hard knocks--as many of you have--relying heavily on peer networking and by attending development seminars and industry conferences.

All franchisors place a high priority on gaining new recruits and responding to contacts from prospective franchisees. But who's setting the pace on performance? Once again, Franchise UPDATE's mystery shoppers hit the phones--and the websites--checking out franchisors from coast to coast to see which were doing the very best work. The best and the brightest were recognized in the 10th annual STAR (Speaking To And Responding) Awards--from the three top national performers to the companies that excelled at fielding telephone contacts or quickly getting back to website leads.