Franchising - Leveraging The Audit

Franchisors, take a look at Success in ensuring and building your brand can be achieved through the compliance/quality audit process. from Franchise World:

Wrong. This is your brand being discussed. Compliance is part of the DNA of any brand. It is critical that the audit process reinforces and grows the brand. Don’t take some audit that was used five years ago and apply it to the concept today. Do it right. Start by deciding which behaviors and characteristics are important to the business. Then design the audit form to measure them. Sure, they will include such standards as quality, service and cleanliness. They will also include indicators of how well employees are being managed and how healthy the culture is. They should include indicators such as business management and customer satisfaction.

Link the audit directly to key indicators of success: profitability, employees, customers, operations broken down into the measurable elements such as revenue and operating efficiency, employee attraction, retention, and training, customer attraction and retention, procedural compliance, waste management, and inventory management. Does the brand know what its customers care about? Too often organizations will place emphasis on things that really don’t matter to the organization.

The best quality or compliance audits are designed not only to ensure adherence to the model, but also to drive and inform improvement and growth. Establishing clear goals and results for the audit is an obvious first step, correct? If one asks most franchise systems, the goal is to make sure franchisees are following the model. Following the model is part of it, but the real goals should be improvement and growth. By tweaking the focus of the audit, the brand can use it to identify problems or shortcomings in the model and opportunities to improve the model.

It does make sense, so take a look at the whole article.

Franchisees - what does it say of your franchisor who does not conduct these kind of audits?