No franchise stands alone. That’s the hidden truth about working inside a franchise business. Even if you’ve built up the business yourself, once you launch a franchise company, you’re living inside the franchise business, not in the business you built yourself. Once the need exists to apply systemization, technical support, and most importantly guide growth, an emerging franchise brand is going to need more help than consultants can provide.
That’s where franchise development firms like Rhino7 come in to provide high-quality and highly effective best practices, operation support services, and other technical, sales, and operational expertise to help an emerging brand become as successful as possible.
Keep in mind that there’s no hard and fast definition for what constitutes an “emerging brand.” Every business model is different, both in terms of capacity and size, so comparing barber shops to restoration services franchises is not productive.
That’s why Rhino7 has built up an industry-leading Franchisor Assistant Program that not only applies to all kinds of different business, but also allows for scalability in terms of the growth of an emerging brand.
Perfecting and Growing an Emerging Business Model
Remember, a franchise development firm wears a lot of different hats in terms of their relationship with an emerging franchise. These services may materialize as a range of services, from evaluating whether a business concept is suitable for franchising, to building a business model that lends itself to a franchising structure, to helping the founders write the franchise disclosure document, and more.
In terms of helping the franchise to grow, franchise development firms are also often responsible for developing franchisee leads, developing the franchise’s sales platform, mapping U.S. territories to optimize locations, and lending the expertise of skilled franchise development sales staffs.
Emerging franchises are also not on their own in terms of how to position their business in the marketplace. Firms like Rhino7 provide complete franchisor and franchisee marketing services that may include brand evaluation, developing and honing brand guidelines, standardizing financial procedures, and developing a technology model that uses content creation and optimized technology to tell the franchise’s story to its customers and the public.
“We’re talking about emerging brands, so we build all the systems and once the systems are built, the operations team works with the franchise owners to help them get up and started and grow and bring down a healthy bottom line,” says Jason Santee, Vice President for two of Rhino7’s most successful emerging franchises. “They all have different strengths and weaknesses, so we really need to be able to work with any emerging franchise to help them be successful in their business. It’s about taking what the founders are doing and helping them develop their business model into a scalable system that can work with numerous people. There’s a lot to it.
It’s also important to remember when diving into the franchising business that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s vital to experience success in one or two markets before looking to grow beyond the initial location and concept. Once your business concept is validated, you can then approach a qualified franchise development company to help you evolve the concept as a franchise.
“Just because it’s a franchise, you’re still starting up a new business,” says Santee about the growing pains of a new business. “You choose a franchise because a lot of things are done for you in terms of marketing, brand guidelines, and other systems. The idea is that, as a franchise, you cut off the curve to get to that point of success faster than if you did it on your own.”
