When you are operating and growing a franchise system, you will not only have issues that can arise at the corporate level, but the potential to have a crisis spring up at one your franchise locations.
Studies have shown that nearly all businesses will someday experience a crisis. Business crises will become more common as we continue to adjust to life after the COVID-19 pandemic and because of ongoing labor shortages. Franchise owners who are hiring workers with less experience or who have a questionable background or mishap in the past may be more prone to experiencing a crisis.
If you’re not prepared to deal with the crisis with the right communications plan, you can do more damage to your company, your franchise owners and your reputation than simply sticking your head in the sand and hoping for the worst to blow over.
And, while it’s laudable that you provide your franchisees with a proven business model, centralized technology and access to an established supply chain, if you aren’t also providing your partners with media training and a written crisis escalation plan, you aren’t preparing them for success.
Prepare for the Worst
A crisis occurs when you least expect it and can crop up out of nowhere. This is especially true for a franchised business when you have several owners with different values spread out all over the country.
While things may be running smoothly at the corporate office, one of your franchised locations might have a disgruntled employee who secretly films bad practices and posts the video all over the internet. Or one of your franchisees may steal from a customer and they go straight to the media to complain and the story gets amplified over local news outlets.
Any good public relations professional will tell you that the best thing to do in these situations is to react quickly. Technology has made it so news spreads so rapidly that it can be halfway around the world in an instant, so your fast reaction is a necessity.
But how can you react quickly if you haven’t created a culture of being crisis conscious?
You need to sit down during times of calm and identify any potential vulnerabilities that could be on the horizon. Once this list is created, you then need to prepare an action plan on the best ways to respond.
If you neglect to prepare for this eventuality and don’t respond accordingly, it might not result in the complete failure of your business model but it could create a lot of headaches, unnecessary expenditures, and a knock to your reputation that can’t easily be overcome.
Training Your Franchisees
If you’ve been in business for a while, chances are that you’ve already created a crisis communications plan for your main location or for the corporate offices of your franchised business.
However, if you’ve not passed this wisdom along to your franchisees, you should build this instruction into your overall owner’s training. You cannot be assured that your franchisees have either created their own crisis management plan or even know what one is.
Depending on how your franchising operations are set up, there are a number of options that are available to your team. Customers don’t necessarily know that your franchisee is an independent owner/operator and will consider the brand as a whole. In fact, in most franchising companies, your marketing and PR teams have probably cultivated that belief.
So, when one of your franchisees is in trouble, so is your entire brand. Your crisis communication plan should reflect that.
Make sure that you spend time helping your franchise owners develop an independent crisis communications plan that works for their location, as well as the corporate office. During this training, make sure that you and the franchisee select a suitable spokesperson and appoint a crisis management team, outline a method for quickly creating a press statement and social media rollout plan, and write out the steps your team, spokesperson and PR agency must take to remain on the same page.
You should also prepare your franchisee on what to do if the media calls for a response. Simply replying with a “no comment” can often result in a much worse outcome than if you let the reporter know you will provide them with a statement before their deadline. Review this statement with your PR team – and an attorney, if necessary – but do it quickly so your response is supplied to reporters as soon as possible.
Media Training is a Necessity
It is also a good idea that you have someone on your team who knows how to handle the media and what to say or do in a crisis situation.
Media training matters. How you handle your conversations with the press can be the difference between a one-day-and-done story and a days-long full court press offensive.
Remember that no conversation with the media should be treated as an “off the record” conversation during a crisis and keep in mind that everything you say can and will be scrutinized.
You should also have someone who can monitor the overall crisis coverage and company messaging to measure the effectiveness of your statements. This person should be nimble enough to correct any messaging that proves to be harmful or ineffective.
This may require that your crisis communications team receive outside coaching from a PR professional or media expert. While it might be impossible to provide all your franchise locations with comprehensive media training, you should have someone on your staff who receives this training and can communicate with your franchisees on best practices.
It is also a good idea for your crisis management team to practice conversations with the media by holding mock press conferences. You don’t want your spokesperson’s first time answering tough questions in front of a camera to be in the midst of a real crisis. First impressions are always important but they are particularly important when you are facing the media during a crisis situation.
This may seem like a lot of work on the front end, but it is as essential in today’s business world as preparing cost analysis spreadsheets and purchasing inventory.
For franchise brands, your reputation is everything and it extends to your franchisees and their locations. Don’t let a crisis threaten that brand. Create a crisis management plan and train the right employees on how to handle the media so that your company will be protected should a tragedy occur.
Heather Ripley is founder and CEO of Ripley PR, an elite, global public relations agency specializing in franchising, skilled trades and B2B tech. Ripley PR has been listed by Entrepreneur Magazine as a Top Franchise PR Agency five years in a row and was named to Forbes’ America’s Best PR Agencies for 2021. It is also recognized as the top PR agency for the home service industry. Ripley is the author of “NEXT LEVEL NOW: PR Secrets to Drive Explosive Growth for your Home Service Business,” which is now available on all audiobook platforms. For additional information, visit www.ripleypr.com.