Validation is Easy... HA!

by Jeff Northrop

I've been struggling recently trying to get our new FBR site into beta testing. The update will have a nice new look and some slick new features. When planning the update everything seemed so clear: A little polish here, some new code there and voila, we'd have a new site. Of course in practice it has proven to be much more complicated and time consuming then I anticipated, and as a veteran of hundreds of site builds I really should have known better.

I mention this because it strikes me as an apt analogy to how people view the franchise validation process. For those not familiar with the term validation, it is used in the franchise industry to describe the process where the prospective franchise owner calls on the existing franchisees to help answer questions about the system. Sounds easy right? Get a phone
list and call on a dozen or more franchisees and chit chat for 30 minutes or so.

Of course the reality is that it isn't easy at all. Franchisees are small business owners and they are busy, usually very busy, and therefore they are not easy to get a hold of. It can take numerous phone calls and messages to finally arrange a time that works. Then once you do get at an appointment to talk to them, you need to be prepared with questions, lots of questions. You will want to ask about training, support, lifestyle, marketing, work demands, corporate responsiveness, and on and on. You need real information about the good, the bad and the ugly, and this is your best, and possibly only, opportunity to do so.

On top of that even if you do the diligence, and make the appointments and prepare the questions in advance, you have to make sure you are talking to the right people. You want to talk to a wide variety of franchisees: happy owners as well as unhappy owners, small market and large market, people who have been in the business a long time and those who are just starting. The list of demands and complications in the process goes on and on.

Now, I don't want to scare anyone, because the truth is this process is something everyone goes through and most go through it with great care and success but make sure you are ready for the time commitment to get it done right.

One thing that can help you is to get your hands on the results of a franchisee satisfaction survey (you knew the plug was coming somewhere). Survey results can give you a leg up by highlighting strengths and weaknesses in a system so you can focus the precious time you have on the phone getting critical answers. It saves you time, and will help you get better information from your own validation efforts, in many cases much better information.

Now here is a final secret. On this site we list dozens of companies with surveys available. These are the ones who want to shout from the roof-tops that they have happy franchisees -- these are good companies -- but the truth is we have surveyed hundreds and hundreds of systems and they have that information to share with you if you ask for it.

The information is almost always free, although some vendors do try to sell the information with some accompanying marketing spin, and can be obtained easily. When investigating a system, ask if they have done a franchisee satisfaction survey. If they have, ask to see the results. If they haven't, why not? Do they validation think is easy... ha!