Certain leadership positions are critical for the health, well-being, and success of your business. These are the unit manager, assistant manager, shift manager, and district manager.

Especially if you have a growing multi-unit organization, those positions will open from time to time. Where will you look for talent to fulfill them?

• If you want to increase the probability of success of the new leaders in those positions, you should take a look inside your team to detect who’s ready to take over those responsibilities so you can allow them to grow. 

There’s great value in doing internal promotions instead of looking for an external collaborator because, when you promote from within, you increase your possibilities of success. 

There are more reasons why:

1. You know these people and their work ethic, so their performance is more predictable. They have been with you long enough for you to experience who they are as employees. When you hire externally though,...

 Even though there is a staffing crisis in the country, some employers are doing okay or much better than others. Why? Because they have a great employer brand. 

• What is this? The employer brand is your reputation as an employer, and what your current and past employees think about you and your organization.

Your employer branding will determine how easy or difficult it is going to be to get the staff you need and retain great people. 

The good news is that there are ways you can increase it so that you can thrive in this staffing war that is happening in our industry. That’s what we’ll review in this blog post.

The Importance of the Employer Brand

People that are looking for a job tend to ask their friends about where they work. 

During a job interview, interviewers often ask about the candidate’s previous job, what they liked and dislike about working there, and why they leave. 

As a matter of fact, in almost every...

No matter the season, business owners should put themselves on alert mode to protect their businesses from robbery, especially during the holidays or the summer, when crime tends to go up. 

• The awful truth is that the vast majority of theft in your business will come from within. This means that either somebody on your staff is robbing you, or letting an external know how to best rob you. That is an absolute business statistic. 

Do you know how to protect your business and how to be ready if you discover a thief among your team members?

In this blog post, I’ll be sharing the rule of 10-80-10 of employee theft in the business industry and some recommendations to shield your operations throughout the year to prevent any losses. 

Follow the conversation on our social media and subscribe to our YouTube Channel to review our business video tips to help you with your day-to-day challenges.

Way back in the early 2000s, I spent time in the...

Entrepreneurs often had difficulty being thankful for what they are going through, especially in the last couple of years. Sometimes the ups, but especially the downs, are just too much to bear, but we must do it if we are committed to accomplishing our goals and dreams.

How can we turn those negative experiences into positive ones for our lives and our businesses? I believe we can do that in two ways:

1. Being thankful for what we have right now
2. Giving what we can, to who we can, every day. 

I remember when I was a child my family lived very humbly. I experienced many things through my friend’s families. One, in particular, had a chalet in a beautiful lake in Guatemala, where I was born. 

She invited me quite often so I got to experience many things at this gorgeous place: she had a boat so we learned how to waterski there, we swam in the lake, went to cool places, and spent the days just surrounded by beauty. It was amazing! 

Another friend had a farm with...

Although things are turning around with the pandemic more under control, the battle for staffing continues in the retail and services industries. 

• As a franchise business owner, you have to figure out how to win this race faster than your competition so you can provide quality service and products and have happy and loyal customers.

If you give them what they are looking for, they’ll keep returning to your business, your sales and revenue will be healthy and consistent, and you’ll be profitable in the long term. But it all starts with having the right people on your team.  

These are six practical tips to hire top talent. Although anybody can do them, almost no one does. So, if you implement them, you'll be better than most and probably win the race of getting that top talent in your organization. 

1. Be the leader that people are looking for

Easy to say but complex to execute because every person in your organization looks for a specific ...

Throughout my +30 years involved in the franchise industry, helping franchisees around the world, I’ve come to realize what is the #1 key to success for a franchisee. 

Of all the things that you need to learn and do when you invest in a franchise, if you don't have this, you are going to struggle as a business owner. How can you avoid this conflict? What is the number one key?

The secret is that you care about your people and they know and feel you care for them. It might sound simple, but sadly, sometimes franchisees and business owners forget to demonstrate and communicate this. 

Communicating this is crucial because even though we may do a lot of things for them every day, unless we share it and let them know why we're doing it, they won’t really know. 

With this blog post, I’m inviting you to reflect on what caring for your people truly means and if you are indeed demonstrating it or not. And, of course, I’m giving you tips and information...

Although the constant attraction of new talent helps you grow, being able to retain the people is also critical, especially with the staffing crisis our industry is facing. How can you do that? In this blog post, I’ll be sharing five strategies to reduce turnover and have a healthy organization.

People that look for a job are searching for opportunities and benefits, but in the end, they stay for the company’s culture. Taking this into consideration, these five best practices will help you transform your business culture, and therefore, have better employee retention.

1. Select the right people

This doesn’t only mean having the talent, the skills, and the experience to perform properly, but making a good fit with your company. Otherwise, you'll end up looking for people again in three months or so.

To help you discover those candidates, you have to define clearly who is your ideal employee and how does the right cultural fit look like. Based on that, as...

When it comes to managing people, why, when, and how to give raises to their employees is one of the biggest challenges that franchise or business owners face. Why? Because given at the right time and in the right way, raises can impact the company culture positively. On the other hand, not having them can affect the working environment negatively. 

You must remember that there are two objectives when it comes to giving people this financial benefit. First, to give recognition for performance. Second, to provide fair and competitive pay according to the market, to be able to retain those employees.

Think about it! Upgrading a person’s salary when they outperform will get them excited and motivated to be in your organization and willing to continue giving you that extra effort when they come to work. Otherwise, even if you have a great culture and you do everything right, if you don’t offer the pay that the employees deserve, then they might end up leaving you.

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Franchisees who want to grow their organization from a one-unit job into a multi-unit enterprise require the help of a district manager to accomplish the business and financial results they expect. 

But this multi-unit leader often gets frustrated because there’s a lack of clarity in the industry as to what is their role. So much so, that this is the first reason why these particular leaders struggle to be successful.

Why is this? The position usually gets promoted from a single unit manager into a district manager and ends up becoming super general managers, instead of true multi-unit leaders that focus on the things that actually impact and make a difference in the organization. 

To prevent this confusion, we at The American Franchise Academy have identified three specific roles that these fantastic and hardworking team members have to play. 

1. The protector of their people

Protecting their staff is the first thing they have to focus their time and...

(Part 6 of the 2022 Multi-Unit Franchising Conference)

During the past weeks, I’ve been sharing the takeaways of what I experienced at this year's Multi-Unit Franchising Conference, an annual event dedicated to helping these business owners make their companies stronger and more profitable. 

In this is part six, we’ll review John DiJulius's keynote. He is a guest experience expert and his organization focuses on helping franchisors and franchisees develop specific customer service expertise and focus. 

Did you miss the past video sessions of the 2022 Multi-Unit Franchising Conference? Subscribe to our YouTube Channel to review the rest of the series!

 John pointed out how in the past 15 years, the level of satisfaction the customers have had in their experience with businesses, in general, is at a 15-year low. A lot of it is being driven by staffing issues and high-cost problems. He urged business owners to act against this customer service recession by...