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Diagnostic Questionnaires: The Right Aid to Franchisee Selection

Written on May 9th, 2007 by Joseph in Franchise Industry.

As a franchisor, you want to hire franchisees that are qualified and well equipped to run a franchise. You want these franchisees to be successful because if they’re successful, you are successful. In fact, they are a huge asset to your franchise company. What kind of person do you recruit?

A franchise company recruits franchisees that are not only qualified financially, but also boast the ability, energy, passion and enthusiasm to make the most of the opportunity available to them.

Yet, picking winners is not a simple task and the difficulties inherent in the situation tend to be compounded by a number of additional factors. Very often franchisors fall into the trap of looking for people exactly like themselves when instead what they should do is look for people who complement rather than copy their own abilities and weaknesses. It’s almost like a husband and wife relationship. What you don’t have, your franchisees will and so you complement one another. Another factor is the cost involved in finding and hiring the right franchisees.

Determining the right franchisee

So, how do you determine who is right for your franchise opportunity? Interestingly, many psychologists have made an industry out of attempting to devise tests which will envisage those likely to make a success of running their own small business and those who are unlikely to do so. This is perhaps worth a try when wanting to find the correct franchisees.

First of all, you need to get an idea of the kind of franchisees you are looking for. Get an idea of the strengths, goals, values and experience they will need to have. You also need to look through the eyes of the prospective franchisees. Remember, their main aim in life is not to make your firm the biggest in its market. Prospective franchisees will have their own goals and these will vary with their past experience.

Remember, people who boast first hand experience of self-employment themselves or come from a family which has such experience are statistically more likely to take up franchises than people randomly drawn from the population. Therefore, ensure that you investigate this question at an early stage.

Make use of standard personnel selection techniques to ensure that your interview and selection techniques are as scientific as possible and protect you against subjective or fanciful judgements. For example, you should develop a correct franchisee role description. Outline the purpose, functions, responsibilities, conditions and prospects concurrent to the franchisee role.

In addition, you need to outline the kind of person best suited to the franchisee role. Once you have done this, you can develop your own diagnostic questionnaire schedule, suited to your own franchise operation.

This approach will ensure that you hire the correct franchisee suited for the role and who will make the franchise a success. The more scientific the approach used, the better your choices should be, thus bringing long-term benefits for franchisors.

The timing of your use of the Diagnostic Questionnaire can be organised to suit the needs of individual companies but the possibilities are numerous.

You could send the questionnaire out along with your franchise company’s initial information pack as part of a first response to enquiries. This boasts the advantage of making potential franchisees think through their own position whilst spelling out some of the issues involved in being a franchisee. Another advantage of this method is that it prevents the dreamers from getting ahead of themselves. It helps them to get their heads out the clouds and start thinking realistically.

You might even suggest that potential franchisees not only complete the exercise for themselves but also get other people who know them well to complete it for them as an aid to checking out the image others have of them. Both versions should then be returned to the franchisor for discussion at the interview stage.

View examples of diagnostic questionnaires and develop one suited to your franchise company. Diagnostic questionnaires are almost 100% certain to shuffle out the right franchisees.