You wouldn’t have thought the management teams of international giants such as McDonald’s, Ford and Caterpillar would agree to meet with people they didn’t know from franchises they’d never heard of in a little country they knew little about, let alone give them several hours of their time. And you wouldn’t expect an award-winning Texan home building magnate to open his home as well as his office to the owner of New Zealand home building franchise he’d never heard of, either. But it’s amazing what can happen during a franchise best-practice study tour.

One of best things about working for Fletcher Challenge when it was still New Zealand’s biggest corporation was their Best Practice Study Programme, a phase they went through where they sent their senior managers off around the world to visit non-competing corporations they’d identified as best practice in their field.

I was fortunate enough to be a member of nine-member “channel management” study tour which visited eight leading franchises in Australia and New Zealand in the space of a week. We talked to legends such as Al Dunn, who oversaw the growth of McDonald’s in New Zealand for more than thirty years, and Bob Jane, the Australian motor racing legend who went on to, in his own words, “tip the tyre business upside down”. We visited the head offices of giants in their industries – Caterpillar, Ford and Ampol Caltex, and pioneers of franchising in New Zealand, Stirling Sports and Fastway Couriers.  

What did we want to find out from such as diverse group? We had two main “learning objectives”:

 

 

The result was an 80-page report, mostly put together during our “spare time” while we were on the road. I’m not sure if what I got out of tour was of any use in my role as a franchise manager, but that report certainly helped to set me up later in my practice as a franchise consultant.

 

There were two reasons for that. The first was that I was able to use the report as a base for further research on franchising best practice around the world. Armed with this knowledge, I was then able to apply it to my clients’ franchises, in one case using it as a model to re-engineer a prominent franchise business from top to bottom with enormous success.

The second reason was that having experienced the value that comes out of best practice study tours, I have been able to set them up for my clients. One in particular wanted to meet with recipients of the National Housing Quality Award, the US residential construction industry’s pre-eminent honour. During the tour that took him right across the American continent, my client was constantly amazed by the willingness of the business people he visited to open up to him about their businesses and, in at least one case, their lives.

 

One invited all his key “partners” in the business – the owners of his drainlaying, plumbing and electrical contractors – to join the meeting to demonstrate how the spirit of partnership worked in that business. Another explained how, issatisfied with the standard of his systems and people, he had deliberately turned away half of his sales to give him enough breathing space to be able to put better systems and people in place. Another invited him to his home for a genuine Texas hoe-down, complete with bull-roping and target shooting.

 

Best practice study tours are, without doubt, one of the best ways to build knowledge and understanding I’ve come across – far better than courses, videos and books. I’ve thought long and hard about why that is. Much of the value comes, I believe, from the wealth of personal interaction and mutual sharing of knowledge that can take place in a short space of time when the meetings are well planned and the objectives understood, but the structure loose enough and the participants open enough to promote spontaneity and real sharing.

I would welcome the opportunity to show you how beneficial a best practice study tour could be for you and your team, and to work with you to optimise those benefits.