Recruiting prospective franchisees requires the personal touch

Working with the right franchisees is the one of the most important parts of developing any successful franchise model. However, I am constantly surprised to find out how little effort and investment – in terms of both time and money – some franchisors put into recruitment.

For me as a franchisor, the time spent working with potential franchisees is crucial. I want to build a strong network of proactive franchisees so at HomeXperts we manage all our own recruitment from first inquiry to appointment. I feel it is too important to outsource this to a third party. I know there are reputable franchise recruitment consultants out there but they are not for me. Instead we have invested heavily in a fabulous franchise recruitment software system. While recruitment of franchisees is about people, the system helps to give a great recruitment experience for the franchisees.

The large-scale franchise recruitment cattle calls are not for us: I don’t believe in herding large groups of people into a room and delivering a presentation to them. While I have tried this in the past, I found the whole process totally unsatisfactory. At the end of the meeting, when the potential franchisees left I felt I knew very little about them. The meeting could be dominated by loud extroverts and if you add just one negative person then it is not such a great experience all round.

Instead we have a structured recruitment journey we help our franchisees to move along during the selection and discovery process. For the franchisor, it is all about selecting the right people to work with; for the potential franchisee, it is about discovering as much as they can about the franchise. I prefer to invest time in properly getting to know people interested in joining HomeXperts and finding out about them, their personalities and what their motivation is. Most importantly: why do they want to change their life in this way?

So for us we sit down on a one-to-one basis with every potential franchisee. We check a number of competences through the process as we know what makes a great HomeXperts franchisee.

Our team work to a three-interview process, giving both us and the potential franchisee time to do the relevant research. As franchisor and founder of HomeXperts, I always conduct the final meeting and interview every franchisee we have within the network. This is time consuming but it is vital: I am building a family of HomeXperts estate agents and working with the right people is essential. It is a part of my job that I really love and plan to continue to do.

Our franchisees invest their time and money in our businesses. It only seems fair to me for franchisors to make the time to invest in their potential franchisees. Get this right and the rest of the business will flourish.