Marketing Systems for Franchising Your Business

"Hi! I'm Tim Ricke, past entrepreneur of the year, on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment; marketing systems. You notice I've used the word systems a lot because that's what franchising is all about. You notice wherever you go it's all systems. Let's look at McDonald's. When you go in the door if you look above you, you know the menu's going to be there don't you. If you look to the left, you know the French fries over there. You know the coke machines are to the right. You know where the machines are to take your money. All of it is right in place. It's systems, complete systems, so you want to do that with your business. Make sure you do your homework. In our case, when we schooled our managers, when they stepped from the field and into the office, the first thing I had them do was call the competition. It's part of your marketing. What they found out is we were better at that what we were doing than what our competition was. They get things like, mommy there's someone on the phone who needs their housed cleaned, rather than an expert company. This built some confidence in my new manager in what she was doing. Plus she learned a great deal about what they did and didn't do, and we emphasized what we did do, which gave us more closures. The other thing is how do you direct to your client to what you need to do. Is the client is looking at your service and how are they finding it? Word of mouth, are they looking at your advertising? You must look at all aspect of your advertising to make sure that you're delivering your message in the best media, and we'll get into that a little later."