Do you have the right skillset to run a successful cleaning franchise?

For all types of entrepreneurs, irrespective of their age and professional experience, franchising can be a desirable career opportunity.

Do you have the right skillset to run a successful cleaning franchise?

For all types of entrepreneurs, irrespective of their age and professional experience, franchising can be a desirable career opportunity. Knowing whether you possess the right competencies to run a franchise is crucial prior to making any investment. With over 25 of experience in franchising, Chris Wootton, MD of domestic cleaning franchise Poppies, offers his own personal advice on what skills a franchisee needs to build a successful business. 

Many people get excited about the idea of franchise ownership and are eager to find a lucrative franchise, such as cleaning, but not everyone has the right attitude or resilience to succeed. Having run my own franchise for 25 years before becoming the franchisor at Poppies, I understand how you need to be able to juggle lots of different tasks simultaneously. You also need to be committed to sticking to someone else’s system, following processes and managing, marketing, and selling your service or product. 

Most cleaning franchises, including Poppies, offer comprehensive training, but there are several additional skills and expertise you need to set off on the right foot. Whether you choose to be an owner-operator franchisee where you become a cleaning operative or a management franchise where you manage a team of cleaners, the key competencies required are still the same.  

Below are my top five skills to help you thrive: 

Communication skills 

The ability to communicate and interact with people is critical in any business. Strong conversational and interpersonal skills play a key role when building relationships with your employees, customers, cleaning suppliers and your franchisor. It’s equally important to be a good listener – to know when to talk and when to listen, so you can understand any issues and tackle them properly.  

Time Management

Time management improves the efficiency and effectiveness of any business – small or large. In a cleaning franchise, it is imperative that you continually work on developing or improving your time management skills as you will have to manage your time between clients, employees and the local community. The more you can stay organised and on top of everything, the easier it will be to consistently deliver your service on time.

Decision Making

Decision making is a must-have skill for anyone running a franchise. Being able to make a quick, yet good, decision can be critical to the success of your business. All business decisions should be carefully considered, made with the best intentions and with the company’s best interests at heart. 

Openness to change

Having a readiness to accept changes in response to market shifts is essential and this goes hand in hand with open-mindedness. In business you need to be able to harness any changes that come your way – for example a change in consumer behaviour due to a pandemic or modifying roles and responsibilities as the business grows. 

Understanding your customer needs and motivations

Knowing and understanding your customer needs is at the centre of every effective franchise, particularly with domestic cleaning as the service is tailored to a client’s lifestyle, home and preferences. Once you have insight into your customers and know what motivates them to employ a cleaning company, you can then use that information to persuade existing and potential customers that using your cleaning services is beneficial, giving them back the time they need to spend on what’s really important to them. 

Success, however it’s defined, takes action and taking good appropriate action takes skills. If 

you have these five competencies, franchising could be the perfect fit for you. Your next step is to now determine what type of franchise best suits your background and experience to offer you a both business success and personal satisfaction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Wootton
Chris Wootton
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