A consultant we had for one of the franchise systems I was involved with once told us that when you have franchisees talking about working 70 or 80 hour weeks, they were really just bragging about how inefficient they are.

There’s some truth there. Not to belittle someone busting ass to make ends meet, but too many hours is usually a sign of poor processes, insufficient training/poor hiring, and an unwillingness to delegate.

Specifically, when it comes to marketing, most owners find other things to occupy their time. Face to face marketing is outside the comfort zone of many operators, so it gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list.

So the questions are:
- Is marketing as important as doing the schedule or payroll?
- Do you schedule your week, or at least your day, or do you take each day as it comes to you?
- Are your current efforts effective? Bad markets often expose mediocre tactics for what they are.
- Did you intend to buy yourself an $8 an hour job when you opened, or did it just evolve that way?

For marketing ideas and discussion with other restaurant operators, visit the forum at The CommonMan Group.

Communication with your franchisees is half the battle when it comes to supporting them. Face to face and by phone is best, but time consuming. It’s also NOT best when it comes to routine questions and becomes very inefficient for your limited staff.

Email is not real-time, making it more efficient in some cases but it’s also one to one. Another franchisee with the same question gets a similar email, but your staff doesn’t get economies of scale. Email can be one to many, when you’re the one initiating the communication (“remember to put up your ad campaign materials”), but not when franchisees are the ones asking the questions.

Email is also a difficult way to post new information. Updates to the ops manual, vendor lists that change often, new forms and tools – who has the most recent and who needs a new one?

A franchise intranet system is another tool for your franchise support people that makes them twice as efficient as before. They can post the latest forms and documents, answer franchisee questions so that others can read the answer too, builds a knowledge base for franchisee self-support, and enables your staff to focus on the troubled units.

Your concept is NOT too small to have an intranet. Big or small, you have the same issues. It’s part of the infrastructure you need to support units, maintain your brand, and ensure consistency of operation.

Restaurant owners, and most small franchise companies, tend to miss out on one of the most important parts of the advertising mix: email marketing.

I’ve seen lots of reasons for this. Fear of technology or ignorance in its usage; lack of understanding as to the benefits or email; unrealistic expectation of results; lack of money.

As a stable part of your marketing mix, email marketing provides regular contact, more impressions, and should play more of a supporting role to your other efforts. It gives you a chance to contact your existing customers one more time (or two more times) about your special price point, your new entree, your community involvement, or your expanded daypart. It’s a chance to remind customers, to incentivize them, to call them to action.

Too many small franchises, selling to single-unit operators, don’t even mandate that a computer and Internet connection be present in the unit. Many of their Z’s don’t check email, or have an AOL account. Often franchisers know the value of email advertising, but can’t get their franchise partners on board.

The next few posts will help to make the benefits of email marketing clearer, and offer some solutions to getting set up to be easy and automatic, getting franchisees on board, and increasing the value of your company.

Intown neighborhoods are usually pretty tight groups. They’re a lot like the suburbs I grew up in where neighbors know each other and when someone is sick the social network springs into action to supply meals and support.

Case in point: Dakota Blue in Grant Park. They work with a local church so that, when the church is scheduling meal drop offs to a family that has recently had a death, a birth, or a traumatic experience, they call him first.

He volunteers for the first night. He cares about them, they care about him. (Another restaurant I work with does this same thing and has received at least 3 catering orders specifically because he does this for the church.)

Six Feet Under rose to the occasion when the Grant Park Conservancy was restoring a fountain. Donate $2 and get a cut-out fountain to write your name on and post to the wall (like Shamrocks for MD). Cheesy, a little. But the local press picked it up and the local residents already knew he was doing it.

Lastly, Applebee’s franchisees report increased customer loyalty due to community involvement and events, of which the company did more than 15,000 last year. A company spokesman said that franchisees are “involved for all the right social reasons” but “we also think there’s a very strong strategic reason to be involved.”

If you’re not involved with your community, or you don’t have a local store marketing plan for your restaurant…why not?

A couple of examples of how to surely piss your customers off and guarantee that, if you do make it through the financial slump, you won’t have any customers left when you reach the other side.

Wachovia has apparently started taking payments for lines of credit (unsecured lines of credit), and presumably for credit cards, out of savings or checking accounts without customer approval. If the payment is late, they just reach in and help themselves. Hopefully that won’t mess your automatic payments up too badly.

Not sure I would allow those foxes to be in charge of my chickens.

Example number two: blaming the customer, calling them thieves, liars, or idiots, won’t win friends or influence people.

A local franchisee of a regional chain has posted signs that he will not accept BOGO coupons in his unit. Apparently the coups were distributed by another franchisee and a few of them have made their way south. Customers who try to redeem the coupons, which expired earlier this week, are confronted with angry counter staff.

When you turn away a coupon, you’re effectively telling the customer you think they’re either too stupid to read (wrong unit, expired coup) or you think they’re a cheat (‘you’re trying to pull a fast one on me!’).

You want to engender negative word of mouth, the easiest way is to call your customers cheating idiots.

Behold! The power of word of mouth!