Hosted by Jeff Walter, Founder and CEO of LatitudeLearning
In this episode of the Training Impact podcast, Jeff Walter, CEO of LatitudeLearning, shared insights from his time at the IFA World Franchise Show in Miami. A recurring concern among attendees—particularly emerging franchisors with 10 to 50 locations—was the challenge of scaling their franchise training programs. While many new franchisors provide robust, instructor-led onboarding for new franchisees, these methods quickly become unsustainable as the network grows.
Typically, the onboarding process for new franchisees includes several weeks of hands-on training at corporate headquarters, followed by field experience at an operating location. While this traditional, immersive model is effective in developing initial skills and business acumen, it is also resource-heavy. The strain intensifies when the same training team is expected to support multiple new sites, provide on-location launch assistance, and revisit locations for ongoing employee training. As new employees are added, most franchisors rely on a train-the-trainer approach that often lacks sufficient structure or support, leading to inconsistent training outcomes and higher employee turnover.
To overcome these limitations, Walter advocates for a shift to blended learning—a combination of self-paced digital modules and targeted instructor-led sessions. He outlines a two-phase transformation approach that begins with onboarding and extends to ongoing employee training.
For onboarding, the strategy is to leverage self-paced courses for foundational knowledge—covering topics such as brand values, service standards, P&L management, and operational protocols—before franchisees ever step foot in a training facility. By front-loading this content, the valuable in-person time can focus on interactive, scenario-based skill development. This approach not only shortens the duration of on-site instruction but also enriches it, as learners arrive with context, questions, and a solid knowledge base.
The same e-learning materials developed for franchisee onboarding can then be repurposed for ongoing franchise employee training. Walter recommends deploying these modules via a learning management system (LMS) to provide structure, track progress, and conduct assessments. This allows new hires to learn at their own pace and ensures message consistency—an essential factor since these frontline workers directly represent the brand to customers.
Certification becomes a key element in the blended learning model. Franchise employees can earn certifications such as “Certified Sales Associate” or “Certified Store Manager” through a mix of assessments and practical application. These certifications serve not just as knowledge benchmarks, but also as motivational tools when tied to tangible incentives like diplomas, monetary rewards, or recognition in company channels.
As franchisors scale beyond 100 units, Walter encourages adding location-based certifications. For example, a “Certified Franchise Location” might require a specific percentage of staff to hold individual certifications. Incentivizing franchisees to meet these standards—perhaps through reduced training costs or rebates—reinforces accountability and quality.
Walter also touches on the future of training scalability through skill development technologies. With advancements in AI and virtual reality, practices such as coaching and simulation-based learning—once limited by cost and instructor availability—can now be made accessible to frontline workers at scale. Scenarios like handling a difficult customer or demonstrating product knowledge can be simulated in low-cost, high-impact digital environments.
The benefits of scaling franchise training through blended learning are significant. A consistent training experience leads to better brand representation, operational efficiency, and employee retention. Walter cites studies showing that lack of training is one of the top reasons new employees leave within 30 days—and again within the first year. A strong training program reduces this churn and boosts performance at both individual and organizational levels.
In closing, Walter emphasizes that the journey from fledgling franchisor to scalable enterprise begins with evolving the training model. By investing early in blended learning infrastructure and leveraging LMS capabilities, franchisors can build a training ecosystem that scales sustainably, supports brand consistency, and drives profitability across the network.
This episode not only provided practical steps but also set a strategic framework for any franchisor looking to grow efficiently without sacrificing training quality. As Walter notes, effective training doesn’t just empower franchisees and their teams—it builds the foundation for long-term brand success.
00:00 Emerging Challenges in Franchise Training
08:09 Transitioning to Blended Learning Models
20:03 Scaling and Certifying Franchise Training Programs
Jeff Walter (00:02)
Hi, this is Jeff Walter, host of the Trading Impact podcast and founder and CEO of Latitude Learning. You know, recently I was over at the IFA World Franchise Show down in Miami and ⁓ it was a really great show, learned a lot of things. ⁓ It’s really interesting what’s going on in that space. But there was a recurring theme and I was speaking down there and I talked to a number of folks afterwards. ⁓
during the show and there was a common problem that kept occurring. There were a lot of franchises there that were emerging franchisors. You know, they had anywhere from 10 to 100 units and they were struggling with the training. And so as we were talking, it came to light.
one of the key problems emerging franchises are facing is how to scale their franchise training program. And actually,
And so I got to talk to a lot of emerging franchise awards. Those are folks with 10 to 50 franchisers. And there was an emerging problem I saw. And even as I talked to some of the larger franchise awards, ⁓ and that was scaling their franchise training program. And typically for the fledgling franchise awards or the emerging franchise awards.
or even the larger franchisors, they do a really ⁓ great job at onboarding that initial franchisee ⁓ in doing so. But it tends to be very manually intensive. So that typical new franchisee onboarding training ⁓ usually consists of a kind of an instructor-led training program that really focuses on skill development. So often,
The new franchisee would be invited to come to headquarters for ⁓ one to three weeks. ⁓ They would go to the test kitchen or test facility at headquarters. They’d briefed on a train, whole bunch of things. Obviously the franchise, also things like P &L management, financial management, things you need to know from a business owner’s standpoint on how to run franchise.
But then also the technical things associated with the franchise, whether it’s a quick service restaurant, how to prepare the food, service the customer, et cetera. Or if it was ⁓ something like the automotive repair or ⁓ something that had more technician related or cleaning service or any of the myriad of things. The new franchisee would then be taught all the different skills that it took.
at that headquarters over that couple of week period. And then after that, the typical thing would be to go for them to go on to a go to an actual site, know, an actual franchise location or corporate store and be there for another two weeks or so as a, you know, employee of the franchise. And then they can see firsthand how to interact with customers.
how to actually do ⁓ the work, ⁓ whether it food preparation or installation. ⁓ And they would see firsthand what it’s like inside of one of the franchises. so it’s fairly, you know, two to four week intense period ⁓ teaching a new franchisee and bringing them on board and making sure they have the skills to be able to run a franchise and then do it. And then…
that support, onboarding program would extend to actual when they’re getting, when the new franchisee is getting ready to open their location and sending an instructor out to that location so that they could train all the initial employees and make sure that it’s going to be a successful launch. And sometimes even stick around for a week or two working in the location to make sure it’s a successful launch. And so,
It’s a pretty, know, and that’s your typical new franchisee onboarding training. ⁓ It’s pretty instructor led, intensive, focusing on not only knowledge acquisition, but skill development. And went pretty good. And then when it comes to ⁓ the typical new franchise employee training after that initial thing, again, the typical thing was
they’re expecting the new franchisee to kind of train the trainer and it’s kind of a train the trainer model and they’re expecting the new franchisee to go train everybody. And there’s not really a lot of support for the, you know, the employees you bring on six months a year later. And so that’s kind of the typical program that you see. And so when you’re an emerging franchise or with 10 to 50 units out there,
Typically there’s a person, a lot of times it’s the founder or somebody close to the founder, one of the executives, and they’re going around to all these different franchisees, all these different locations, and they bring the people into headquarters for a few weeks and doing that initial thing, and then they’re running out to location A to train their initial people, and then over to location B. And you can see that from a scalability standpoint that you’re adding more more locations.
That model of a heavy instructor lead really ⁓ starts to put its toll on the organization. ⁓ People just get stretched thin, they’re going all over the country or continent or all over the world. We have one client where they’re flying all over the world, they’re instructors, and it’s very taxing. It’s hard to scale.
And then on top of that, ⁓ you’re not getting a lot of support, six, 12 months down the line, not a training support. When you bring on that next wave of franchise employees and you’re expecting, they’re expecting the franchisee to do the training and that becomes problematic and that leads to even more, Hey, can you send somebody here to help? I just hired five more people and I need more help. So the focus, so that’s kind of the situation that I found down there, talking to a lot of these franchise lawyers. And so the question became,
Hey, Jeff, ⁓ as an emerging franchise or how can I scale my franchise training program so that I don’t have people running around like chickens with a head cut off? And so, and so start talking about that. And I started thinking about that. And in my presentation down there, I kind of included how to scale your franchise employee training program. So that, that first part about onboarding a new franchisee.
very solid but very instructor-led, very intense. My suggestion on that component and on the other component is you need to start to move towards a blended learning program and away from a purely ⁓ on-site instructor-led training. And that’s how you can start to scale your franchise training program. So let’s look at it from two components. First, from that onboarding of the new
and then from the ongoing. On the onboarding of the new, instructor time, time in front of that expert is very valuable time, it’s expensive time, but it’s also extremely valuable. Blended learning is where you combine self-paced learning, self-paced training course, whether it’s video course or a SCORM e-learning course or some other self-paced type of learning course. You combine that with instructor-led training.
And the best way to do that is to use ⁓ self-paced learning and assessments of the knowledge you’re assuming somebody to get in that self-paced learning to establish a baseline of knowledge. And so even on the new franchisee training program, rather than bringing them into headquarters and starting from scratch and spending all that valuable instructor-led time just learning the basics, you start to bring in a blended learning program where you’re doing
⁓ You’re getting the basics out of the way. You’re kind of expressing this is what the franchise is. This is what it’s about. This is our brand. This is what we’re doing. This how you do this service. This is how you do that service. This is how you do your financial statement. This is what you should be doing every month from an ordering standpoint, et cetera, et cetera. And you can build a lot of that into self-paced learning so that the new franchisee
gets a certain base level of knowledge before they come to headquarters for that intense two week instructor course. And what we found is when you do that, the time spent with the instructor becomes much, much richer and more valuable to the learner because they’ve already got a certain base level of knowledge and in acquiring that knowledge, they’ve also
Develop a number of questions and things that they’re that they have thought about and so when they actually get into that Time with the instructor that to eat in this case the two-week time You know, it’s it’s just a much richer They’re operating at a much higher level and they can get more out of that very valuable face-to-face instructor time And then same thing when they’re out at the company store the training sort the escape
It kind of jump starts everything. The instructor’s not sitting there starting from step one or step 10.
So, you know, and that’s blended learning. In order to do blended learning, know, you also need a learning management system. You can do it with just videos that they watch on YouTube or something or some private video channel like a Vimeo or something. But to do it properly, you really want to get a learning management system there and then put the self-paced courses on top of that. That works out well. So, and the nice thing about that,
and investing in that, that allows you to start to scale that new franchise training program is it also helps out on the ongoing franchise employee training. know, and again, the typical model is that train the trainer and the new franchisees, you know, call up and say, Hey, can you send somebody out? that, again, that person’s running around the country trying to train. When you invest in that blended learning now,
⁓ that same material on how to do all the jobs within the franchise and the franchise positioning and meaning and culture and what you’re trying to accomplish there. All of those materials can also be used for new franchise employee training. So that when they start hiring the next ⁓ franchise employee three to six months down the road, rather than saying, hey, ⁓ this franchisee, you go train them and here’s the materials, you can actually say,
Hey, have them take these type courses. teaches them how to, you know, from a customer service, teaches about the brand, the story of the brand, how to do the elements of the, you know, how to merchandise. If it’s a retail store, how to do installation if it’s more technical thing, how to provide the service, service oriented franchise. You know, it gives you the baseline for all the franchise employees.
so that they can acquire that same base level of knowledge and understanding. And again, you want to do that with a series of assessments ⁓ to assess their knowledge. And I would suggest assessing their knowledge first. If they already know something, if they already know ⁓ the basic tenants of customer service, or if they already know how to do a particular operation, they can test that a bit. And that condenses the amount of time that they have to spend.
training. But regardless, you want to get all that self-paced stuff available for that ongoing franchise training, franchise employee training. And then ⁓ you can, then, you know, taking the next step, start combining it, start creating certifications so that the franchise employee becomes a certified installer or certified barista or certified store manager or a certified sales associate. ⁓
and use that certification and some type of reward or incentive. And the reward can be as simple as a diploma ⁓ to much more sophisticated monetary rewards.
so they can go buy things in a company store or ⁓ they earn out of a plaque. There’s all different types of reward mechanisms, but even just starting with a simple diploma that they’re a certified sales associate or store manager or technician is a start as a certification to get that. Then you start looking at measuring your program based on the number of certified franchise employees you’re
you’re creating. And that gives you the base that blended learning where there’s a lot of self-paced learning going on at the employee level. You’ve got kind of 50, 60 mix of self-paced and instructor led at the onboarding level. That really starts to give you the tools to scale, have a scalable franchise training program. That is you continue to evolve past 10 to 50 units and yet you’re going from being an emerging
Franchise or to you’re on your way to an established franchise or now you can start to move into more advanced things like ⁓ Certifying a franchise location and say well a certified franchise location is one that has so many ⁓ Certified sales associates certified managers in order to become a certified manager certain percentage
people have to be certified, et cetera, et cetera. And now you’re looking at having a certified franchise location. And you’re taking it up a notch. And as you’re doing that, you might want to start to look at incentives at the franchise level. And we’ve seen different forms of that incentivization from
you know, reducing the cost of the training to the franchisee, to adding a little financial sweetener in terms of products and rebates and things like that. But all these are ways to work with your franchisees so that it hit a certain level of knowledge and skills within their franchise locations. ⁓
because ultimately a trained franchise is a more profitable franchise for both you and the franchisee. And then as you’re rolling that out, want, you know, getting to that, you also want to start to roll out some manager feedback. You want to, you know, one of the easiest things is the net promoter score, task managers, franchisees. Would you recommend this training program and certifications to another franchisee?
⁓ And now you start to measure your success, your training program based on the number of certified franchises or certified franchise locations. Excuse me. And that kind of takes you up to that hundred unit, you know, as you’re growing and scaling and it’s giving you the tools to make sure that not only are your franchisees trained, but their employees are trained and knowledgeable. And I was talking to ⁓ one franchise or small franchise or
and they were really pushing on the train to trainer model until I said, well, you know, the other thing you gotta remember is that frontline employee, is the representation of your brand. They represent your brand to the end customer. And by doing the train to trainer model, you’re relying on your franchisee to convey the value of your brand to the frontline employee.
By providing this blended training, this self-paced learning, ⁓ you’re able to control the message that’s going right out to that frontline employee ⁓ that is the one that’s interacting with the customer. so when you start, you so not only are you getting them up to speed, but you’re also getting more consistent ⁓ messaging, getting out to those frontline franchise employees that are the face of the brand to your ultimate customer. So that was.
Once I kind put it that way, they’re like, ⁓ that makes a lot of sense. And so as you’re going through this ⁓ and you’re evolving your onboarding program to a blended learning, and then you start creating a blended learning program or self-paced program ⁓ for the franchise employees, you’re creating the tools to ⁓ not only get that initial success when a new franchise launches.
but then that ongoing success as you bring new people in. You know, interesting thing, I was talking to somebody else down at the show and they had referenced a recent survey of retail employees, especially focused on franchise retail employees. And the number one, not the number one, one of the top reasons why a new franchise employee quit within the first 30 days was they were not trained. And so they didn’t know what they were doing.
And then one of the top reasons why a new employee quit within the first year was they realized nobody else knows what they’re doing because they’re not trained either. So the training is an important part. People knowing what they’re supposed to be doing is an important part to having a successful franchise network. And this is a way of scaling your franchise training program. Then once you get kind of past, you know, that kind of takes you up past a hundred units. You’ve got this nice blended learning program going.
certifying the employees, you’re certifying the franchise locations, you got some type of incentive going on so that the franchises are ⁓ making sure that people get trained and certified and maintaining that level of knowledge and skill within their franchise. Now you want to start to move to the next level which is really skill development, ⁓ looking at skill profiles, what are the different skills and different roles within the franchises, what are the different skill levels. ⁓
you want to be able to get into skill assessments. ⁓ And with skill assessments, that also requires regular practice and mentoring and coaching. And they’re starting to bring tools into that. And one of the cool things happening right now with AI is traditionally, that practice and that coaching was something that was very human intensive and therefore very expensive and especially very expensive to do at the franchise employee level.
Now with AI and the avatars and virtual reality, a lot of that can be done through the computer and they are at a very, very low cost. And that allows you to extend that out to the frontline employee so they can practice a skill, such as say dealing with a difficult customer, right? Or practicing their sales skills.
you know, more of like say dealership or virtual reality or practice a technical skill. And so, you know, and this is as you’re growing past the hundred units, you can start to look at that, start to create those environments where people can practice their skills, have their skills assessed, and then you start measuring your success based on the skill levels within the franchises. And so there you kind of have a multi-step approach.
You get your friend to scale your franchise training program to go from what many fledgling franchise or is have, which is a really ⁓ instructor intensive onboarding program and provides some materials for ongoing training, employee training ⁓ to one where that intense onboarding program turns into a blended program.
the franchisee gets more out of it because they’re coming, they’re spending that time at a higher level. They’ve gotten all the basics out of the way and so they can really use that time much more effectively. But then also it really is the groundwork for all the self-paced learning materials that the franchise employee needs. And ⁓ if you do that, we’ve seen that work and that’s our suggestion.
My suggestion to emerging franchisors, this is how you scale it. Start with the instructor intensive stuff. Start developing a blended learning program before you’re onboarding and use those same materials to train your franchise employees and then start to migrate, know, and create the certifications and the rewards for certifications and then start to certify the franchise location so you make sure they have a certain level of knowledge within a franchise. And then, you know, add some incentives on that for the enfranchisees.
And then eventually as you ramp up past 100 units, start thinking about skill profiles and giving franchise employees the opportunity to practice those skills and get coaching. with AI ⁓ emerging, that’s emerging as a very cost effective technology to allow people to practice those skills and get coaching from the AI. There’s some really fascinating things going on there, which I’ll talk about in another episode. And if you’re able to do all that,
Well, then you can accrue the benefits of franchise training. The number one benefit being increasing revenue and profitability. So that’s really a double whammy to the bottom line, double thumbs up, good. And that happens because you get more consistency across your franchise locations. Again, because you’re training that frontline employee that’s the face of the franchise to the customer. That consistency leads to a better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
It also increases improved operational efficiency, which is part of the profitability. And then all at the end of the day, improve franchise employee retention. As I mentioned earlier, lack of training, lack of knowledge, one of the key reasons people leave within the first 30 days and then again within the first year. And so, you you get better consistency, higher customer satisfaction, increased efficiency and improved employee retention.
That all contributes that higher revenue, higher profitability. And that’s what you’re aiming for with your franchise trading program. So ⁓ like I said, it was a great show. I really enjoyed it. The folks over at IFA did a really nice job putting on. There were some great attendees asking lots of really deep probing questions about all this. There were some really good ⁓ seminars from other speakers. ⁓
you know, about what to look for in a franchise. And really interesting enough, one of them was your franchise or needs to do three things for you. So help you in sales, help you train you and then provide ongoing support. So it’s very good to see training as number two in there, but it was really great show. I had a really great time. This need came out of it. Stay tuned to our website.
because we think there’s something we can do there to create a program to help these emerging franchise awards ramp up. But until then, just want to share that information, had that conversation with a number of people down there and thought that it would make for a good episode to get out to a wider audience in terms of how to scale your Franchadez award training, where your franchise training program. Thank you for listening. Appreciate you as always and have a wonderful day.