To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily QSR AM Jolt. If you're a restaurant franchisor, here's something worth sitting with: no phase of the franchisee relationship carries more weight than the onboarding and launch phase. Discovery Day is where you build trust.
Onboarding is where that trust either gets proven right or starts falling apart. Think about it: your new franchisee just made one of the biggest financial and personal bets of their life. What happens in those first few months decides whether they feel ready and supported, or completely underwater.
Here's the mindset shift every franchisor needs to make, especially early on: you're now running two businesses, not one. So if you're selling ice cream, you're still selling ice cream, but now you're also in the business of helping other people sell ice cream, and that's two different strategies. The franchisors who treat onboarding like an afterthought, just a box to check before the "real" business continues, are usually the ones watching their early franchisees flounder.
The classroom-and-kitchen stuff is honestly the easy part. Most franchisors have already nailed down food safety, equipment, recipes and POS systems. Where onboarding usually drops the ball is everything that happens outside the kitchen.
Hiring and scheduling a team. Handling an angry customer. Surviving that first brutal shift when you're short-staffed.
Figuring out what actually gets people through the door in week one. Good onboarding weaves operations, financial literacy and culture, right alongside the technical training. By the time a new franchisee walks out of onboarding, they should know their daily labor and food cost targets cold.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
