Mainland founder Nick Powills shares strategies for leveraging franchisee personas to scale your brand and support your franchisees' success.
Key Takeaways:
- Every franchisee candidate is unique and has different goals, backgrounds and skills.
- Rather than thinking of franchisees as a singular group, franchisors can benefit from recognizing the various layers of franchisees’ personas.
- By utilizing franchisee personas in your marketing efforts, you can energize your business and franchise sales while supporting franchisees. As a franchisor hoping to scale your business, building up healthy franchise sales numbers is critical for growth and success – both now and in the future.
Unfortunately, many franchisors today are missing out on opportunities to energize their brand and franchise sales processes. By neglecting best practices, like utilizing franchisee personas to leverage existing networks and target their marketing strategies to specific demographics, franchisors can unwittingly leave franchise sales on the table – and sell their businesses short in the long run.
In this article, we’ll explore strategies for identifying franchisee personas and discuss ways to use that knowledge to target good-fit franchisees.
What is a franchisee persona?
A franchisee persona is the combination of a franchisee’s unique background, career history, education, character, goals, lifestyle, capital and other unique qualities. In short, it’s the characteristics that define them as a prospective franchise buyer and future business owner.
“Think of a layer cake,” explains Nick Powills, founder of Mainland, a public relations and digital marketing agency that works with franchise brands. “You see what’s on the outside; you see the final product. But within the inside of a cake, there could be multiple layers of multiple flavors, and there's a lot of construction that goes into building this cake. With a franchise, it's much the same.”
How can franchisee personas help franchisors energize sales?
While it might be difficult to say “no” to the wrong candidates when you’re just starting out as a franchisor, the importance of choosing the right franchisees to represent your brand cannot be overstated. By leveraging franchisee personas and creating a custom marketing plan that’s tailored to your target audience, you can streamline your franchise sales process and convert leads into good-fit franchisees.
Steps for Identifying Franchisee Personas
To define your franchisee personas, think about your future franchisees in terms of the qualities that would be the best fit for your franchise system. In addition to defining your ideal franchisee, make sure to think about the ways you could customize your offering to fit the needs and goals of those franchisees – and how you can market your offering to them in the future.
1. Do a brand check to customize your offering
The first step to defining your franchisee personas is to do a brand check to determine your offering level and how much capital franchisees will need to open and operate a franchise business within your system.
Buying a franchise usually requires more capital than just the franchisee’s initial investment, so it’s important to include capitalization in your franchisee persona profiles and qualify candidates during the discovery phase of your sales process. Powills suggests doubling your operating capital requirements when defining your franchisee personas to ensure there’s a financial cushion after opening their franchise business.
Still, for candidates with limited access to capital, Powills says there might also be ways to create business ownership opportunities for those with the right level of grit.
“You have to go into franchising understanding that the voice you're going to be given is templated. When you're looking at your business, if you understand that and say, ‘Okay, that's how the industry works; let me take the template off and customize it for my brand,” Powills says.
To customize your franchise offering for franchisees from lower levels of capitalization, Powills suggests considering the following options for your offering:
A partnership model. If you have an employee with a lot of passion and hustle but no cash, a partnership model could enable them to pay off some of their initial fees in sweat equity.
Incentivized franchise fees. Candidates with grit who aren’t flush with cash can benefit from paying a smaller fee upfront, with the remaining balance paid over time.
Discounts. Offering discounts on initial fees for candidates with backgrounds in certain industries, like education or the military, can help attract candidates with the right skills.
By creating business opportunities for franchisees from different backgrounds and levels of funding, you can open your brand up to a wider range of prospective buyers while continuing to prioritize your ideal franchisee personas.
2. Leverage affinity networks
As an emerging founder and franchisor, your background and identity as both a person and business owner – your brand story and founder’s story – can help you reach the right people by creating emotional connections and generating organic interest among prospective franchisees and the general public.
Similarly, by drawing on existing franchisees’ backgrounds and the experiences that brought them from their old lives to their present role franchisees, you can define franchisee personas that share those traits – and attract other like-minded franchisee candidates to your brand.
To reach candidates who will resonate most with those stories, it can be smart to target your marketing efforts toward affinity networks and media with audiences that share similar backgrounds. For example, if your new franchisee went to a certain university and your goal is to target candidates who share that persona, try sending a message to that school’s alumni group announcing the purchase. The same can be done with other affinity groups.
“If I read an article that said, ‘Former journalist buys a franchise,’ I might be like, ‘Oh, I’m a former journalist, I would like to buy a franchise,’ and I would click on that link,” Powills says, noting that by utilizing franchisee personas in this way you can also contribute to your brand’s internal culture.
3. Know your brand and where franchisees fit in
When it comes to selling franchises after your FDD is issued, it’s critical to know your target audience in order to recruit the right people to represent your brand. Equally important, however, is understanding where – and if – your franchisees fit into the equation.
“When we've talked to buyers on what it takes to buy a franchise, they talk about the business opportunity and they talk about the culture – those are the two ‘things.’ And then, above that statement, they have to be comfortable with the pure concept that they can own in a franchise in the first place,” Powills says.
When defining your franchisee personas, make sure to identify who would be a good candidate for franchise ownership – and eliminate anyone who realistically wouldn’t be a good fit. For example, a person who lives in a major city and takes the train to work every day and isn’t interested in cars likely wouldn’t be the best candidate for an automotive franchise.
“As much as we start finding the persona at the top to say, ‘Here’s the business model. … Here's the culture and the people behind it, here's what franchising is. Before we get there, you can also have almost a negative (franchisee) persona to say, ‘We’re not going to go after someone who has these traits – let’s remove that from this process, too,’” Powills says.
Learn more about Nick Powills and Mainland at https://hellomainland.com.