When you think about what keeps customers coming back to their favorite brands week after week, the answer usually lies in the right mix of quality and consistency. But building a loyal customer base is not always about flash, free giveaways, or wall-to-wall advertising. It’s building connections by identifying and communicating with the audience, often through storytelling.

2021 was an exceptionally strong year for franchisors and franchisees; what a comeback they made after two rollercoaster years of uncertainty across all factors on the franchise front. According to FranData and the International Franchise Association’s latest Franchise Outlook, 2022 will be another good year.

The world of franchising frequently touts franchise brokers as a valuable resource for achieving franchise sales goals. Given their credibility with buyers, franchising knowledge, and local presence, it simply makes sense, for many franchisors, that engaging a broker network is a smart strategy for generating franchise sales. But getting to the sale is not as simple as just deciding to “hire” a broker network. It’s more like a courtship.

As businesspeople, we give a lot of thought to time. We think in terms of Q1 through Q4, hours in a week, and when is the best time to do this or that? Regarding launching a franchise, we tend to compare the seasonal aspects of both the franchise industry and the industry in which we are operating, and choose the best time of year to get started. What we don’t often think of – in terms of time – is how long it takes to line up our legal ducks. Let this serve as a reminder that without the legalities, a franchise can’t get off the ground, and nobody has time for that.

An acquaintance of mine recently told me about an expensive mistake he made that taught him a valuable lesson. This business executive spent quite a bit of money on pay-per-click lead generation when a representative for the media resource reached out. The media rep promised a much more sophisticated campaign designed to deliver a far greater number of leads. And, as an expert in the field, the businessman trusted their capabilities. A few months later, the results started coming in and, indeed, this strategy delivered a substantially greater number of leads. But as time continued to pass, the businessman realized that these leads resulted in far fewer conversions and sales than expected. In the end, eyeing only the large six-figure marketing budget and not the company’s overall needs and strategies, the fox had snuck into the henhouse and my acquaintance paid the price.

Franchise owners in the food industry are feeling the brunt of the labor shortage that has plagued businesses, large and small, in a post-pandemic world. Early in the pandemic, restaurants struggled from shutdowns, consumer wariness, and limited capacity restrictions. As those things have improved in recent months, employers have been struck with a new problem – labor shortages.

There is a myth about franchising that goes something like this: franchisor-owned corporate stores will outperform franchised stores because franchised stores cannot meet the high level of quality that corporate stores do. This misconceived notion is fueled by the idea that by giving up some level of operational control in awarding a franchise, the franchisor is almost necessarily giving up some measure of quality control.

There is no question that the last year has been a challenging one for all business large and small, new and established, franchise and start-up. The forecast for the remaining quarters of 2021 is bright however, especially if you are interested in operating a business within an industry now conditioned to thrive post-pandemic, and specifically if it is a franchised concept.