I’m at IFA today. If you’re here too, come find me at booth 700. We’re officially launching The Franchise People Playbook and I figured today was the perfect time to share a little bit of the backstory behind the book.

New Orleans, 2013

It goes back to my first IFA. I was standing in the exhibitor hall in New Orleans knowing exactly one person in the entire place. CareerPlug was doing fine at that point, but something felt off. 

We were helping a lot of large and small organizations with hiring. But we had launched the first version of our hiring software specifically for State Farm insurance and I saw how much impact we could make when embedded within a network of businesses. That’s why I was at IFA in the first place, following my curiosity to see if franchises would allow this same ability to help more people hire and grow winning teams.

I looked around the hall. There were franchise people everywhere, all of them building and working towards something. And everyone was excited, energized, and eager to share with each other.

Within hours I was in conversations with franchisors who were wrestling with the core problem that CareerPlug helps solve: “How can we help our franchisees hire people without doing it for them?”

My curiosity was sated. Franchisors and franchisees needed help that CareerPlug could deliver in a unique way.

The variable nobody talks about

Over the next decade working with hundreds of franchise brands and thousands of franchise locations, I kept seeing the same pattern. There’s one variable that determines whether any individual franchisee succeeds or struggles. It’s the people they hire and how well they manage them.

Franchisors hand their franchisees everything: operations manuals, marketing systems, supplier relationships, financial frameworks. 

But when it comes to hiring and managing people, most franchisees are figuring it out on their own. And most franchisors have been cautious for a variety of reasons (but mainly joint employer liability) about giving too much guidance here.

This book fills the gap

People management is the hardest part of any business. In franchising, it’s the one thing that can make or break an otherwise solid investment. 

When employees struggle, franchisees struggle. When franchisees struggle, the whole system feels it.

That’s the gap and it’s why I wrote this book.

The Franchise People Playbook is written just for franchise businesses, built from more than a decade of working alongside franchisors and franchisees to figure out what actually works.

Come grab a copy and chat with me and the CareerPlug team at booth 700. I’d love to hear what you think.

More next week,

Clint