The Personality of a Franchise Rep

Greetings from a hotel near you,

If you don't have patience, sense of humor, and the ability to hold your tongue, you don't have what it takes to travel around the country visiting franchisees.

I visited two franchisees the other day that each had half of a large Southern city as their territories. The first franchisee I met with didn't have a clue. When I asked him how many new customers he wanted to add next year and what his plans were for marketing next year he said that he wanted to gain 50 customers next year. He only had 150 customers and needed 400 customers to break even. He was so under motivated that he was giving himself 14 months to get 50 customers! When I asked him what he was going to do for marketing, he said he had 1,000 postcards to send out and thought that was enough, which it wasn't. The fact that he had previously not been able to kept a job so his father gave him the money to buy the franchise was shinning through. He had no idea how much revenue he was bringing in per customer. We figured it out together and came up with around $200. He wasn't computer savy, so he was doing several things by hand that he should have been doing on the computer.
Then I went across town to visit the other franchisee. He had several marketing and business books on his desk. He was working on a new web site and blog to help market his business. Without looking he told me he was bringing in around $500 per customer. He had doubled his number of customers each of the last two years and planned to do it again. He had goals posted on the walls and progress charts. He did all of that with the same 24 hours a day that the other man had.
In one day, I saw two completely different pictures. One of someone that will be going out of business at some point in the not so distant future, and one who will be buying out the other franchisee at some point in the future. Both were comfortable in their present state and didn't want any help from me.
The next day I went to visit someone that had 14 customers and had just hired an employee to take care of these 14 customers, and was planning to cut a hole in the top of a van for ventilation......

Fran