🎙️Episode 7

IFA World Franchise Show 2025

Turn Your Franchise Training into a Strategic Asset

Hosted by Jeff Walter, Founder and CEO of LatitudeLearning

In this powerful episode of the Training Impact Podcast, we spotlight Jeff Walter, Founder and CEO of LatitudeLearning, and his thought-provoking session at the 2025 IFA World Franchise Show. With over 20 years in Learning and Development, Walter brings clarity and urgency to a message franchisors need to hear: franchise training isn’t just a necessity—it’s a strategic weapon.

Walter opens by challenging the conventional belief that training is simply a cost of doing business. He explains how many executive teams instinctively fund sales, marketing, and product development as strategic investments while relegating training to operational overhead. His argument is simple but compelling: training should earn its place as a strategic priority by delivering measurable return on investment. When training impacts revenue, profitability, retention, and efficiency, it stops being a checkbox and starts becoming a catalyst for growth.

Throughout the episode, Walter walks us through the deeper benefits of a well-structured training program. From creating consistent customer experiences across locations to boosting loyalty, minimizing employee turnover, and increasing operational efficiency, he makes the case that great training doesn’t just support performance—it multiplies it.

But strategy needs structure. That’s where Walter’s Training Program Roadmap comes in. This five-stage maturity model helps franchisors understand where their training programs are today—and how to evolve them. From informal, self-directed learning all the way to full alignment with organizational KPIs, Walter outlines the journey clearly. He emphasizes the importance of moving beyond static content and embracing role-based, blended learning solutions that drive behavior change and skill development.

Listeners will also hear about one of the most common breakdowns in franchise systems: the disconnect between solid onboarding and underdeveloped ongoing employee training. Walter explains how franchisees, often left to their own devices, lack the structure and support needed to deliver effective training to new hires. The result is inconsistency, low retention, and missed opportunities for performance improvement.

To address this, Walter shares a detailed case study from a power sports franchisor that successfully built a scalable training program. With a mix of self-paced eLearning and instructor-led sessions, tiered certifications, and performance-linked incentives, the franchise saw dramatic improvements in both engagement and operational outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, they used Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a straightforward, actionable KPI to gauge training effectiveness.

For emerging franchisors, Walter offers a phased roadmap to build and scale training alongside business growth. He explains what to prioritize from the first 10 units up to 100+ and beyond. As brands grow, the need for automation, certification tracking, and even advanced technologies like AI-powered coaching and simulation becomes critical. Walter emphasizes how these tools are no longer out of reach—they’re now practical investments for scaling franchise learning without sacrificing quality.

Walter closes the episode with a clear message for L&D leaders: speak the language of executives. Show how training connects directly to business goals. Demonstrate impact. When you do that, training stops being seen as overhead and starts earning serious investment and strategic attention.

Whether you’re a franchise exec, L&D lead, or business owner navigating scale, this episode is a masterclass in rethinking how training drives enterprise value.

And don’t forget—listeners can access additional resources, best practices, and implementation frameworks mentioned in the episode through the QR codes and links provided.

Tune in and discover how to turn your franchise training into the strategic asset your business needs.

Transcript

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Hi, it’s Jeff Walter, and welcome to the podcast.

 

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You know, a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at the IFA World Franchise Show down in Miami Beach.

 

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It was a lot of fun, a great time there, learned a lot about the franchise, franchise training, emerging franchises and what they need, and there was a lot of really great speakers, but I mostly enjoyed speaking to all the franchisors out there.

 

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It was really something.

 

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What I thought I’d do for this episode is I have a recording of the show of the presentation we did down there at the speaking engagement and figured it was on how to turn your franchise training program into a strategic asset.

 

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And I just thought you guys might enjoy it.

 

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And so without any further ado, here is my turning your franchise training program into a strategic asset presentation down at the IFA.

 

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Hope you have a great time enjoying it.

 

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Then again, as always, thank you for listening.

 

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Hi, I’m Jeff Walter, founder and CEO of Latitude Learning, and welcome to Transform Your Franchise Training into Strategic Asset.

 

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First, I just want to thank the folks at IFA for inviting me to come here and speak at the 2025 IFA World Franchise Show.

 

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It’s been a great show.

 

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Our booth is over, two aisles over right here, and come by after the presentation if you have any questions.

 

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Also, you know, you can raise your hand at any time.

 

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I’ll answer any questions while we’re going through.

 

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You might notice there’s a little QR code at the bottom of the presentation there.

 

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The information that’s on this presentation is pretty much available at that QR code.

 

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So take pictures, take the QR code, ask questions.

 

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Hopefully we’ll have a little bit of fun.

 

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Okay, so the first thing

 

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we might want to ask ourselves is, what is a strategic asset?

 

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And to understand that, we really need to understand the mindset of the executive.

 

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And so here we have an executive.

 

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And really, executives only do one thing.

 

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They allocate money.

 

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And they only allocate money to one of two things.

 

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Things that are either a cost to doing business or things that are strategic investments.

 

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I mean, I know it sounds a lot more complicated than that, and we told these executives in higher regard.

 

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I’ve been an executive for 20 years now.

 

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This is what we do for a living.

 

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We allocate money, and we think of them as either, it’s either a cost of doing business or a strategic investment.

 

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And so what do we mean by cost of doing business?

 

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Well, cost of doing business are things that you have to do to keep the business going.

 

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So things like accounting and regulatory compliance and a call center and things like that that are necessary and you have to have to stay in business.

 

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Strategic investments are things that generate a return.

 

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You spend a dollar on it and it generates $2 back.

 

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So those are things like sales and marketing.

 

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product development, investments in plant and equipment.

 

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You spend a dollar, you get more than a dollar back, that’s what makes it a strategic investment.

 

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Versus the cost of doing business, which is just something you gotta do to be in business, like I said.

 

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So, what executives do, they allocate money to these two categories of spending.

 

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That’s the primary thing they do.

 

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And what they like to do is give big piles of money

 

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strategic investments, as much money as possible because that’s where they get their return, that’s where the company generates its profits, and that’s how they get bonuses.

 

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And then they want to spend as little money as possible on things that are cost of doing business because there is no return.

 

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It’s something you have to do, it’s necessary, you have to have it, but it does not generate a return.

 

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And so they want to spend as little money on that as possible.

 

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So those are your two categories.

 

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Now having been in this business for over 20 years, I’ll tell you that most training programs are viewed by executives as a cost of doing business.

 

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They know that they have to have a training program, they know that it’s necessary, but they generally don’t see a return, nor do we as learning and development professionals

 

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promote the return.

 

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We tend to think that knowledge is good, more knowledge is better, and therefore the executives should open up budget so that we can make sure that everybody has lots of knowledge and skills.

 

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But what we don’t do, and what we haven’t done pretty much as an industry, is really bring that down to where is the return on investment.

 

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And so most training programs are viewed by the executives

 

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as a cost of doing business.

 

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And the goal in turning it and transforming your training program into a strategic asset is to turn it into a strategic investment.

 

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And that’s what makes it a strategic asset, is that it has a return on investment.

 

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And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about.

 

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And we’ve got a lot to cover in a little bit of time.

 

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So let’s go.

 

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Now one of the great things about training and as an L&D professional for several decades now, it’s one of the reasons I love training, is I do believe knowledge is power and power, and with that, more knowledge is better than less knowledge, but it also, it can drive benefits.

 

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And the primary, primary benefit of franchise training is it can increase revenue and profitability.

 

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It’s like a double whammy, you bring in more revenue and of that revenue you get to keep more of it as a profit.

 

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And so the training really can do that.

 

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I’ve seen it happen with a number of clients.

 

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It’s a wonderful thing.

 

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And the way it does it is these other benefits that happen.

 

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One, with that training, you get a consistency across your franchise locations.

 

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That consistency leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty because they know wherever they go, they’re going to get that same level of service and quality.

 

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So you get that higher satisfaction, you get that higher loyalty.

 

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The other thing it does is it also helps the franchisee improve operational efficiency.

 

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And operational efficiency means that they can do more with less.

 

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They can do something and spend less money on it.

 

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That’s your higher profitability right there.

 

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And then lastly, part of that is also improving franchise employee retention.

 

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I was talking to a gentleman earlier and he was telling me about a recent study of retail employees and one of the top reasons retail employees quit within the first 30 days is they’re not trained.

 

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And then one of the top reasons they quit within the first year is even though they weren’t trained, they stick around until they realize nobody else is trained and nobody knows what they’re doing and then they have a tendency to leave.

 

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So that helps out with retention.

 

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Retention helps out with efficiency.

 

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Knowing what to do helps out with efficiency.

 

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All that helps out with consistency.

 

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The consistency leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, and all of which leads to higher revenues and profitability.

 

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We’ve been doing this for a long time.

 

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We know that this works.

 

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Unfortunately, a lot of training programs don’t take advantage or don’t do what they need to do to generate those types of benefits.

 

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But we’ll be getting into that.

 

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So let’s move on.

 

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All right, so the first thing you got to ask yourself is who needs to be trained?

 

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And depending on the franchise, there’s different names for these folks, but basically the franchise operator, the owner, the operator that operates the franchise, any store managers or assistant managers they might have that help them with the store.

 

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And then, as a general term, skilled associates and sales associates, there are different names.

 

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Sometimes they’re called technicians, sometimes they’re called installers.

 

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coffee shop that might be called a barista but these are people that have that have a skill that’s that is core to the franchise right so I just call them skilled associates sales associates can be anywhere from a cashier to a salesperson whose full-time job it is to do something like if you have a more something like a Signorama or a Zeitbart which you know it’s a more technically oriented type of franchise

 

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And then you might have some customer service reps depending on the type of franchise you have there.

 

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And there might be some marketing coordinators that help coordinate with the franchisor.

 

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So those are the folks who need to be trained.

 

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It really depends on the franchise and the nature of the franchise and the types of jobs that the franchisees have.

 

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But that’s it, you know, kind of good in a nutshell.

 

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All right, now we know who needs to be trained.

 

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The next question is what do they need to know and do?

 

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First off the bat is business management.

 

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This is usually at the franchise operator level or the store managers.

 

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They need to understand the franchise model.

 

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They need to know how to read a financial statement.

 

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And so that financial management.

 

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They also need to understand leadership and how to run teams.

 

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And so it’s the business management.

 

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You’ve got your sales and marketing.

 

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And don’t worry, it’s a little bit of an eye chart up here.

 

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Like I said, all this information is available if you follow the QR code.

 

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which strategically is not on this page.

 

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But if you use the QR code from before, you’ll get there.

 

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But sales and marketing, usually your sales associates are focused on that.

 

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Technical skills, skill development, adherence to standards, et cetera.

 

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Your technical associates are focused on that.

 

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Customer service in terms of how to, you know, what the best practice is, what are the service protocols.

 

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how to constructively take customer feedback is on there.

 

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Obviously, product knowledge, detailed understanding of the product and how it compares against competitors, and being able to do hands-on demonstrations, again, depending on the type of franchise you have, quick service restaurants generally do a lot of hands-on demonstrations.

 

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but a number of other types of franchises do.

 

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The operational processes had actually, the systems and technology, the operational processes, and then if there’s any regulatory compliance or ethical standards that are required for the nature of the franchise, those are also coming there.

 

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Okay, so now we know what kind of benefits we’re shooting for, who needs to be trained, the types of people that need to be trained, the different audiences, and what they need to know and do.

 

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So we’ve kind of gone through that.

 

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Now, like I said earlier, we’ve seen a lot of this over the years.

 

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We’ve worked with a lot of franchisors and other types of partner training programs, and we’ve created something we call the Training Program Roadmap.

 

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We’ve categorized the types of training programs into five different types of training programs, starting with Stage One, and these stages are kind of evolutions.

 

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steps that a program would go through as it goes from a modest low level of return to a very high level return so stage one self-directed you’ve got the the tools out there the information out there for the learner to self to to learn and it’s self-directed they take the courses they want and you know it’s a very kind of what’s really it’s a very

 

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volunteer oriented type of program very good except people tend to only go in when they want to learn something or they need to know something and you know, they don’t go in and you can’t really as a franchisor depend that your franchisees have a certain level of knowledge or skill.

 

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Then from there we move on to a stage two like we call a knowledge acquisition

 

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type of training program.

 

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Here you’re requiring people within the franchise, or at least a certain number of people within the franchise, to acquire a certain level of knowledge.

 

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You’re doing assessments for that.

 

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Stage three, skill development.

 

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Now you’re going from knowing something to doing something.

 

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I always think of stage two and three as the difference between when you get your driver’s license.

 

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You know, passing the written test is knowledge acquisition.

 

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Passing the road test is skill development.

 

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You actually need to be able to do something.

 

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And then we move up from there to performance-oriented.

 

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Now it’s not just being able to do something, but do it well and having high impact.

 

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And stage four is at the individual level, and stage five is at the organization level, really focusing on organization performance.

 

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Now, we’ve taken those five stages and we’ve identified the best practices in each stage.

 

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And don’t worry, I know, especially, well, even if you’re in the front row, this is a bit of an eye chart, especially if you’re in the back row, but I think it’s also an eye chart for a front row.

 

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But I just wanted to share this with you to say each stage has a set of best practices.

 

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Each stage can be optimized to deliver to be the best it can be.

 

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And these are some of the best practices.

 

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So not to go through each one of them because we don’t have time.

 

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We’re only here for a little bit.

 

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And so we got a lot to cover.

 

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But, you know, in general, in your stage one, you’ve got comprehensive resources.

 

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You’re doing blended learning, which means self-paced and instructor led.

 

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You’re using an LMS to track everything and to deliver that self-paced training.

 

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You’re doing regular updates, you’re getting learner feedback, and you’re usually measuring stuff in your success in enrollment.

 

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Now, when it comes to stage two, you’re usually putting things into certifications.

 

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You’re assigning certifications to individuals.

 

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You’re specifying some partner certification objectives.

 

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You want to get a certain number of people within that franchise certified.

 

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You’re doing pre-assessments.

 

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You’re letting people test out of some courses, because why sit in the hours-long training if they already know the stuff.

 

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You’re incentivizing the training.

 

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You’re branding it if you’ve got multi-brands.

 

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A lot of learners might have multiple locations, et cetera.

 

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When you get to stage three, now you’re focused on skills, being able to do something.

 

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You’re developing skill profiles, you’re setting skill objectives for your partners.

 

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and your franchisees, you’re assigning skill levels to people and you’re giving them the main thing with skills.

 

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And again, going back to the driver’s license, you need to be able to practice and you need some mentorship or you need some coaching, right?

 

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And so most of us with the driver’s license that was in a parking lot and a parent or older sibling or uncle showing us the ropes.

 

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how to actually parallel park, how to pull out a parking spot, how to accelerate, how to brake, etc.

 

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And then you need to move to stage four, you start incorporating individual key performance indicators into your program so that to get certified they actually have to hit a certain level of performance.

 

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And then stage five, you’re getting into that organizational performance.

 

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Focus where the organization has to bring in partner or franchise KPIs into your training program asserting certain staffing levels and Doing some pretty sophisticated discriminant analysis to figure things out.

 

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So again, I chart don’t want to spend a ton of time on it QR code at the bottom if that QR code is too small for the folks in the back if you can’t get it Don’t worry at the end of the presentation we’ll have

 

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a slide with two big QR codes and you can pick it up there.

 

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So again, don’t want to spend too much time on it, but it’s important.

 

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It is a framework we use to evaluate programs.

 

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So let’s move on.

 

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All right, now when it comes to your franchise training program, there’s usually two components.

 

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One of the components is the onboarding training, which is something that every franchisor does.

 

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They have some type of onboarding training for a new franchisee.

 

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And

 

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There’s thousands of franchisors out there.

 

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All their programs are a little bit different.

 

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So if yours is better or worse than this, I understand.

 

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I’ve seen all different types.

 

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But this is typically what we see a new franchisee onboarding training program look like.

 

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And to kind of summarize it, I would call it a stage three instructor-led training program.

 

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So what does that mean?

 

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Well, if we look at those best practices, I’ve highlighted the ones that are

 

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used in a typical onboarding program, grayed out the ones that are generally not used.

 

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So usually you see things like, hey, there are some comprehensive training resources, the materials have been put together, there’s suggested training, there’s feedback, and before getting the best practice, what does that onboarding program look like?

 

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Well, it’s usually the new franchisee goes to headquarters for a couple of weeks.

 

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They go to the test environment, to either a test kitchen or a test environment, and they get trained on financial, all the things we talked about before.

 

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Financial management, how the franchise operates, all the different skills needed within the franchise, sales, technical, et cetera.

 

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How do you make a shake?

 

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How do you make a latte?

 

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How do you install that sign?

 

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How do you put solar panels on the top of somebody’s house?

 

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all those different types of things depending on the type of franchise you’re talking about.

 

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So they go there to headquarters and really they’re learning a ton and they’re also developing a bunch of skills on how to do all these things.

 

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After 2 weeks at headquarters, then they usually go to a training location, a training store, a store that does training.

 

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It’s usually corporate owned, but it doesn’t have to be.

 

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It could be a franchise store.

 

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Apprentise a store location, but you go someplace and you hang out there for a couple of weeks now You’re seeing everything in action.

 

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You’re behind the counter.

 

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You’re doing the work And you’re you’re helping this particular Location do its job and you get to see how everything flows and that’s usually a couple weeks long That’s really building those that knowledge Acquisition you’re really acquiring that knowledge.

 

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You’re really developing those skills.

 

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Okay that now after four weeks of that

 

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Then you’re building out your location.

 

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When you’re getting ready to launch your new franchise, usually somebody from headquarters comes by.

 

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They’ll spend a couple, a week to a couple of weeks with you and all of your initial employees.

 

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They’ll train them, make sure they know what to do.

 

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You open up the store, everybody’s been trained.

 

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A lot of times that trainer will stay around for a week or two as you go through the operations to make it smooth.

 

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And it’s a pretty good onboarding program.

 

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You get the franchisee, that franchise operator, and all their initial employees pretty much up to speed so that that franchise can be successful.

 

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It’s very instructor intensive and it uses things like, we’ve got the comprehensive resources, there’s certifications,

 

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You know, that they’ve gone through this program and they get their certification.

 

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There’s a bunch of skills they have to develop.

 

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They do the practice by going to that corporate store.

 

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They get that mentorship and coaching.

 

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And it’s really an effective type of training program, I think.

 

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But it’s very instructor intensive, very instructor intensive.

 

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But then once that franchisee is on board,

 

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you go to the next issue.

 

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And that next challenge is training new franchise employees after that initial launch, after the onboarding.

 

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You know, six months after the stores open, how does that new employee get trained?

 

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And again, I know there’s a bunch of different varieties.

 

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There’s over 3,000 franchisors in the United States alone.

 

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Everybody does it different, some better, some worse.

 

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Again, from my experience, the typical new franchise training program is what I would call a stage one train-the-trainer training program.

 

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That is, the franchisor goes, hey, here’s all these great training resources.

 

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Here’s the suggested training for that type of new employee.

 

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Now you, franchisee, franchise operator, you go be the trainer and train the new employee.

 

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And it’s a very, like I said earlier, instructor-led, instructor-heavy training program.

 

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While we’re usually asking these franchise operators to do this, they’ve just launched, they’re still trying to figure things out.

 

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They’ve already got a day job and a night job, and now we’re asking them to be trainers of new employees.

 

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And so what generally happens is not a lot of training happens.

 

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Yeah, not a lot of training happens.

 

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And people usually end up with on the job training, or they learn on the job.

 

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And that’s where it gets us back to that survey I was talking about earlier, where one of the biggest reasons

 

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people quit retail jobs within the first 30 days is they don’t get trained.

 

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One of the biggest reasons they leave within the first year is they realize nobody else got trained and they don’t know what they’re doing either.

 

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So, and that really is exemplified by this type of training program.

 

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And so what I thought I would do is, like I said, I think it’s

 

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It’s that ongoing franchise employee training program where we have a great opportunity to really make an impact and get those benefits of franchise training.

 

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And one of our clients is a power sports company, they make power sport vehicles and equipment, and they have a dealer training program, and these are the best practices that they’ve implemented, right?

 

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So pretty much a full stage one, they have the resources, they’ve invented a blended learning program,

 

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So blended learning means you’ve got a bunch of self-study courses, and then you also have the instructor-led courses that come after the self-study.

 

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And the neat thing about that is, and the benefit that we’ve seen on that, is that self-study courses, whether they’re e-learning courses or videos with assessments or whatever,

 

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allows a person at their own pace to acquire a certain set of knowledge, a certain level of knowledge and understanding.

 

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And then, I’m sorry, those self-study courses are also prerequisites for the instructor-led training.

 

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And then when they go to the instructor-led training, well, basically,

 

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Everybody has a certain base level of knowledge.

 

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You know, in instructor-led training, you tend to teach the lowest common denominator.

 

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Here, everybody has an elevated sense of understanding.

 

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And that very valuable instructor, that person whose time and experience is very valuable, now spends their time focusing on much more advanced concepts.

 

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And so not only

 

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does it take some of the pressure off of the instructors in terms of everything they’ve got to teach and you can shorten and shrink the number of instructor hours of instruction per student, but that the hours that they are there, the students get so much more out of it because they come with a base level of knowledge.

 

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And so that’s the blended learning.

 

258

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I really want to focus on that.

 

259

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You see that down in the stage one.

 

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Then what this client has done, they have a number of certifications.

 

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They assign them.

 

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They assign objectives for their dealers to have a certain number of trained or certified staff per location.

 

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They incentivize the training.

 

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It’s interesting in this place, this particular client charges for the training, and as you as a dealer

 

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get more trained people in your dealership, what they charge for the training.

 

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They actually have a kind of a bronze, silver, gold, level one, two, three.

 

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And as you go from level one to level three, at level one you’re paying full price for the training, level two you’re paying half price, level three training’s free.

 

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So that’s one way they incentivize the dealer.

 

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And then the other thing they do,

 

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Here you’ve got a lot of warranty work going on and as you go from that level 1 to level 2 to level 3, as a dealer, not as an individual, they increase what they give a premium on the warranty work because they know that there’ll be less repeat, you know, they’ll be fixed right the first time and they won’t have to pay for the warranty work to be done over again.

 

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And so it really becomes win-win for everybody.

 

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Then you get into the skill profiles and skill assessments, incentivizing that as well.

 

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And then this particular client does something really interesting.

 

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And again, I’m bringing this up as something that I think is valuable for everybody.

 

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They measure, they use an organizational performance metric for success, partner impact, and it’s a net promoter score.

 

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They ask the franchise operator, would you recommend

 

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on a scale of 0 to 10, it’s the net promoter question.

 

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Would you recommend this program to another dealer?

 

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And everything is based on the net promoter score.

 

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The program is judged on it.

 

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Bonuses are, you know, for the people running the program are based on it.

 

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It’s all based on the net promoter score.

 

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So it’s really, you know, you don’t have to create all these, you know, very sophisticated KPIs.

 

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You can just do something very simple like a net promoter score.

 

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I thought it was brilliant when I first heard of it.

 

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I was like, oh, of course.

 

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in retrospect, it made sense.

 

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But I thought this is just a really achievable training program that I wanted to share.

 

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And I think it’s a really good goal for most franchise employee training programs.

 

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And I would use this as the model that I would shoot for because you get tremendous return on investment here.

 

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Tremendous.

 

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You know, there is stage four and five and you’ll get more return on investment, but this is something that’s very achievable for just about every franchisor out there in their franchise training program.

 

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So I would use this

 

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as the model.

 

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I really like this.

 

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This client does great and they get so much value out of their training program.

 

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It’s amazing.

 

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So that was my presentation and where I was going to end it and say, Hey, that’s how you turn your training program into a strategic asset.

 

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But this being the second day of the conference, I had an opportunity to talk to a lot of emerging franchisors yesterday and

 

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And there was a common theme that came coming up, and that was scaling their franchise employee training program.

 

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And usually the story went something like this.

 

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You know, we’re an emerging franchisor, you know, we’ve got, you know, and it might be them, or it might be one or two individuals that do all the training.

 

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And as we’re adding more franchisees, you know, we’re running around all over the country or all over the world in some cases.

 

304

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like chickens with our heads cut off, doing all this training, and it’s unsustainable, and how do we scale?

 

305

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How do we scale our franchise training program?

 

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And, oh, and I’m sorry, one thing that I had mentioned earlier is that blended learning can also be very valuable when you’re doing the onboarding.

 

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So it’s not just valuable for the ongoing new employee training,

 

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but also the onboarding.

 

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And it’s the same concept.

 

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That instructor-led time that the new franchisee is getting is very valuable.

 

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There’s a lot of insight that can be had there.

 

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If the new franchise operator can come to headquarters with a base level of understanding, they’re going to get a lot more out of the week or two that they’re there.

 

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They’re going to understand things much better.

 

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They’re going to develop much better skills.

 

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Same thing when the instructor goes out to the franchise location for that initial opening.

 

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If you use that self-paced learning and everybody has to achieve a certain level of understanding before the instructor shows up, you get a lot more value out of that instructor’s time.

 

317

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Can’t overemphasize that, very, very important.

 

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Okay, so and it plays a point in scaling your franchise training program if you’re an emerging franchisor.

 

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So, you know, you know, when you start off, you’re kind of got a couple of units, usually company owned, you start franchising or, you know, you’re getting up to 10 units, you’ve got that instructor led program and you’re starting to run around like a chicken with your head cut off because as you’re adding more units, there’s just more and more to do and it’s hard.

 

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And so the first thing you should start doing is that blended learning, start developing that, that, that, that self-study

 

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whether it’s video courses with assessments or e-learning courses, but to get that base level of knowledge in a self-paced way and make that a prerequisite for the instructor-led, I can’t overemphasize how important that is.

 

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To do that, of course, you’ve got to bring in an LMS.

 

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We’re an LMS vendor, so we like that.

 

324

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But you do need that.

 

325

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You want to do the pre-assessments.

 

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and allow people to test out if they already have the knowledge.

 

327

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You want to get that learner feedback.

 

328

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You want to create those certifications to say they’re a certified person.

 

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You want to sign those certifications based on the type of role they’re playing within the franchisor.

 

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And then as you’re moving up past 50 units, you want to start to focus on trained franchises instead of trained individuals.

 

331

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And so start creating training objectives or certification objectives for each French fries location.

 

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You got to think about incentivizing that somehow, whether it’s better terms, whether it’s discounts on materials.

 

333

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It’s going to be specific to your franchise and the nature of the business that you’re in, but I would really put a lot of thought into how are you going to incentivize your franchise to do this.

 

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And then as you get up,

 

335

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past the 100 unit mark, now you can start focusing on the skills and skill profiles and skill development and creating things for practice.

 

336

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And one thing I will say, and the practice and coaching, again, tends to be very, very expensive, historically.

 

337

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I was at a conference, well, I’ve been at a bunch of conferences, but artificial intelligence and avatars are making that practice and coaching

 

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cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

 

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And virtual reality is making that practice and coaching cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

 

340

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So there are emerging technologies.

 

341

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Historically, we’ve had a hard time with skill development because of the practice and coaching.

 

342

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It’s very human intensive and that’s expensive.

 

343

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But I’m seeing a lot of really cool things with AI.

 

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that are giving people the opportunity to practice and get coached by the AI.

 

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And I think it’s going to really make its mark on skill development.

 

346

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I’m really excited about that.

 

347

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It’s really cool.

 

348

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Love to talk about that more, but I’m running out of time, so I got to get going.

 

349

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But I wanted to put this slide in here to kind of address what I was hearing yesterday and then this morning as a real concern of these emerging franchise

 

350

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wars, you know, how do I scale?

 

351

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And so I want to kind of put together a roadmap here.

 

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Hopefully it helps.

 

353

00:33:07,273 –> 00:33:10,713

And like I said, I’ve been doing this a long time.

 

354

00:33:10,953 –> 00:33:14,713

Training can have a tremendous impact on the bottom line.

 

355

00:33:18,473 –> 00:33:19,753

And so here we are.

 

356

00:33:21,593 –> 00:33:26,073

You know, we started off by understand, trying to understand what does it mean to be a strategic asset?

 

357

00:33:26,553 –> 00:33:37,913

And it really means changing in the minds of those executives, viewing training instead of being a cost of doing business to being a strategic investment that yields a return.

 

358

00:33:38,233 –> 00:33:39,993

And these are the returns you’re looking for.

 

359

00:33:39,993 –> 00:33:53,352

And as learning professionals, as you start building this out, the main benefit that it can have for your organization is increased revenue and profitability, more money and higher margins.

 

360

00:33:54,312 –> 00:33:56,312

It’s a beautiful thing, and it brings tears to my eyes.

 

361

00:33:57,592 –> 00:34:07,672

The way that occurs is you get increased consistency across all the locations, increased operational efficiency within the locations.

 

362

00:34:07,752 –> 00:34:11,911

There’s where you get some margin improvement, increased retention.

 

363

00:34:12,552 –> 00:34:33,592

within the franchisees, which allow them then to deliver higher customer satisfaction with that consistency, with that experienced employees, that higher customer satisfaction leads to higher loyalty, which are the things that feed back to the number one benefit, which is increased revenue and profitability.

 

364

00:34:33,911 –> 00:34:39,992

And so if you do the things that we’re talking about there, you’ll your training becomes a strategic asset.

 

365

00:34:40,752 –> 00:34:51,831

If you’re a training manager, it opens up budget because executives within your organization know that for every dollar of training that they spend, they’re going to get $2 or $10 back.

 

366

00:34:52,152 –> 00:34:54,391

And that’s a beautiful thing.

 

367

00:34:54,952 –> 00:35:03,032

And so with that, that kind of concludes my presentation.

 

368

00:35:05,832 –> 00:35:06,872

As promised,

 

369

00:35:07,592 –> 00:35:13,112

I told you there’d be bigger QR codes up on the screen if you weren’t able to get the small one there at the bottom.

 

370

00:35:13,352 –> 00:35:15,032

So these are the bigger QR codes.

 

371

00:35:15,512 –> 00:35:26,312

The surefire training impact, the QR code on the left there, will take you right to a lot of the materials that were throughout the presentation.

 

372

00:35:27,072 –> 00:35:28,552

And so you can jump right in there.

 

373

00:35:28,712 –> 00:35:32,152

That’s also what the one at the bottom of the screen took you to.

 

374

00:35:32,672 –> 00:35:36,392

The one on the right just takes you to our homepage, latitudelearning.com.

 

375

00:35:37,352 –> 00:35:42,632

And then you can find the Surefire Training Impact with Lad2Learning.com, but I promise you those two things.

 

376

00:35:43,752 –> 00:35:50,072

If you have any questions, I’m out of time here, so if you have any questions, I’ll be standing around.

 

377

00:35:50,072 –> 00:35:54,152

I’ll be over there afterwards, so come on up to me.

 

378

00:35:55,432 –> 00:36:08,152

If for some reason I miss you or you can’t meet right now, like I said earlier, our booth is 2 aisles over, right over that way, just past there, just right across from the food over there.

 

379

00:36:08,392 –> 00:36:13,832

So come visit me, I’ll be here the rest of the day, and I hope you’re having a great show.

 

380

00:36:14,232 –> 00:36:15,192

I’m having a great time.

 

381

00:36:15,432 –> 00:36:17,992

Thanks again to the folks at IFA for inviting me here.

 

382

00:36:18,432 –> 00:36:19,512

It really has been lovely.

 

383

00:36:19,512 –> 00:36:29,032

I’ve learned a ton, and I love talking about this stuff, as you can tell, and so would love to keep chatting about it, and especially if you guys want to talk about AI.

 

384

00:36:29,032 –> 00:36:33,992

I love how AI is impacting learning and development and some of the fun things we’re doing there.

 

385

00:36:34,232 –> 00:36:37,192

But even if you don’t want to talk about AI, come up, chat with me.

 

386

00:36:37,432 –> 00:36:39,112

I love to talk about this stuff.

 

387

00:36:39,512 –> 00:36:41,832

I have a real passion for it, and I love to talk about it.

 

388

00:36:41,832 –> 00:36:44,112

Again, thank you very much, and have

 

389

00:36:44,312 –> 00:36:45,032

Have a great day, guys.