Simplify the System
It’s amazing how your business grows when it becomes structured and simplified. Sandra and Simon Allars are our clients. They have been successfully running their business, Sooth Mobile Massage, for about 13 years and were busy but their systems were quite ad hoc. Their Melbourne based business provides retirement homes and hospitals remedial massage.
By deleting some of the things they did and improving the digital side of the business and their website, the business grew up to 250% in a year. Quite remarkable.
It’s not uncommon to get up to 50-100% growth in a year because you are simplifying and tuning – something you’ve probably not done since you first started the business because so many things become habit. When you create systems, you review and break them up and get rid many. It is something to always keep in mind.
When it comes to franchising, we begin with some strategy. But we also look at the branding, because your brand is the essential core of franchising and is important in the early stages to address that. You must look at what your franchise needs to make it tick because it will be different to what you do today. A lot of people try to franchise what they have got by ad hoc amending it. That often is not successful. You need to look at the business and rebuild the model, usually simplifying what you do.
This is the first stage of four steps we talk about, which we have documented in our operations manuals. So, you get to work through four manuals to franchise your business, referring to the instructions as well as relying on the words of consultants.
One statement I truly like is Confucius with the fact that “Life is simple but we as humans insist on making it too complicated” and it tends to be true to have that habit. So, it is a matter of distilling the business and we often can’t do that ourselves. You sometimes need someone to assist you.