The Mindset Shifts Every Franchise System Must Make to Scale

Growing a brand from a scrappy startup to a scalable system is demanding, hectic, exhausting, and also one of the most rewarding journeys you’ll ever take. Not only does your small, dedicated team need to pull together to build a new franchise, but you must create that company with transparent, straightforward processes so franchisees don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can instead replicate what you started. Your gut instincts and underdog attitude can get you to five, six, or 10 locations, but you’ll need a whole different set of skills and a new perspective to take you from 10 to 100.

Starting a brand in a space all to yourself is like settling the Wild West: There are no rules except for the ones you make. Prospectors in those days could dig for days and come up empty. But sometimes, they’d move a few inches over and strike gold. That shift in mindset made all the difference. Progress came not from working harder, but from approaching the opportunity differently.

Why mindset, positivity, and rejecting limiting beliefs matter

A change in perspective is essential for franchisees who can fail without it. A lot of entrepreneurs launch a business because they’re good at whatever the company does; maybe they enjoy practicing yoga and teaching it to others, so they open a yoga studio. But they soon learn that running a business requires an entirely different set of skills. They’re no longer just a yoga teacher; they’re also a business owner.

It gets more complicated if the goal is to scale it into a franchise; they’ll have to teach others how to run each location consistently, which requires laying everything out in a playbook. All procedures and products are uniform, so the franchisee only needs to open the playbook and see how everything is done. Consistency is key in branding and service delivery, so every customer has the same experience no matter their location.

Shifting your mindset is the only way you’re going to hit your goals, because in franchise sales, for example, we can look at numbers, run data, and see how many licenses we can sell based on that, but the numbers only tell part of the story. They can add up to “No,” but who says you have to take “No” for your answer?

There’s an old saying that if you accept all the “No’s,” you’ll never get to the “Yes.”

It takes longer to overcome negative thinking because human beings tend to remain in a negative space. It becomes easier when you can produce cold, hard data, and then no one will challenge you.

New franchisees are especially susceptible to this. They come in very excited, and then reality sets in. They rebel. They don’t want to follow the playbook because they think they know better. That’s when you must lead them to the right answer and show them you’re setting them up for success. It’s important to be honest: scaling is achievable, but it isn’t easy.

Growing together

In franchising, everybody needs to be on top of their numbers and reach their projections, and the only way that happens is when everyone is rowing the boat in the same direction. To scale and grow, everyone must be together; if one person fails, everyone does.

It just takes shifting your mindset, and by moving a few inches to the right, you just might strike gold.

Alisa Anderson is vice president of franchise development for Hammer & Nails.