If you’re like most franchisors, you make money when your franchisees make money. Which means every minute they are not focused on making money takes money away from you. Yet each new franchisee starts off with an inherent disadvantage and – what we call – a profitability gap. What’s that mean? It means that starting a new franchise is an overwhelming and – for many people – nerve-wracking experience. There are too many unknowns to list, and what might take a veteran franchisee X amount of time to do something, might take a new franchisee X times 10 amount of time to do the very same thing.

Think we’re exaggerating? Try this. You’re probably sitting at your desk. Look at your watch and time how long it takes you to pick up the phone and dial up a vendor that you do business with. Okay go… How long? Maybe five, ten seconds? Now imagine you are a new franchisee. Dialing that same person brings up several questions… what’s the number? Is there a directory somewhere? Do I need to dial a #9 first to make an outgoing call? Is this person located in the same time-zone as me or should I call later? Is this their direct number or do I need to ask for them? Who exactly is this person? What’s our relationship with them? Not so easy after all. It might take this person 30 second or more – three times as long as it took you! Now multiply this activity by the several hundred activities that a new franchisee must complete and you can begin to see how much time is ‘wasted’ and not spent on productive activities.

So how can you properly train your new franchisees, thus reducing the ‘profitability gap’? It starts by knowing your audience and presenting the information from their perspective, not the perspective of a veteran like yourself. It also means anticipating their needs, which is a little like trying to read their mind.

One advantage of working with an outside training firm to develop your new franchisee training is the firm’s ability to take an objective, detached approach. You might be too close to it. Many clients (before they become clients) say to us, “How can you develop training for our franchisees when you don’t know our business?” To which we respond, “Neither do your franchisees… yet.”

I was reading an article in the Chicago Tribune this morning about Ford and its hope that the new Taurus model will resonate with the American consumer. The goal was to do a better job of understanding what the American consumer wants and needs in a car? A better job? How – after 100+ plus years of making cars – does a company of this size and who spends hundreds of millions on R&D, NOT know their audience yet??

Forget tariffs, forget out-of-control union wages, Ford, GM & Chrysler all have the biggest home-court advantage of any industry and that is that people WANT to buy their products over the foreign competition. Made in America still means something and, often, people begrudgingly purchase products made abroad – simply because they are better. My father drove American for 30 years before he bought his first Nissan, and do you know what he said? Why didn’t I do this sooner? The car met his needs and wants.

My first reaction to the article was amazement. How could the carmakers be so out of touch? And then, as I often do, I tried to draw a comparison to my industry – training, and you know what? It’s the same thing. I can’t tell you how many times my firm gets hired to develop training for a company’s employees and the story the people in corporate HR tell me is vastly different than the story the actual employees tell me. How well do corporate training departments know their audience? Or what’s more, if they don’t know, how many of them are recognizing it and taking steps to correct the problem?

Believe it or not our clients are sometimes surprised when we say that – before we develop anything – we’ll want to speak to the people for whom the training will address. To me it seems an obvious part of any analysis – it’s something we do with every project. And more often than not, the scope of the project changes after we do.

I don’t feel qualified to fix Ford’s woes, but I do know that your training initiatives will be infinitely more successful if you spend the time figuring out what your employees need. Do it in surveys… do it in interviews… do it by allowing employees to contribute random ideas through some knowledge-sharing mechanism or social network, but do it. You have a home-court advantage with your employees. Don’t make them begrudgingly take part in your training.