Success leaves clues. Who wouldn’t want to uncover its secrets – especially when launching a marketing campaign? It’s not surprising that a behavioral scientist with a specialty in neuroscience would be fascinated with success. After all, I’ve spent the past 23 years studying, quantifying, validating and modeling the psychographic markers which create franchisee success. You might, however, wonder how psychographics and neuroscience will make you a better marketer. More importantly, how you can use these sciences to attract franchise candidates with the highest likelihood of success within your franchise system.
How vs. Who
But before we can get into the how – let’s talk about whom. Who is your ideal franchisee? Beyond their net worth, education or job title, what distinguishes them from the not so good franchisee? Performance? Of course – that’s why you are in business. Compatibility? Certainly – no fun working with a prima donna or disagreeable franchisee. Compliant? Naturally – you spent a ton of time and resources creating those systems and have earned ever royalty cent. What else? Can you measure it? If not how will you be able to replicate or manage it?
Franchising is all about replicating. So why not clone your top performing franchisees? You might be thinking, that’s a great idea but how do I do that? Simply put – by analyzing your current franchisees and modeling your top performers. If we want to replicate the people part of success then we must quantify what created it from a psychographic perspective.
Analyze and Model
Modeling, at its core, is a forecasting process used to help predict the best possible outcome. Companies use it to see which methods, sites or solutions score well against a “model” of various influences—both positive and negative—on future store performance, marketing, site selection, staffing and more.
You’re a smart franchisor. You’ve been modeling many facets of your business already; your consumer base in various markets, future brick-and-mortar sites and even the potential challenges and opportunities of products, services or systems you are considering rolling out. All for naught, however, if a franchisee is incompatible, unmotivated or incapable of exploiting all that you have laid out in front of him.
How do we define a compatible franchisee? A compatible franchisee shares your company’s values, stage of growth and fits within your culture. A compatible franchisee will comply and leverage your company’s systems. A compatible franchisee has competencies that complement your value package and strategic plans.
A compatible franchisee will ramp-up quickly, pay his royalties, validate well and retain for the long-haul. Most importantly he will have strong year-over-year growth. That being said, if we can measure the psychographic markers that lead to franchisee-franchisor compatibility, in theory, we should be able to replicate the DNA of a top performer. Your likely thinking sounds great but you’ve tried personality tests and found no clues or evidence as to how or if personality inspired performance.
Personality Tests Do Not Work
I agree. Personality is a poor indicator of performance. Personality tests are designed to measure traits of an individual that remain constant through a lifetime. People like businesses evolve and change; thus personality tests, by their very nature, are limited both in scope and application.
“Correlations between personality and performance fall in the .03 to .15 which is close to zero.” – Frederick Morgerson et al, Personnel Psychology
Zoracle does not use personality tests. Instead, we use a meta-analysis approach including the following statistically validated sciences: Values, Stages of Growth, Culture, Work Style, Business Skills, Sales Style, Business Path and Emotional Intelligence.
