Opening a shop to start a business is a choice that many modern people hope to reduce the risk of business failure. But as a prospective franchisee, do you know what problems often arise between headquarters and franchisees? What psychological preparations should I make before joining? What rights and obligations must be guaranteed before signing a contract? Some franchisees, after signing up to join, found that the actual business situation and cooperation mode were far from what they imagined before joining, so they were very angry with the headquarters and felt very sorry. From the standpoint of franchise headquarters, I feel quite helpless about the cooperation of franchise stores. Either you don't like too many activities at headquarters, or you don't cooperate with headquarters at all. Do not understand the spirit of the contract, rely too much on the headquarters in business and do not manage it carefully.

In the franchise business, Taiwan Province Province is ahead of the mainland, and there are many useful experiences for reference. This magazine will serialize the top ten most common joining disputes summarized by relevant people in Taiwan Province Province, aiming to prevent people who are interested in choosing the joining mode from repeating the same mistakes.

The top ten most common joining disputes are:

1. Franchisees are not satisfied with the "marketing support and counseling" provided by the headquarters;

Second, the franchise stores are not satisfied with the "commodity price" provided by the headquarters;

Third, the "policy coordination and execution" of franchise stores to the headquarters is very low;

4. The franchisees are not satisfied with the monthly turnover;

5. The dispute between the franchise store and the headquarters about "goods are not allowed to be purchased by themselves";

6. Franchisees are unwilling to cooperate with the promotion activities held by the headquarters;

Seven, franchise stores and headquarters have different views on the "protection scope of business circle";

Eight, franchise stores do not cooperate with the "education and training" organized by the headquarters;

There are disputes about franchise stores: monthly royalties and management fees;

Ten, franchise stores can not repay on time every month.

Whether the franchise stores complain to the headquarters or the headquarters is dissatisfied with the franchise stores, disputes and controversies will continue in the process of mutual interaction. Some people describe that under the franchise system, the relationship between headquarters and franchise stores is like getting married. Look carefully before marriage, turn a blind eye after marriage, and don't care too much. However, some people think that the relationship between them is just like the relationship between monarchs and princes in the ancient Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. The combination point is both United and suspicious in terms of interests.

Under such a chaotic and ambiguous relationship, it is really easy to have disputes with different opinions. If the two sides can't negotiate rationally and calmly and reach an understanding acceptable to both sides, it will inevitably happen. Therefore, in addition to the correct concept of the franchise stores themselves, and in line with the overall policy of the headquarters, the franchise stores should also take responsibility to reduce the purchase cost, increase the turnover and make the franchise stores more centripetal force.

One of the Ten Common Joining Disputes

Dissatisfaction with the marketing support and counseling of the headquarters has become the voice of franchisees in almost any industry, but what is more interesting is that the complaints of franchisees can be divided into two categories in content. The first complaint is that the headquarters has no action, or it seems that it doesn't care, which doesn't help the store's performance or business bottleneck.

Compared with complaining that the head office does not provide marketing guidance or is not reliable enough, some franchisees feel that the head office intervenes too much, asking for that today and cooperating with it tomorrow, which makes franchisees very uncomfortable.

Therefore, it is very important for joining the headquarters to play the role of marketing support and counseling. Generally speaking, the mentality of franchise store owners will only think of seeking support from the headquarters when the operation is difficult, and when the profit is stable, the regulations of the headquarters will be regarded as a constraint to control personal freedom.

For franchisees, we must first identify the ability of headquarters to implement marketing and counseling. This includes:

First, the implementation of any policy depends on people's actions. For convenience stores, basically every 7 to 15 stores, the headquarters has full-time counselors responsible for the counseling area. Suppose there are 300 franchisees in the headquarters, and there must be at least 20 counselors. Therefore, in addition to asking about joining, we might as well compare the ratio of counselors in this headquarters to existing franchise stores. If the result of the transformation is too wide, then perhaps franchisees should think more about the follow-up counseling and support from the headquarters.

Second, the tutor is professional, not just recruited by the headquarters. Therefore, it is best to choose a franchise headquarters with a certain number of direct stores. In order to cultivate and retain talents, the headquarters will select outstanding cadres from direct stores as regional tutors, and such tutors, because of their practical work experience, can really understand the difficulties and positions of store management in the process of coordinating and communicating with franchise stores, and put forward correct suggestions, not just being the mouthpiece of the headquarters.

Third, franchisees request marketing support from headquarters, usually because the revenue situation is not ideal. It is impossible for the headquarters to give franchisees the right medicine by intuition alone, which requires the headquarters to really have a complete set of management methods, and there must be some relevant forms, such as business day reports and single-day revenue statistics, to teach franchisees how to calculate and fill in, and to require franchisees to return to the headquarters on time.

At the same time, franchisees should also believe this. Only when there are many requirements in the headquarters specification, the chances of success will be great.

Franchise stores are not completely without responsibility. Headquarters and franchisees should have certain trust and recognition with each other in advance. Never think that "joining" is equivalent to becoming a "boss" and doing whatever you want. Unwilling to accept the norms of the headquarters, then you can join the headquarters if you meet such conditions, and there is no guarantee that the future revenue will be really stable. Therefore, franchisees must first weigh themselves before joining.

"Joining" is not just an irrelevant cooperative relationship after the headquarters collects the joining fee and commission from the franchisees, and the franchisees acquire the brand and sign the contract. Think about it carefully, how many disputes come from the imperfection of marketing support and counseling at the headquarters, which makes the franchise stores in an isolated state, and it seems too late to regret and cancel the contract. Therefore, franchisees should make good use of the resources of the headquarters, rest assured that the headquarters will take the pulse for you, trust the practices and judgments of the headquarters, and make the operation more handy.

The second controversy

The dispute between franchise stores and headquarters about the purchase price of goods constitutes one of the top ten most common franchise disputes, which affects the cooperative relationship between franchisees to some extent.

Franchisees think that one factor of high procurement cost is that franchisees lack the concept of overall cost calculation, and they can't understand why the cost of raw materials provided by headquarters is always more expensive.

In the face of the dissatisfaction of franchisees, the headquarters handles it, but sometimes the helplessness of the headquarters lies in that the concept of enterprise management may not be accepted by franchisees. The biggest headache for the headquarters is that franchisees only have "banknotes" in their eyes. As long as a commodity is more expensive than others, the headquarters doesn't know how long it will take to explain the concept of overall cost, but the effect is not good.

If this is not clear enough, such as calculating the total cost of products, in addition to the cost of producing raw materials, it also includes R&D, quality control, refrigeration, inventory, logistics and other links, and the headquarters must spend a lot of money to provide these services. Even if the headquarters is not engaged in the production of raw materials, it still has to bear the costs of quality control, refrigeration and logistics. In other words, the burden of the headquarters is far heavier than that of a single store, not to mention that the headquarters also needs to provide staff training, promotional activities, advertising and other services. Suppliers don't have to consider these factors.

Taking the catering franchise industry as an example, will setting up a central kitchen at the headquarters reduce the burden of purchasing costs for franchisees?

First of all, from the perspective of economic scale, the greater the output of manufacturers, the lower the price of external sales. If the same logic is put on the central kitchen built by the headquarters itself, the situation may be a little different. Why? In fact, the reason is very simple. The products of the central kitchen of the headquarters can only be supplied to "own people", and other market suppliers do not have this restriction, as long as the price is reasonable and the quality is good. Any single store may become a supplier's customer, not to mention whether the franchise store will become "one of its own" again after the contract expires, and there are considerable variables. In terms of market competition, the headquarters is already at a disadvantage.

It is also the volume of economic scale. In terms of logistics distribution, although everyone emphasizes a small number of flexible distribution methods, the products distributed by the headquarters center factory are limited to their own stores. Compared with other suppliers, the distance between distribution points is naturally much farther than other suppliers, and the distribution cost of headquarters is of course higher.

However, franchisees cannot unilaterally reject the intention of the headquarters to control quality just because of these factors. After all, only high-quality goods can win the trust of customers. Headquarters and franchise stores are as close as lips and teeth, and poor management of headquarters is definitely not good news for Canadian stores.

The production and distribution cost of headquarters is higher than the market price, and the competition of suppliers is inevitable. As a partner of raw material procurement and logistics distribution, the headquarters can still supervise and control the quality of products, and can also use the dynamic transportation resources of suppliers to deliver goods on its behalf. Generally speaking, this practice can be said to save trouble and money. At the same time of implementing this strategy, the headquarters can concentrate on marketing guidance for franchise stores by using existing resources, so as to make a breakthrough in the number of outlets. When the headquarters reaches a larger economic scale, it will go back to suppliers for lower purchase prices. Such a virtuous circle is good for headquarters and franchisees, so why not?

The third controversy

Some people tend to regard the franchise system as a big family. Whether the family can be harmonious depends on whether the parents' leadership style and ideas can be valued and obeyed by family members. Similarly, the franchise system is composed of franchise stores all over the world, and everyone has their own ideas and practices. The direct selling system can't order everything from top to bottom, and the employees who implement it are easy to control. Therefore, for the implementation of policies, it often takes you more time to communicate ideas and condense franchise knowledge.

And franchisees often have a question about the headquarters policy, which is very strange! Doing business is doing business, and the headquarters always comes up with a plan, which not only wastes my time, but also makes no more money. Moreover, if I don't cooperate, I will be punished by the headquarters. What a waste of people and money! Since franchisees hold this concept, the operational difficulty of promoting policies by headquarters is obvious.

The concept of franchise stores in the industry generally stays at the level of single stores. As long as the results are good, where do you need to accept further instructions from the headquarters? Franchisees will forget that since they are joining Warm Country, they are not going it alone. Perhaps the owner of store A thinks that the business is doing well and he is unwilling to cooperate, but he may not think that store B is in urgent need of help from the headquarters. That's it. The owner of a store may even go further and refute the needs of store B. This is really a good question. The idea of a shop owner is not completely wrong, but the cognition of franchising lacks the concept of collective management. Franchisees should know that customers will come to spend. In addition to the effectiveness of personal efforts, consumers will see the brand of the headquarters, and because they are interested in this brand, customers will choose the same brand for consumption wherever they go.

What is the scope and function of the policies formulated by the headquarters? The policies often formulated by industry headquarters can be divided into: first, commodity policies can increase the competitiveness of brands in the market and help franchise stores to collect turnover and customers; Second, the management policy, the headquarters according to the total turnover data, formulate the target for the next year; Third, implement policies to increase turnover or strengthen consumers' brand awareness; Fourth, the personnel policy, the headquarters to strengthen the education and training of employees, so that employees can learn how to cooperate with the headquarters' new initiatives or service-oriented franchise system; 5. Operation policy, through which the headquarters will reduce the cost of commodity management and procurement process; Sixth, the joining policy, after the headquarters evaluates its own strength and expected goal in the industry, such as narrowing the scope of business circle or changing the joining conditions, to achieve the purpose of expanding the joining territory.

As far as the marketing policy is concerned, although it is always well-intentioned, what makes franchisees complain most is that the staff of franchisees are not adapted to the new practices and their performance is not very good in essence. Since it didn't work, why did they experiment with franchisees? However, the effectiveness of any policy implementation will take some time to brew. In the initial stage of policy implementation, there is usually no direct and obvious effect, which is always clear. However, the purpose of the headquarters is to inform consumers through the huge publicity effect that all franchisees under the headquarters provide the same services or products and cultivate the memory of customers' consumption behavior.

Only the headquarters that operates with care will implement the policies and regulations that many franchisees often think are "troublesome", and franchisees often complain about the poor results from a harsh perspective. However, franchisees should know that the headquarters is not a fairy, and no policy can be achieved overnight, and not every activity can produce immediate results in the process of exploration and trial. Ten plans, as long as there is a success, then the hard work of the headquarters and franchise stores for the previous nine times is worth it. Unity is strength, giving full play to the collective strength. This is not something that a single store can do if it wants to, which is one of the reasons why a single store can't compete with the franchise system.

Therefore, before joining the franchise system, franchisees should take the planning, implementation and past activities of the headquarters as one of the criteria for evaluating the quality of the headquarters.

The fourth controversy-franchisees complain about low profits and franchisees are in urgent need of innovation.

Usually franchisees' complaints about turnover can be divided into two aspects. One is that the original good profit is decreasing year by year because of the change of external environment, which includes the increase of rent, water and electricity costs and the adjustment of employees' wages. These are the costs that franchisees must absorb by themselves. Secondly, internal factors, including the supply price of the headquarters, reflect the rising cost of raw materials in the market and the increase of capital expenditure on overall services, such as the employment of personnel, the expansion and abandonment of factories, which will charge higher fees to franchisees. Squeezed by these internal and external factors, the income of franchise stores is like "burning candles at both ends", and the actual income will of course decrease day by day.

As far as the responsibility of the head office is concerned, if the store is dissatisfied with the turnover, it will verify the facts according to the specific operating data and formulate the remedial measures for the store or area. However, if the overall strength of the head office is too weak to face the test of market competition, I believe that no matter how hard the evaluation and coordination are, it will not help franchisees make more money. In other words, franchisees should consider the following three points when choosing a head office.

Headquarters economy scale

Headquarters with economies of scale, because of the large purchase volume, can grasp the decision-making power of the bargaining interval when negotiating prices with suppliers. Moreover, the headquarters takes low prices from suppliers, which can naturally give back to franchisees, alleviating the pressure on single stores to bear the cost of raw materials.

R&D capability of headquarters

As far as the current consumer market is concerned, the headquarters that only relies on fixed goods as a selling point will often face the dilemma of losing the charm of products and no longer attracting customers to the door because of the changes in customers' consumption habits. So the commodity research and development department at headquarters is very important. In other words, with the continuous introduction of new products, the headquarters will always let consumers have new tastes to taste, so that franchisees can maintain a certain competitiveness in the market. Therefore, franchisees can not only consider the popularity of their brands in the existing market in the pre-evaluation of choosing their headquarters. Whether the products of headquarters can be launched one after another is a very important factor for franchisees to continue to attract customers to spend at home in the future.

Does the headquarters seek help from other resources?

In order to increase the number of visitors and the scope of services, the headquarters can choose suitable products and display them in franchise stores. Convenience stores are the most common in China, such as collecting phone bills and sending flowers on behalf of customers, which can attract consumers to the store and invite them to buy. When franchisees choose their headquarters, they often ignore the joint sales of headquarters and sideline products, which can bring more income to franchisees.

Joining the cooperative relationship is nothing more than the joint efforts of the headquarters and the franchise stores, and both parties get a certain degree of reasonable remuneration. While the franchise stores are full of grievances, it is advisable to think calmly about whether they have completely managed the stores, and do it in full accordance with the steps taught by the headquarters, and then come to the headquarters for justice. But the income can't meet the franchise headquarters. Even if there are more and better suggestions and systems, franchisees will not accept them, but will turn to other headquarters after the contract expires.

Therefore, in the face of franchisees' complaints about turnover, in addition to listening to franchisees' opinions from the perspective of goodwill, the headquarters must also seriously consider whether there is room for flexible adjustment. After all, franchise stores are the lifeblood of the headquarters. Without the support of franchise stores, how can the headquarters have a chance to survive?

The fifth dispute-the franchisee asked to purchase the franchisee himself, but the franchisee refused to give in.

Franchisees are dissatisfied with the restriction of headquarters prohibiting self-procurement. In fact, the dissatisfaction with commodity prices mentioned above is a two-sided problem.

Restrict franchisees from purchasing from headquarters only. Such a regulation is a rule that must be established in order to maintain the operation of the franchise system. How can I put it? In addition to intangible technologies such as marketing and management unique to each headquarters, the most important tangible resource of headquarters proprietary technology is the products sold by headquarters. Franchisees are willing to pay the relevant fees, but also for the return of these tangible and intangible resources. Therefore, franchisees must first realize that the intention of the headquarters to restrict the purchase of goods is not only to make money, but to maintain the reputation and quality of the brand and build consumer confidence. For the headquarters, it is definitely more important than earning the difference in purchase.

Faced with the profit pie of franchise chain, suppliers in the market must try their best to "carve up" this market. In order to attract the attention of franchisees, the price will definitely satisfy franchisees. As for the quality of raw materials, if the supplier has a considerable scale, the raw materials provided will even be better than the headquarters. How can franchisees not be "excited"?

Therefore, in order to calm the complaints of franchise stores, the headquarters not only pursues economies of scale, but also strives for more favorable bargaining space when purchasing raw materials, and constantly introduces unique products that rivals cannot imitate. It can not only increase the consumption freshness of Witt products, increase the income of franchisees, but also enhance their loyalty.

In addition, franchisees must not neglect the service of headquarters in purchasing goods in order to save money, which can save you a lot of trouble. As far as the current logistics distribution system is concerned, it emphasizes diversification and small-scale flexible distribution, which aims not only to maintain the freshness of products, but also to reduce the inventory cost burden of franchisees without wasting too much storage space.

However, franchisees may question that the service attitude and replenishment speed of outside suppliers are not worse than that of headquarters. Indeed, except for a few headquarters, there is not much difference between headquarters and other competitors in delivery and service, but the point is that the biggest difference between headquarters and outside manufacturers is that headquarters will provide Canadian stores with the obligation of purchasing goods and quality control according to the contract. Usually franchisees purchase goods privately, limited to several raw materials. Assuming that franchisees rely on them more and more, and there are so many kinds of goods, can franchisees ensure that outside manufacturers maintain the same quality and service attitude?

Seeing that franchisees and headquarters are arguing about restricting the purchase of goods, we can't help but admire the charm of implementing policies in large international fast food restaurants. Wherever consumers go, as long as they see the same signboard, it is almost a guarantee of cleanliness and consistent taste. In addition to persuasion and punishment, the headquarters can open some products with weak competitiveness to franchisees to purchase their own goods, but they must be audited by the headquarters to ensure the quality, and franchisees have no hostile attitude. They think that the headquarters is not allowed to purchase goods privately, just to make money. Franchisees should understand that the market is full of mixed goods. In order to maintain the brand's reputation, it is absolutely impossible for the headquarters to allow stores to purchase goods at will. If franchisees go their own way,