Franchise Leadership and Development Conference Profile: Brandon Moxam

By BRIAN DIGGELMANN For three days in October, some of the best and brightest minds in the franchising community will assemble in Atlanta for the 14^th Annual Franchise Leadership and Development Conference. Experts from over 40 industries will gather to discuss the current state of franchising and how to take their businesses to the next level. We asked five franchise development professionals from attendee brands to share their wisdom and insights into how development strategy has evolved over the past twelve months and where their companies are headed. Bill Simmons is one of today’s best sports writers, but he’d never make it on the court in an NBA game. Unlike sports, franchising and the media outlets that cover it often share or exchange personnel. Brandon Moxam is a perfect example. He learned the ins and outs of franchising as the associate publisher of a franchise publication before switching teams and joining U.S. Lawns six years ago. Today, he serves as Director of Franchise Recruiting and keeps the 253-unit landscape-management concept ahead of the curve. How has growth been at U.S. Lawns? It’s trending slightly up year over year. I’d say there’s about a 10 percent increase from where we were at this point last year, so it’s good to see us make improvement. Have there been any recent strategic changes in terms of development? We’ve made a concerted effort to make more content available about our opportunity. As everyone knows, we live in an age of technology and information. I believe patience is probably a lost virtue at this point -- it’s all about instant gratification. Because of that, the candidates of today are a lot more educated, and in many cases we see that they’re conducting due diligence and online validation before even speaking with some of our development team. That has really forced us to take a look at our entire development process. In my opinion, I would say gone are the days when a franchisor could put a candidate through a very rigid and methodical step-by-step sales process. I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow some type of process, but that process better be flexible and allow you to communicate with these candidates in a way that makes them feel comfortable. For some that might be the traditional recruiting process where you start a conversation with a candidate and lead them down a checklist of material to cover, but many others want a great deal of content and to do a lot of self-discovery. As franchisors, we need to reposition where we provide content or we’re going to miss out on qualified candidates. Where are you delivering content? You have to keep your website fresh by constantly updating content. You need to be in a position to incubate these candidates. You need to utilize social media. We’re very active right now with Facebook and Twitter and through a database of candidates that inquired over the years. You need to be in a position to consistency place your brand and message in front of them. Is the use of Facebook and Twitter new? We’ve had it for a few years, but like most franchisors, I’m not sure anyone really knew what to do with it. All we heard was “it’s a space you better be in.” We started that about 3 years ago, but we have made a more concentrated effort on keeping it up to date to the point where we’re doing daily postings on there. I think it’s just us doing better utilizing that space today. Are those social media presences geared towards consumers or franchise development? It’s a combination of the two. We utilize it for PR on the consumer side, trying to put the brand out there which could potentially also help our unit economics and our franchisees in local markets. But we’re also utilizing it at the same time to make sure everyone is aware there’s a wonderful franchise opportunity called U.S. Lawns. Has LinkedIn factored into your social strategy? We are using LinkedIn but we’re just starting that process -- we’re not extremely aggressive with it yet. It seems like everyone I talk to who is using LinkedIn says its great but they haven’t closed any deals off it, or maybe gotten one or two deals. It’s one of those areas where we’re not sure what to do with it. We’re there, we’re active, the development team is on it, but as far as actually advertising on it to different groups, that’s not something we’ve implemented yet. The other thing we’re doing is making a strong emphasis on geomarketing. We’re doing a lot less of the national shotgun approach to advertising. We’re looking to target candidates specifically in markets we want to be in. To do this we’re using targeted email campaigns, the job boards like careerbuilder.com and then really working the SEO angle of our own website to make sure that people doing organic searches online in the areas we want to be in are finding us. How do you determine the markets you want to grow in? It’s based upon commercial demographics since we only service commercial customers. We’ll take a look at the markets that have strong commercial density and that line up with current and existing franchise territories. Obviously you want to target markets where you’re a little thin as far as market coverage. Have you seen an overall change in the quantity or quality of inquiries? I would say no, at least not as far as quantity. I think the quality has increased slightly, and that goes back to the fact that we are dealing with more educated candidates. I still see us having challenges reaching people the traditional way by phone, and I think that’s because a lot of these individuals are doing a lot of self-discovery. They’re processing content, conducting validation on their own and don’t necessarily want to be bothered by a phone call. But when we actually do get someone on the phone or they’re ready to engage at that level, I would say the quality is definitely up from what we've seen over the last year or two. Do you put an emphasis on multi-unit agreements or conversions? We only do single units. That doesn't mean that we don’t have franchisees expanding to new units and additional territories, however our emphasis is on increasing market density within each territory before a franchisee increases their market coverage. The conversion market is one we've really had success with recently. Targeting those individuals that are already in business goes hand in hand with the emphasis we have on reaching out to specific markets and geomarketing. We have been very proactive in reaching out and calling individuals that are already in that same industry we are in. It’s always been a market we've targeted but we've increased our efforts for the past two years. It makes sense right now with all the turmoil in the economy and business owners searching for ways to improve their business and find a competitive edge in their local market. I think franchising is a pretty natural fit for these entrepreneurs. They’re committed to the industry already and they've already taken on the risk, but in most cases they lack the branding, systems, processes and support of a national company. Last year alone we awarded record number of conversion franchises. It’s been integral to our success and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Can you ballpark the percentage of franchisees in the U.S. Lawns system that came from conversions? Traditionally it’s been around 30 percent. Over the last two years, I would say it’s right about 50 percent. Have you seen an increase in inquiries from franchisees of other brands? Not so much. What we have seen is a lot of people in the landscape construction industry. With the recent downfall of construction industry, individuals are searching for things to do, and our primary business, which is landscape maintenance, is a lot more consistent than the ups and downs of a construction business. We’ve seen those types of landscape professionals shift their focus to maintenance and move to U.S. Lawns. It’s partially why we’ve had a lot of success on the conversion side as well -- the slow up in construction has really helped that area of our business. What challenges do prospective franchisees planning to open a business face? The challenge right now is the availability of money and credit. Banks have it and they’re sitting on it. A lot of this goes into consumer confidence. When consumer confidence is up, money is flowing a lot more freely and there’s a larger pool of qualified candidates that are willing to invest in themselves. What about internal challenges for your franchise development team? I think it’s staying current and ahead of the curve with technology. Technology and information platforms change at such a rapid pace that just when you figure it out, the game changes. Figuring out how to best use these platforms, like social media for instance, is always going to present challenges for us. It all goes back to communicating to candidates in a way they see fit. I mentioned this earlier but I don’t think that the traditional way of recruiting franchisees can be used today. You cannot put them through that rigid step-by-step process where they do something, you do something, they do something and drag out the process. It’s all about free communication and transparency. Tie that together with staying ahead of the curve on the technology end and that’s going to create continued challenges, but there are also a lot of opportunities if you’re flexible and willing to change. What are some of the other technological changes you’ve made to keep up? We’re doing a lot of different things right now like setting up additional micro sites to help our SEO. For communications, we find that some candidates today are willing to text a whole lot more than talk, so we’ve made it part of our process to reach out to potential franchisees by texting and utilizing that way of communication outside of traditional phone calls if we’re having issues reaching people. You said this will be your third year at the Franchise Leadership and Development Conference. What keeps you coming back? It’s an opportunity to spend time to spend time with professionals in the franchise industry. We’re part of a wonderful industry and when you get a group of people that are involved in franchise development, so much knowledge is shared. You can always come back with some things to implement in your development process to improve it.