Your small business operations manual can keep you on the right side of the rules and regulations of running your small business.

A small business operations manual is perhaps even more important to a new franchise owner than to someone running an autonomous small business.  There is a trade off that you get when you land that big deal to open a franchise of a very popular brand name. The trade off that benefits you because when you sign that franchise agreement, you have the rights to hang that highly recognizable franchise name on your building and inherit the massive crowds of customers that will come to you because of that name.

This is not to say that you are going it alone because among the other massive documents that will flood your mailbox will be a small business operations manual that will help you understand exactly how to look, act and smell like every other franchise in the chain. That franchise operating manual  is your bible for how to make your franchise take off like a rocket to huge sales and profits.  It contains the assembled wisdom of an army of gurus who are locked in little rooms back at the franchising company headquarters cranking out documents like your small business operations manual to make you a success.

You are not expected to have been born knowing how to make that franchise a stunning success. But you are expected to read and know well every rule, regulation, guideline and suggestion in the small business operations manual that the mother ship gives you.  Don’t see this as a tedious imposition by the bosses. Instead see it as a lifesaver for your franchise because the people who know very well how to make big piles of cash are passing those insider secrets to you in exchange for your franchise fees.  That is an excellent swap.

Look to your small business operations manual to keep the legal hounds off of your back.

If all the small business operations manual will do is make you rich beyond your wildest dreams because you learned to run a hugely profitable franchise outlet, that would be plenty. But just as important are the legal tips that pop up in your small business operations manual on how to keep your franchise running squeaky clean with the law. Those legal sand traps that your small business operations manual can keep you out of include tax requirements that the city, state and federal government are very interested in seeing you live up to.  They include other quirks of the law like how to run a safe store or how to treat your employees in a way that avoids lawsuits.

These guidelines in your small business operations manual can keep the lawyers and other legal trouble makers away from your door so you can focus on the big job you have of making big money running your franchise outline. Toss in there that there are a rats nest of franchise laws that you have to live with because you signed that franchise agreement.  The franchise relationship is a legally binding marriage so the last thing you need is to have some quirk of the franchise law jump up and bite you on the toe because you did not know about it.  Know about it by making your small business operations manual your best friend in the world.

The steps for setting up a franchise owner so that he or she will become an instant success takes skill, planning and plenty of tender loving care.

When you go about setting up a franchise at a new location, the process of finding a good buyer for that franchise and getting that new franchise off of the ground is a major undertaking.  When you set out to franchise your company, you rallied your troops to set up the systems and structures so that you could mobilize that crack force of business people to expand your business like gangbusters.

Once you have that finely tuned machine in place to crank out dynamite franchises one after the other, don’t get lazy.  Give each and every new franchise addition the same care and anxiety that you poured into that very first fresh faced franchise buyer who appeared, hat in hand at your door to buy a franchise of your very prosperous business.

Pay attention to how well the process of taking a new franchise outlet from soup to nuts works.  Don’t sit up nights if you do not close every franchise deal that appears in the sunset.  You will have potential franchise owners who just do not cut the mustard. But if perfectly good future franchise powerhouses start falling out of the system before you ever nail down that franchise agreement  and collect those fat franchise fees, it is time to look at what is slowing your growth into the massively profitable business empire you want to become.

 The top priority for setting up a franchise is investing in that new franchise owner.

There are plenty of places in the franchise development process that can be fine tuned.  The performance of your new franchise development orientation process could be the culprit for low closing of new franchise owners. It could be those overpaid franchise lawyers are gumming up the works.  You need to keep those legal eagles around to make sure you are kosher with franchise law but don’t let them scare off good franchise buyers with too much legalize in the orientation or in the franchise documents that must be signed to make the new franchise take off.

Keep in mind that each new franchise owner is a part of your business. It is true that they are small business people on their own. But their success is your success and their failure is your failure.  Give them plenty of tender loving care as you nurture a new franchise owner from prospect to very productive franchise operator.  But don’t let it end there.  Apply just as much TLC to franchise owners after the doors are open and customers are flooding in.  If you stay on top of your vast empire of franchises across the city or across the world, you will enjoy seeing an army of happy franchise owners and happy franchises pumping nice big fat profits into your coffers each month.

Your retail franchise agreement should be offered to the best of the best of the retailing world but how to you sort out the good from the bad?

The act of giving a retail franchise agreement to a franchise applicant is a risk for you and the future franchise owner as well. For the new franchise owner, a lot of money, time and effort goes into opening a new franchise outlet of your business. But when you franchise your company,  you want every one of your franchises to be a blockbuster success.  The key to making that happening is to go the second mile in checking out every one of those eager applicants who want to secure a retail franchise agreement from you.

There is a routine amount of due diligence that has to happen before you ever sit down to sign a franchise agreement with a new franchise owner. Part of the reason that the franchise application is such an involved document is that the franchise applicant has to show to you that they have the financial resources and the experience to take your retail franchise agreement and run with it and turn it into a major money making machine.

Don’t just take the information provided on the franchise application on face value before you offer a retail franchise agreement to that franchise applicant. You have every right to check out that the person who might sign that retail franchise agreement with your company to make sure they have the financial resources either on account or as viable credit accounts to carry off the size of transactions needed to start a new franchise.  You also have the right to check their resume, references and history of success in running a knock-your-socks-off retail outlet.  Running one of your franchises is no place for rookies and you want a seasoned old pro that can take that new franchise from start up to a hugely profitable franchise in the shortest time possible.

Double check who should get that retail franchise agreement before signing day.

When you sit down on the appointed day to grant a retail franchise agreement to that hopeful new franchise owner, you want to look across the table at someone you trust and someone you feel that you know.  The various ways to validate that each franchise applicant is up to snuff should be considered SOP or standard operating procedure whenever there is a retail franchise agreement on the table.

Take that SOP to the next level.  Do not find yourself in the position that the first time you lay eyes on that potential franchise owner is the day they take ownership of a fully operational retail franchise agreement.  Someone in authority in your business should meet with each franchise applicant sometime before that retail franchise agreement is finalized.

This is a great time to ask those subtle questions that will surface if this franchise applicant is excited about the challenge of putting that retail franchise agreement into action and has the confidence, the leadership skills and the many other personality traits of a great future franchise owner. If you do that and you did your due diligence before the singing of a retail franchise agreement, you and that new member of your franchising family are in for a long and very productive life together.

The FDD franchise disclosure document is a required franchise document but it is also a crucial step toward making the franchise take off.

When your FDD franchise disclosure document is delivered to the future franchise owner, you are living up to the letter of franchise law.  Franchise law  is quite picky that when you are ready to set up shop to sell franchises, you have to be ready to deliver a FDD franchise disclosure document within a specified time frame before that big deal finally goes to that big moment of closing and becoming a reality.

When you are required to do something, it is easy to meet the minimum requirements and to pout about it along the way.  Well, put that reaction on the shelf because the FDD franchise disclosure document can be a huge key to turning a wide eyed raw recruit into a seasoned old franchising pro in no time.  That is because the FDD franchise disclosure document is where the rubber hits the road.  It is designed to make sure that all of the behind the scenes details and the insider scoops that the franchise owner must know before plopping down his or her good money to buy your franchise.

Look on the FDD franchise disclosure document like one big training manual that will give the lay of the land to your future franchise owners.  Just as the legal pests insist that you get that FDD franchise disclosure document to the franchise owner in time for them to review it, they are accountable for what is in that big document. So by packing it with everything you think is crucial for running one of your franchises, you pass the buck to the franchise owner because they can never say, “But you never told me that!”

Go the extra mile on making the FDD franchise disclosure document a helpful step toward a very successful new franchise owner.

Making the FDD franchise disclosure document a watershed document that allows you to go forward with the franchise arrangement is one of the big values of the document.  There is a lot of detailed that franchise law requires that you pack into that document.  But instead of just doing the least you can do, take your efforts to the next level.  See the FDD franchise disclosure document as your chance to begin molding that new franchise owner into the kind of go getter that will know how to take a franchise and make it a huge success.

There is a window of time when you are required to deliver the FDD franchise disclosure document to the future franchise owner. Instead of barley delivering the FDD franchise disclosure document within the deadline, go above and beyond and have that important document in the hands of your franchise applicants as soon as it is clear that he or she a serious franchise candidate.  Go that second mile of being available to discuss and explain to the franchise applicant what is in the FDD franchise disclosure document so that the cycle of using this required franchising document as an educational tool works its magic.

Reviewing the franchise agreement forms that you sign with a franchise owner makes sense because you might want to cut them a better deal or cut them out.

The franchise agreement forms that you send out to a prospective franchise owner are not “till death do us part.”  While you are selling that franchise to a small business owner and it is he or she who will run their operation, the rights to that franchise are still with the franchising company. That is why the language that you put into the franchise agreement forms should include some escape clauses so that if the franchise owner makes a mess of things, you have a way out.

Franchising your company  is a big step and there are steps you can take to make sure the partners you bring onto your roster of players as franchise owners are up to snuff.  The various franchise agreement forms shift some of the burden of proof that they can carry their weight in the franchise relationship to those starry eyed new franchise owners.  By making it a serious requirement that the franchise owner provide proof that when it comes to running a small business, they know their stuff, you avoid handing over that valuable franchise to someone who is going to run it into the ground.

There are variables in the franchise agreement forms that you can tweak based on how well this new franchise applicant gives you the warm fuzzies that they will do well.  If you have secret doubts that a particular franchise applicant might be a dud, you can hike up the initial franchise fees within the franchise agreement forms.  That way you build in some insurance in case you have to go in and clean up some messes.

You can also adjust the term of the franchise agreement forms so that an iffy franchise comes up for renewal faster than might be standard. If you set that renewal to come up in a year and make that the law of the land in the franchise agreement forms, then you have a legal way to cut and run if they do badly.  But if they turn out to be all star business managers and their franchise is knocking down serious money, you can make adjustments when you renew the franchise agreement forms.

Making some changes when franchise agreement forms are renewed gives you a window to turn a good franchise owner into a great one.

All franchise agreement forms spell out so anyone can get it that the franchise will expire at some moment in the future.  While the idea of renewing the franchise agreement seems on the surface to be at time when either franchisor or franchisee can run for the hills if they need to, it is also a chance to kick a very successful franchise owner into high gear.

If you have a franchise owner who is kicking backside and taking names when it come to profits, you can sweeten the pot in the franchise agreement forms to make his or her next tour of duty even more of a profit machine. You may wish to sweeten the pot with a nice looking franchise royalty arrangement that lets the franchise owner keep more gold in his or her bank account if they break a few sales barriers.  Or you can offer that knock-your-socks-off franchise owner a way to build an empire through a master franchise agreement.

These changes are all perfectly legal within franchise law and they are what capitalism is all about. When you can capitalize on your all stars and cycle out the dead weight leveraging those franchise agreement forms term limits, that is just smart business that will result in a dynamite team of franchise owner that you will profit from big time year after year after year.