The Real Franchise – Ep9 – Accelerated Start-up

Watch the full episode of The Real Franchise Episode 9 – here

Rhiannon Hello and welcome to The Real Franchise, a video series designed to deliver real information, real answers, and real insights into franchising. This series is brought to you by James Home Services Australia. I’m the CEO and Justin is one of our owners and our head of new businesses.

Together, we’re going to tackle all of the big topics unscripted, unplanned and unfiltered. No sales, no fluff. We’re just going to give you information straight up. Today’s topic is the accelerated Startup program. Now you are not going to hear about the Accelerated startup program as a familiar term across franchising, it’s ours, it’s something we own. It’s something we created.

You may have just watched another episode on our subscription model. Another thing we own we developed, we created. So we are over here doing firsts. and our accelerated startup program is no different. Justin, do you want to start us off today by explaining a little bit about what is our accelerated startup program? In a nutshell?

Justin Yes. Well, James has been around for over 30 years now, and so we’ve been starting franchises for a long time. We’ve learned lots, but particularly in the last 18 months. We were talking about the subscription model in the previous episode, and we’ve started lots and lots of businesses in the last 12 to 18 months and learnt lots. So on top of, you know, 20, 30 years of experience, we’ve in the last 12 months in this current economic climate, we’ve gained lots of experience, learned lots about what and when needs to be done to help people get off to a good start as possible in the new business.

And and the accelerated program was birthed out of that. You know, we’ve, with our business coaches, we regularly get together, with yourself and have really started to crunch through some of the learnings and some of the things that we picked up on the journey. And for us, I think for me, one of the biggest things I’ve seen in any accelerator startup program is it starts now, a long time before you commence your business.

In James and I previously, and I think in every other franchise network, nothing starts until you start. And then we found there was just this lag phase. And as you said in the previous episode, you know, we really see the first 10 to 12 weeks as critical in someone launching our stats show that that first 10 to 12 weeks is it, so the more we can do before kick off, the quicker that, has a chance.

Because when you talk about marketing, sorry, you’re now getting excited here. But it’s something we observe every day that you and I. People just think you turn on marketing an instant result and particularly online. But we’re finding that it takes time. People can’t expect to start a campaign and get calls and leads flooding it. And so what we try and do is work on a lot of things, to happen earlier.

So this morning, just this morning, I had a, a great new guy joining us on the Gold Coast. He’s just signed his franchise agreements. He’s paid that initial thousand dollar thing, the deposit, payment for his subscription model. So the very first thing I did was email our business coach, and franchise support coordinator and say, hey, he signed up.

Everything’s in order now to commence that accelerator startup program.

Rhiannon And now, technically, he doesn’t start his training with us until the middle of August. And frankly, in most franchise networks, what that means is that there is just a an abyss for the next two and a half weeks. You don’t hear from us, we hear from you. You’ve signed your agreement, and you just show up on your training date.

And that’s that’s go day. Your training date is go day. Really what we’ve learned over the last couple of years of starting lots of new businesses, tens of new businesses, is that the earlier we can start getting you thinking about all the things you need to do, the the stronger you’re going to get off the line. When you do actually physically start trading your business and the better you’re overall start is going to be, the stronger your business is going to build, the faster it’s going to build, the more confident you’re going to feel.

Also, standing at that start line, because there must be so much fear and uncertainty. So what we do is as soon as your franchise agreements have been signed, there are lots of rules and regulations around, you know, allowing you another two week cooling off period. And technically, once you sign your franchise agreement, you do still have another two weeks where you can cool off and you can back out, and there are no financial repercussions for you doing that whatsoever.

So in a way, we jumped the gun. Most franchise networks, at a minimum, will wait that two weeks before they will allow you to do anything in their network, just in case you change your mind. We kind of assume that if you’ve gotten to this point, you’re pretty darn serious, and it’s going to take a fairly life changing kind of situation to arise that might cause you to change your mind at this point.

So we say, you know what? Yeah, there’s a small risk. But also what we actually want is for you to get off the line as quickly and as confidently as possible. When trading day rolls around. So we’re going to start working with you now. So your business coach starts working with you head office, start doing a whole heap of business setup tasks.

You get a list of all of the things that we need you to start doing. You know about business names if they haven’t already been done. you know, Justin, you go ahead and you start ordering equipment and kit and products and uniforms and marketing collateral. We start teaching you about basic marketing techniques. We we start to encourage you to observe what’s happening in Facebook community groups where you can later get leads from.

We start to encourage you to read about all sorts of different marketing techniques and strategies that we use about in their network. We teach you some of them. We start to talk to you about how to talk to your friends and family about your business, and we do this before you’ve even started your training, because we want you to start to get into that business owner mindset, because I don’t think it’s as easy as flicking a switch when you arrive at your training, and all of a sudden you’re acting as a business owner and you know what to do.

It’s impossible. We can’t expect that. So we actually start the process a lot earlier, our accelerated start up program. It’s just a fancy way of saying this is the structure to which our training takes and our support takes. Now, in most networks, your your training happens and then they push you out into the real world and they say, hey here, if you need, best of luck.

You know what we do instead? Actually is we continue your training for at least your first 12 weeks. In fact, the first 12 weeks you continue a structured training and support program. And I’m going to say it’s mandatory. It’s mandatory for a reason because we can’t possibly teach you everything you need to know in your first seven days of training with us.

We need to continue your learning. And it’s really important that over the next over the first 12 weeks of your business, we continue to do that in a really structured way. Justin, our business coaches play an absolutely pivotal role. And something you mentioned before, was it as soon as someone signed their franchise agreement, even if their training is not for another few weeks, you notify the business coach and also the franchise support coordinator.

Why do you do that? And then what happens? What does that trigger our business coach and franchise support co-ordinator to start doing.

Justin A lot of emails no, we have so in our system, we have under the franchisee who’s, who’s going to be starting one of the menu options is a business set up list. And on that list currently, I think eighty nine different items at the moment, like that email I send out to a coach this morning, those 89 things now start happening.

You know, I speak to hundreds of people every month that are checking out James and checking out other businesses and and talking to them and sometimes going to be really frustrated because it takes a while to get through the information journey just to realize how much is involved in starting a new business. I have so many people in the first discussions go, yeah, yeah, starting a business is easy.

I’m just deciding who I want to go with. And it’s like right from the start. Often I think people are starting with the wrong mindset. Starting a business is not easy. In fact, the stats show 80 to 90% fail on the first 12 months. So starting a business is not easy. You’ve got to start it right. And and that’s what I love about this accelerated startup program is we’ve observed from ones we’ve done awesome and from the few who haven’t.

And we’ve learned from that. And really, those 89 things that the business coach and the coordinator start doing, really are about putting in place the structure for people to launch successfully. Yeah. And for most individuals I know for myself, when I first started my first business, I had no idea about that stuff. And I thought I did.

You know, I used to manage a massive company and had multiple stores and staff, and because I was in a big company, but I had no idea when it come to starting my own small business.

Rhiannon There’s just so many things to think about, you know, prior, prior to working for James Home Services. My role was as a business consultant and economic development consultant, and so I helped a lot of people start businesses. And, you know, they sit down with you for that initial meeting and, you know, I heard the same things. You hear all this is going to be a walk in the park, you know, just need to design a logo, launch a website, and then away we go.

Customers will just come. It doesn’t quite work like that. goodness me, there are so many things that go into it and so many things that people just don’t even think about. And that’s why you that’s why you come to a franchise network, frankly, because we have done this. We have walked this road hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times before.

And it is a we are a well-oiled machine when it comes to what happens between signing your franchise agreement and commencing your trading of the business, we know exactly what needs to happen and when, and we know what we can take responsibility for and just do it for you. And we know what you need to take responsibility for.

But we know how to guide you through that so that at no point are you on your own. You know, at some point very early in the process. In fact, after you let a business coach know that someone signs their franchise agreement, so the business coach is ready to start working with them. the business coach reaches out to that person and organizes a meeting, and it’s a get to know you.

You know, let’s just get together, have a bit of a chat. You know, I need to learn a little bit more about you. I want you to sort of learn a little bit more about me and what my role is for you as you start your business. And in that very first chat, what we share with the potential, oh, the new the new onboarding franchisee is we share a 4 or 5 page document.

And it’s it’s all of the things that we need them to do. Now I 4 or 5 pages sounds huge, right? But what it is, it’s only a handful of things we need you to do, but we just we give you all the links you need. We tell you why you need to do it, how to do it, when to do it, how to get support, whether you need a third party, a help like, you know, going and getting an accountant to start, you know, to do something for you, we give you all of that information in a checklist form, and we will either walk with you whilst you do those things, or if you’re

super independent person and once you’ve got a checklist, you’re good to go, then off you go. Give us a yell if you need a hand, but we will check back regularly and we will make sure that all of those things are being done in the lead up to and ahead of your training. Because when you get to training, you have got so much new information being hurled at you to learn.

We want to have all these business set up stuff out of the way. We want to have it squared out of the way. You’re ready to go. You know, we’re not still trying to get your first aid certificate. So we’re not still trying to worry about GST. Said no. Nope. We’re done. We’re done with the boring stuff. We are ready to launch this business.

Let’s go. Do you know, I’m often, I’m often invite invited to guest on podcasts, and one of the most frequent questions I actually get asked is, how do you tell a good franchisor from an average franchisor? Or the first time someone threw that question at me, I thought, actually, that is such a good question. There’s a million different part of my answer is you need to be able, if you’re a potential franchisee, if you’re thinking of starting a business right now and you’re listening to this, my biggest piece of advice to you is the next time you meet with your potential franchisor the company you’re thinking you might join, you need to

sit that person down and you need to say, talk me through your startup process. Because if they can’t give you an answer or if their answer is, yeah, just rock up for training, we’ll take it from there then. Frankly, in my experience, they don’t have the systems and processes that are required to get you started fast. Now, they might have great systems and processes, right?

But what you’ll find is that you will start slower. It’ll be a harder, longer slog. There will be surprises along the way. All of a sudden you’ll be getting an email saying, hey, you need to do this and then you need it. It’ll feel chaotic to you. That isn’t the optimal way to start a business. The optimal way to start a business is to know well ahead of time what is required from you to have time to get that done, and to take that off and to square that away.

So then you can focus on your training. Then you can focus on launching your business. You alluded to this earlier, Justin, but I want to come back to it because we have seen some mad stats over the last two years of starting new businesses. If your business isn’t firing by the ten week mark and these are these are hard stats, right?

I can’t live out these days of what our numbers, our numbers are telling us. If your business isn’t firing by the ten week mark, you’re not going to make it sounds really harsh, but I’m just going to be frank. This series is all about being totally unplanned, unscripted, unfiltered. Well, the unfiltered truth is, if your business isn’t firing by week ten, you’re not going to make it.

Or if you do, you are really going to have to pull out all the stops. So you’ve got four weeks basically to pull out all the stops. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible. It just means you really have to go back to back to basics and have a complete shift of strategy and mindset, you know, and probably by the ten week mark, if you business isn’t firing you business coach is already talking to you about this.

In fact, they’re talking to you about this at the four and the five week mark. You know, we see this stuff coming. So given you’ve got ten weeks, 10 to 12, 14 weeks, it is imperative that you don’t just start. When you start training, you actually start operating like a business owner from as early as you possibly can.

That’s what our accelerated Startup program is designed to do.

Justin Justin. Can I jump in this? You just raised such an important point in talking to people and so just to highlight what you just said in, in other franchises, right. And I’ve been in this industry for 15 years now. Other franchises take you down. Let’s assume it’s a great training program. Right? It might be three days in Melbourne or whatever.

Okay. You go down there and you get jam packed full of information. I’m sure. I’m sure there’s lots of awesome content that’s thrown into your brain. We do the same thing. And for those three days, jam packed heaps of information. To you the reality is, in stats show that you’re going to forget 80% of that, right? And in other franchises when you go home, you then on your own.

Yes, you can call the head office, right. But that’s it. You’ve had your training and in it, and the industry has shown that doesn’t work right, am I? Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think our single biggest expense in our head office budget is the cost of having business coaches, right? Yeah, you’re right, support, that support.

Rhiannon Single.

Justin Biggest expense. And the whole focus of that. Look, if we were in another franchise, we could cut most of that expense out, right? Yeah. But that single expense line is all about supporting walking. It’s really the accelerated startup program, all right? Helping people get up on their feet. and it cost money to deliver that support. But we’ve seen the fruit of providing that support, and that’s why we do it.

Yeah. And that’s what I love about the model. We talked about the subscription in the previous episode. We don’t make money if people aren’t making money. And so we’ve got to invest into that.

Rhiannon Yeah, yeah. our business coaches are, entirely pivotal to your business success once you get in. And I want to spend a little bit of time just kind of drilling down into what does that first 12 weeks look like? We’re going to do an episode that really actually goes into detail, like, yeah, I like actually, from a really practical perspective, what are you doing each day in each week, but just really quickly in the next few minutes?

What I wanted to talk about a little bit more is what the ongoing support looks like from the business coach over the first 12 weeks, because what we do is we will do at least one scheduled, one on one coaching session with you, additional training session with you each week. Now that goes for a minimum of 12 weeks.

At the end of 12 weeks, you and your business coach decide if you would like to continue that coaching program and at what frequency. Most people say, let’s continue, but, maybe it goes back to every fortnight or something like that. So there’s those one on one coaching every week. Now, if your business isn’t firing or if you just feel like you want a bit of extra support, you can meet with them every day if you want.

There is no limit, there is no cap on the support they give you. At no point am I saying to a coach you need to spend less time with our franchisees. That’s ludicrous as the opposite of what? In fact, I’m saying often to our business coaches, make sure you are staying in contact in your first couple of weeks, you can expect a phone call from your business coach every day or every second day.

Now, you might be super confident. You might be at up, you might be of on your race and you might be feeling really strong about, you know, coming out of you training and you know what to do and you’re just really focused. That’s fine. You call might be five minutes and your coach might just simply ask you if there’s anything you need a hand with.

How you feeling today? Had that quote go you did yesterday. Let’s troubleshoot this. Let’s problem solve that. Let’s let’s work through this scenario over here. Your coach is there to be really hands on and pragmatic with you about your marketing and winning the work in this first few weeks. The other thing, and I’m going to throw to you in a second for a little bit more explanation on this.

The other thing we do in our accelerated startup program that I think is super important is that we put you in a small group with other business owners who have started at pretty much the same time as you, and once a week you get together weekly business coach for what’s called a group huddle. Now, I mean, the name might sound a little bit fluffy, right?

But it’s the content of what we do in those group huddles. It’s really important, not what we call it. In those group huddles, for the first few weeks, you will cover some really basic core kind of psychological concepts that help you run your business Justin, really quickly and at a high level. What sort of things do we talk about with our business owners in those first few weeks?

It helps set their mind set up for running a really successful business.

Justin We go through this a couple of things that happen. in those meetings, we actually go through some structured, principles, things like we talk about the laws of exchange. you want to have a talk about it this morning? You know, any business interaction has to be a win win for both parties. An understanding that, you know, if you’re just day to service your customer just to get money out of them, it’s not going to be a successful exchange, right?

They have to get value and see. But so we go through all those sorts of structured. There’s a couple of what I call pillars of of having a business, what you need to understand these principles and what I love is those principles apply to life. Like they’re just really core fundamental things that that often we don’t understand. Some of us operate well in those things naturally.

but, you know, sometimes because of culture or upbringing or, or just lack of experience, we’re not across those things and they’re really important to understand. So we go through those sorts of things. The other thing that I’m saying, because this was all birthed from the Accelerated Startup program, I mean, I starting so many businesses, when you start, you’re on your own, you know, and and that can get lonely and you can be struggling and going, oh, this is I’m finding this really tough or whatever.

When you’ve got part of this, what we call the team huddle, you part of a group of people that have started basically at the same time as you, you’re doing the same thing and sharing, you know, what they’re struggling with and their wins and those sorts of things are really it’s awesome just to watch them encouraging one another in these team huddles.

You know, you’re not on your own. You’ve got people you can ring and call on and not just, you know, the coaching staff or head office team. You’ve actually got colleagues that are in exactly the same.

Rhiannon boat yeah, sometimes, you know, sometimes that business coaches can, you know, they can indicate to you the importance of what we teach you how to do on Facebook, or the importance of what we teach you to do on your Google business profile. but there’s so many things that we’re teaching you to do and so many things that we’re asking you to do.

You know, the first few weeks of being a business owner that sometimes if you don’t really understand something, it falls by the wayside and you continue to focus on what you know, where you comfortable. What we’ve really found is a huge benefit of those group huddles is actually where someone actually does in your group grasp one of these concepts, implements.

It sees almost instant results because we only teach you how to do stuff that works, and they actually bring that feedback back to the group and say, hey guys, I did this on my Google profile last week and this was the outcome. And honestly, it’s so helpful as a business owner to hear that from another business. Sign up, because that business coaches have all been business owners.

We don’t have a business coaching network who doesn’t have hands on business ownership and management experience. We don’t give you someone who is not qualified to coach you in growing your own business. We give you people who have been there, done that successfully and who are well qualified to give advice and guidance. However, sometimes it can feel like their advice and guidance just sort of sits in a different place, you know, and it just takes on a whole new meaning when you hear it from one of your own colleagues, from somebody out there doing it, you know, and it’s wonderful how many times someone will come back to that group and say, hey, I did

X last week and this happened, and then, you know, or I did X and this happened. And the other great thing that you talked about already was, you know, we can work through scenarios together. You know, if you’re struggling with something we can work through it together. If you’re, you know, if you’re not great at the presenting the quote and then walking the customer through to an acceptance of the quote, we work through that in real time in these huddles with you to build your skills and your confidence in those spaces.

In the first couple of weeks of our accelerated start up program, once you’ve really commenced trading, hands down, our focus is on teaching you how to market your business because you can’t do anything else unless you’ve got customers. The only way to get customers is market your business. We are also marketing your business and there will be leads that are generated by us.

But so much of the power in business ownership comes from when you understand how to generate your own leads, because that puts you in control of how much work you go about getting. You can see it, and you can wait for our leads and they’ll come. But if you want to supercharge how you get started in your business, we teach you how to take control over that, and there’s such power to that.

So the first couple of weeks is absolutely focused on marketing, no question about it. But then the result of marketing is leads and leads to just customers who want your services, who have made an inquiry with you. And then the focus shifts for the next few weeks on how do we convert a lead to a customer. And this is a science.

This is an art form. You know, we can’t just any franchise network who thinks that they can just train this to you in a couple of hours in your training is delusional. This is a skill. You know, consumers out there today really savvy, and they have a very different way of operating to ten years ago, even two years ago.

We teach you current strategies to convert a lead into a customer and then take it over next level, a customer who’s an advocate for your business, who’s referring work to you, who will leave you a review, who turns into a regular. We teach you all that stuff. Now we can’t do that in a couple of days of training.

We can teach you the concepts, but we can’t then help you to implement. So that first 12 weeks it’s about reteaching you everything we taught you in the first few days, because we know that there’s so much you’ll forget. Most of it. It’s human nature. We anticipate that. So the first 12 weeks is about retraining and retraining in a way that you can actually go out and implement in your business.

And when you start implementing, it starts to become a pattern of behavior and behaviors become success over time.

Justin So success is boring. It’s the same things, good things done repeatedly.

Rhiannon Yeah, it really is. Yeah.

Justin Complete in the Olympics in the swimming. Because I don’t put in the hours in the pool that yeah, those people do. And I have basic talent as well.

Rhiannon I came across a really beautiful analogy the other day that’s short and honestly, it just it’s it speaks so much to what we do here. and it is no one who starts on the start line of the 100 meter race for gold. No one wants to come last. Everyone has the same goal. They want to win. Same goes for when you start your business.

Everyone who start to business has the same goal. They want to be successful. The ones who? The one who wins gold or the ones who achieve success in their business are not the ones who just hope for the best. They’re the ones with the most determination and persistence in implementing processes, procedures, you know, sticking to those doing them day in, day out, every single day.

It’s hard luck that shows up for training every single day. It’s the bloke with the most consistent diet, you know, in our network. It’s the people who are most consistent in following our systems, and our processes are most consistent in marketing. Their businesses are most consistent in their communication with their clients, most consistent in the way that they negotiate their client to accepting that service are most consistent in gold medal level service delivery.

It’s not the person back on the start line with the biggest goals and the biggest dreams and the biggest hopes. It’s the person that every single day gets out of bed and does everything we guide you to do consistently. Those are the ones who achieve success and our accelerated start up program is designed to coach you through getting out of bed every single day, and applying the same systems and processes consistently.

So that is how our support differs from any other. We have a dedicated program. We have dedicated training. Our support afterwards is not just a hey, how you going every now and then. It is actually a continuation of your original training. And it is designed, designed to support you implement our systems and processes consistently to achieve success in our network.

Justin Yeah, it’s not luck.

Rhiannon It ain’t luck. There is nothing in business that is pure luck. No, it’s not a thing. It’s hard work. It’s hard work, and it’s being really focused on where you spend your time. And that’s why you come to a franchised network, to be guided as to why you spend your focus.

Justin So I can give a real example of this. On Monday, I had someone ask me, Justin, how do I make my business be found on Google, right? Someone who’s looking at joining our business? And I said, well. This is right. A startup program takes care of it if you do the things we trained you to do. But and I said, okay, we’ve got a new guy in Sydney.

that’s just started. I have no idea how his Google page is going. I haven’t looked, but I tell you what. So I opened an incognito window in Google, so Google didn’t know it was me from James because otherwise it would just fit me. James. Yeah, and I just searched, lawn mowing businesses in that particular suburb. Now this guy has only just commenced, a couple of months ago, two months, two and a half months ago.

There’s other businesses in the area. They’re probably great business has been there for 10 or 15 years. Right. Most people go to Google now and they are searching. So I just put the lawnmowing businesses and the suburb name and guess who came up? Number one in that area? Yeah. Was this guy. And this guy’s biggest fear when he when I went through the journey was computers.

You know I’m not great on computers and yet he’s already the top ranked business in his area. Yeah. That’s because he’s put the accelerated startup program into place. He’s done the boring stuff. Yeah. Consistently and and I just knew because he’d been doing that, I knew he would be seeing the results. Yeah. I didn’t expect to be so quick.

I was hoping you’d be on the first page, but he was number one.

Rhiannon So the power of consistency, the power of consistency, and the power of taking all of the guidance that we give to you all over the course of our accelerated startup program and beyond. You know, we’ve talked about the first 12 weeks. The support doesn’t end at the 12 weeks, right? We have the accelerated startup program is a 12 week program from day one to, you know, that 12 week in Mark.

And we we have designated that 12 weeks because we know it week ten. It’s pretty make or break if you’re not doing well by week ten. We know it’s going to be a really uphill battle for you. So it’s those first 12 weeks that are really, really important to get right? Yeah. But the support doesn’t stop. It just takes on a more tailored approach.

In the first 12 weeks, everybody started at the same start line. And so we’re teaching you the same concepts and mostly at the same pace. What we find is that at the 12 week mark, people start to demonstrate to us what their business goals are and they start to get really certain as to what it is that they’re looking for out of their business.

They either know that they want to continue growing and get staff, or they know that what they want to do is achieve a certain level of income and then just simply maintain as an owner operator. Now, the support we give to person A who wants to grow a team beyond 12 weeks is very different to the support that we give to person.

B it’s no less or no more. They get the same support, but it’s different type of support. We’re focused on different business concepts now. We’re teaching H.R and employing and all of the different obligations and responsibilities that come with that, whereas maintaining a whole different kettle of fish. And now we’re talking about, you know, how important it is not to get complacent in your business.

If you’re maintaining, then you want to make sure that every single customer you’ve managed to convert over the last 12 months or so continues to be a customer. So a very different conversations, but the support doesn’t end. Yeah, yeah, I think that is probably a very natural place to end our conversation, because we’re both getting a little bit ahead of the ahead of the episode topic, and we’re diving into a whole nother one, which is what happens after 12 weeks.

And we will get to that topic. But let’s leave our accelerated start up program discussion here for today, if you’ve made it this far in the video or as a listener, thank you so much. It’s such an investment of your time to spend more than 30s looking at a short reel or something on Instagram, so we really appreciate it.

We hope that you found some value in the information that we’ve shared. And if we if you’re finding these discussions really helpful, but we haven’t yet covered a topic that you’d like us to cover, leave us a little comment below with your question or the topic that you’d like us to discuss. And we will. We will go there, and we will do it in an unfiltered and unplanned, in an unscripted kind of way.

And we will just have a conversation about whatever you’d like us to chat about. So we hope that you join us for our next episode.

Justin Thanks.

Rhiannon Perfect.