Strong Franchise Growth Requires a Good Brand Story. Here’s How to Tell Yours.

For franchise brands, crafting a unique and compelling story is crucial to growth. Brands can leverage their stories in different marketing channels and build time capsule moments that will stay with them forever and become part of their brand’s history. 

To that end, 1851 publisher Nick Powills and franchise legal expert Charles Internicola of the Internicola Law* Firm discussed how brands can own their story during their recent webinar series, #TheGreatReturn. During this series, Powills and Internicola spoke with different franchise brands about how they have navigated the coronavirus pandemic and how they plan to leverage their data and experiences in order for their businesses to win. 

Mike McFall, the co-CEO and co-founder of retail coffee franchise Biggby Coffee, and Josh York, the founder and CEO of in-home, personal training franchise GYMGUYZ, both spoke with Powills and Internicola about how sharing their stories has been integral to their respective brands’ growth. 

“My belief is that brands don’t sell brands, people do,” Powills said. “Especially in franchising, when we think about franchisees, they all come from something. Some moment happened before they made the decision to join your brand.” 

Powills and Internicola noted that brands should take a look at their franchise journey and use their digital and marketing dollars on telling that story. Like a great movie, brands should build an arc around the evolution of their business and consistently and genuinely tell the story about the products and services they provide. Should brands neglect to own their story, they will fail, which is why they want to make sure they control the narrative and put out accurate information. Their stories should be aligned with their company’s unique selling proposition, mission and leadership team. 

Brands can start with the basics. They should google themselves, as well as their brand names plus the word “franchise” to see what comes up on search engines. Brands should also look up their competitors and see how those brands show up on search engines. Franchise brands need to make sure their social media profiles are up to date and showcase their best stories and media placements, especially over the previous three years. Brands can even send these stories to their lead database. 

Brands should also consider posting stories on their websites that can answer the following questions: 

• What problem does your brand’s product or service solve for your customers?
• What is the transformation someone experiences after they become a franchisee with your brand? 
• When someone becomes a franchisee, what problem does your franchise system help them solve? 

McFall noted how he started out as a barista for Biggby Coffee’s first store and fell in love with the business. He and Biggby Coffee’s original founder, Bob Fish, took what they now refer to as “the walk”: a four-hour-long walk during which they hashed out the vision for their business and shook hands on it. 

“A big part of storytelling is identifying what the purpose of the story is,” McFall said. “The real impactful part of that story is we formed the company on a handshake. And people love that. They love the trust there.” Yes, they worked for over 18 months to put the company together and formalize everything, but the company also formed its core purpose of helping people build a life they love, he said. 

McFall also noted that brands often talk about creating their vision and finding their purpose, all of which are constantly in development at Biggby Coffee. 

“We’re five years into this, and it’s still working,” McFall said. “It’s still iterating. Each and every day we do something different. We tweak something. It’s been an amazing journey for all of us.” 

For York, he started his company at his parents’ dining room in 2008 with nothing but a laptop and a vision. 

“You’ve got to really believe in yourself,” York said. “You’ve got to go all in. Fear is something that’s obviously a definition of false expectations appearing real.” 

York likes to tell the story of how he sent a box to Nike CEO Phil Knight and got a response and was supposed to be satisfied with that but he wasn’t. He persisted and called the company and went through a phone tree of Nike executives that eventually led him to Knight’s handler. The result: He and Knight scheduled a dinner date that, sadly, has been rescheduled due to COVID-19.

But he did get it. 

“If you don’t have the attitude of never quitting, of being able to deal with pain and go through struggles, you’ll never get comfortable,” York said. “You have to be okay getting uncomfortable if you want to be comfortable, and that’s just the way I roll. If you want to be successful, you better be a good storyteller. You better have good energy. You better be able to let people get excited. If you don’t do that, you’ll never get to the highest level you can possibly go to.”

In a separate conversation about how brands can utilize their data to drive prospective franchise leads, Raintree* CEO Brent Dowling noted that video content tends to be particularly effective in getting casual browsers to fill out online franchise inquiry forms: Brands that invest in telling their stories and “having videos that explain what the culture and community of the franchise is”  can help increase those conversion rates, he said. 

Bottom line: Storytelling is an important part of the franchise journey, so brands shouldn’t be afraid of this particular aspect of their development. As Powills put it: “Get vulnerable. It’s okay. Get comfortable with telling the story.”