The Best Question to Ask your Potential Franchisor

by John DeHart

At Nurse Next Door, we invite anyone who makes it through our sales and discovery process to a final meeting day, where we spend about 12 hours together at "HeartQuarters." It is a long day, but our potential candidate’s walk away really knowing whether this is the right business opportunity for them, and of course, we have a pretty good idea if they are right for us.

During our final meeting day, we allocate up to 2 hours for the franchise candidates to spend with our management team, to grill us with whatever questions that they have. We close the doors and say, "we aren't leaving until all of your questions are answered."

Some times we end the session in 10 minutes, other times we use the full 2 hours. And after 5 years of running this session, one question still stands out to me as the very best question a franchise candidate can ask a franchisor.

"Tell me about a conflict you had with a franchisee and how you dealt with it." Followed by "And is this the process you follow for conflict? What is your process?"

Awesome question. Why? Because every franchisee will inevitably have conflict with their Franchisor.

So before you enter into a long term relationship with your franchisor, you better understand how your franchisor deals with conflict. In my experience, when it comes to conflict, there are three types of franchisors:

1) The franchisor who acts like they have all of the power and subsequently deal with conflict coming from this position of power;
2) The franchisor who buries their head in the sand to avoid conflict; and
3) The franchisor who actually has a well thought out and structured system to deal with conflict fairly and rationally.

If your potential franchisor falls in category 1 or 2, do you think that you will really be able to build a powerful relationship this way? When a conflict arises, will your franchisor listen to you? Will they see your perspective? And do they have a good process in place to effectively handle conflict? What is it?

I can tell you that even though this is top of mind in our system at Nurse Next Door, we don't always get it right. Why? Because dealing with conflict is hard. I wonder what the systems are like where it isn't top of mind or important?

You better find out before!

John DeHart
Co-Founder and Co-CEO
Nurse Next Door
JohnDehartBlogs.com

Learn more about Nurst Next Door at topfranchises.franchisebusinessreview.com.

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