Winning business awards is about so much more than recognition and reputation. It’s about the journey of business improvement, excellence and growth—not only for your business, but for you and your team.

If you don’t think your business needs any form of improvement, you may as well shut it down right now.

Part 2 in our series on Franchisee Selection: Why It Is the Most Important Decision Franchisors Make It doesn’t matter how good your systems, training and support are—if you don’t select the ‘right’ franchisees in the first place, none of it is going to produce a high performing franchise. Yet as a franchise consultant, I can't believe how many franchisors rely on gut feeling or, worse still, chance in the way they select franchisees. But what do the 'right' franchisees look like? As I mentioned in the first article in this series, that depends on the franchise business, according to Christiane Gaul of the University of Applied Sciences in Kufstein, Austria, in her study Partner Selection Process in Franchising . Of course, the kind of candidates a franchisor looks for will be different for a lawn-mowing franchise than a professional services franchise. Let's look at who the 'right' people are for some well-established franchises...

“And the Supreme Franchise of the Year Award goes to…” I dare not breathe. Why is there always that interminable pause before the winner’s name is announced? My client has already won all three awards that I entered them for – Field Manager of the Year, Franchisee of the Year and Franchise of the Year in their industry category. But will they walk out with the biggie…? “Signature Homes!” I can’t begin to describe the elation I feel every time I help a client to win a franchise or business award. It’s as exciting for me as it is for the client. Businesses enter awards competitions for different reasons – recognition, credibility, ego, media exposure – but to me the most important reasons are the ability to benchmark yourself against the best and use what you learn to continuously improve your business. I take my hat off to those who keep entering awards despite failing to win but keep getting better every year until hopefully… finally… One of the keys to writing better awards entries, I’ve found, is to understand the criteria for the awards and what the judges are looking for. Of course, the criteria depend on what the award is for – leadership, customer service delivery, marketing, innovation, the list goes on. But I have found that the most common awards frameworks or models in the general business excellence category are the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model and the Baldrige Excellence Framework.

We all know that success in franchising is largely about selecting the ‘right’ franchisees. Arguably, franchisee selection is the most important decision a franchisor can make. So how do franchisors go about the selection process and what selection tools are on offer? Inadequate franchisee selection procedures are the biggest single cause of franchisee failure, according to a study by Professor Lorelle Frazer from Griffith University.

We’ve all been led to believe that a solid business plan, complete with a genuine vision and values, is the secret sauce you need for business success. How wrong we were. OK, if that’s not the secret sauce, how about points of difference? Wasn’t it Phillip Kotler or some other Marketing 101 guru who said that’s all you need for successful marketing? Wrong again.

I would like to be able to say this is a question I rarely heard when I was a franchisor, because my franchise recruitment marketing was so good that people already knew the answer before they contacted me. Unfortunately that wasn’t always the case. When I first started out in franchising, I thought that my obvious passion for the business would be enough to sell truckloads of franchises. It wasn’t.

That’s the question I asked myself when two of my New Zealand clients asked me for help in expanding their franchises into Australia. New Zealand has been called the most franchised country in the world and 71% of the franchises here originated in New Zealand, but only around 20% of New Zealand homegrown franchises have entered international markets and the 2021 Franchising New Zealand Survey showed that intentions to expand internationally are significantly lower than in 2017.

Would you buy this franchise?