How to write a franchise manual

As any franchisor knows, a substantial part of any franchising program is the work done to abstract the successful workings of the business being franchised such that it becomes a replicable unit that is, a business whose operation can be can practically and effectively transplanted. The cornerstone of this process is the development of a franchise operations manual. Because the success of a franchising program is closely allied to the way in which the operational processes of the franchise business are captured, expressed and supported through training, a perfunctory franchise manual which incompletely or inaccurately addresses the requirements for expressing the operations of the business will almost certainly doom a franchise to failure. Only a quality encapsulation of franchise operations will allow effective setup and support of the fledgling business. This article sets out a working method for developing a quality franchise operations manual and gives an insight into the considerations and issues the franchisor will face in the process of this task. What should be in a franchise operations manual? The primary purpose of the franchise manual is to support the operations of the business - that is, to support the people working in the business to do their jobs. A franchise manual should set out the following inter-related aspects of an operating business: what the roles of the employees in the business are what the main processes or activity streams of the business are the tasks that are performed by employees of each role in each stream the performance standards that attach to the tasks and to the activity streams what the mechanisms for process management and improvement are.

Who should write it? Because of the critical nature of this documentation, the short answer is the most competent resource/s you have at your disposal. The longer answer will involve figuring out whether that is you (the business owner), your key employees or specialists you bring in specifically. When should it be written? The franchise manual will actually enable many of the complex planning activities that go into setting up a franchise program. It should be written first. You will see why as you read on. The phases of writing The process of writing a franchise manual is similar to the process of writing any technical, reference or training document that is aimed at an end-user who has a need to be supported to do particular things. A franchise manual is a user document as much as any video programming guide or word processing manual. Writing it involves working through the following phases: defining the purpose analysing audiences, tasks and information needs determining the contents writing the contents reviewing and evaluating what is written fine tuning and publishing.

In this article we will illustrate how these phases can be worked through using the case of a fictitious example company Digest Food Services, fine food caterers.

Digest Food everywhere! Digest Foods operations were relatively smooth and quite profitable. Their successful formula in catering for corporate events in Sydney was the precondition for taking Digest Food to other geographical centres. This is how the franchise operations manual that would help them do it was written. Step 1 Defining the purpose As is proposed above, the purpose of a franchise manual is to support the operations of a business which is to say, the activities of the individuals working in it. The directors of Digest Food, in considering how a new DFS outlet might take wings at another location, readily appreciated this purpose but immediately upon imagining what the manual might contain when finished saw that the development of such a document contained a challenge to the way their business currently operated. Are we actually operating as efficiently as we can? In describing how we do things now are we setting up the franchise to repeat our errors? In confronting the formal expression of how their business operated, the directors of DFS realised that the franchise manual had a dual benefit DFS could look to improve what it did at the same as it took stock of it. At the very outset, the franchise manual project became a project of process improvement and refinement as well as a documentation exercise. Step 2 Defining audiences, tasks and needs The franchising business needs to consider the roles in which its employees act. How roles are defined however is often a grey area. Smaller businesses often dont extend their conception of their human resources beyond an identification of the actual individuals working for them, ie Fred is responsible for X, Y and Z. Separation of Fred from his role/s is important if or when Fred separates himself from the business the role/s he inhabited must continue to be fulfilled. The audiences, tasks and needs step in developing a franchise manual involves separating employees from functional role and then defining the characteristics of the role in terms of the business tasks the role is responsible for carrying out. An individual employee may have a number of roles, and a single role may be shared by a number of employees. Conceptualising the business this way is critical to being able to transfer it elsewhere, where others can be trained to perform its roles. The directors of DFS developed a matrix which specified the roles of the business and the tasks belonging to them. Around this they were able to shade in a whole range of other important details for example, they specified the experience and capacities required by an employee to qualify for employment in a role. They also were able to list what support an employee needed in role in other words, knowledge needed to do their job that it was not expected that they possessed before joining the business. These were the knowledge needs the franchise manual had to supply. Taking the process further, the directors grouped the functional roles within the main activity streams of the business sales and marketing, orders and inventory, production, dispatch and administration. They now had the elements and activities of the business laid out before them in a way that corresponded to how the business functioned, and they were able to specify in a detailed way the performance levels that needed to be defined to meet the objectives of the business plan for the franchise and to validate that they could be achieved. Step 3 Determining the contents Armed with a framework from defining audiences, tasks and needs, the directors of DFS listed at a high level the topics that needed to be covered in the franchise manual. The topics were of two kinds tasks and information topics. The tasks were descriptions of activities carried by employees in particular roles; the information topics provided background, concepts and descriptions of performance standards for the business. The end product of this phase was a detailed table of contents for the manual, and an estimation of the amount of work involved to do the actual writing.

Step 4 Writing the contents; Step 5 Reviewing and evaluating what is written; Step 6 Fine tuning and publishing. These steps are grouped in a block because they are repeatable in sequence. Once the blueprint for the franchise manual has been developed, the writing process involves an iterative cycle of input gathering, drafting, reviewing, revising and re-drafting. For the directors of DFS, who were keen to harness the capacities for process improvement that the franchise manual project offered, this was an intensive but highly rewarding period of activity. As the true nature of DFSs operations were captured in print the opportunity for a critical evaluation of what the business was actually doing arose. For a successful and franchisable business, a remarkable amount of process developmen t and refinement took place. Numerous inefficiencies were uncovered, some costly duplications and one or two terrifying gaps, which had the potential to really derail the smooth running of the business entirely and which were hidden by actions that capable employees had been taking on their own initiative, unbeknownst to the directors.