Posted:06-August-2014
Interview with Sophie Atkinson, Managing Director of Autosmart
Autosmart were named the bfa HSBC Franchisor of the Year in June – the third time since 2008 that the business has won the highest accolade available to UK franchisors. It also picked up the bfa’s inaugural Franchisee Recruitment award this year, contributing to a total of six accolades gained at the Franchisor of the Year Awards in the last six years.
The company, which develops and manufactures vehicle cleaning products that are sold from purpose-built mobile showrooms, has therefore firmly established its reputation of an ethical approach to its franchisees, both prospective and existing.
Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, Autosmart reported record network sales in 2013 and is on course to surpass that in 2014. A remarkable 84 percent of franchisees had their best-ever year last year, in a network containing many long-term business owners. With expansion to five European countries already under their belt and more sure to follow, it’s a true British success story.
The bfa’s Paul Stafford caught up with managing director Sophie Atkinson to ask about the resounding success of her franchise.
You’ve led a business for 15 years that’s been named Franchisor of the Year three times in six years, reported record turnover last year and is successfully expanding internationally, amongst many other achievements. That’s a record most franchisors dream about! How do you keep your team motivated when you’ve already achieved so much?
We keep our sights fixed on what else we want to achieve. All of our staff and our franchisees know our UK plans – which are to increase sales by a further third, mainly by each franchise owner increasing in size. Having a shared vision means that we are pulling in the same direction.
Then we break the big goal down into the small achievable goals which we need to get done to help our franchisees achieve this sales increase. For some departments this means teaching franchisees advanced negotiation skills; for others it means inventing new products, or travelling to China to source polishing cloths, or buying a second UK site. Then we measure progress against the goals all of the time. So we know clearly when we are doing well, and we also know quickly if something needs to be adapted or modified.
The awards judges remarked that Autosmart “place franchisee profitability at the heart of their corporate goals”. Was that a conscious leadership decision or a natural evolution?
It was a conscious decision right from the start – we can only do well if each franchisee does well. In the UK this is pretty straightforward because nearly all new franchisees are buying a [resale] business which is already profitable. In France though, where there are many greenfield start ups, we have adapted our franchise model so that the new franchisee begins in a mini-mobile showroom which means he or she is profitable even in the early stages of their Autosmart business.
Innovations on products, systems and support have played a major part in the Autosmart story in recent years. From where or whom do you get your ideas?
We get our ideas first and foremost by talking to customers, franchisees, and our regional business managers. We also benefit from being international and have collected some interesting ideas by looking at what our competitors are doing in our various markets.
Achieving network buy-in of new business and mindset coaching initiatives, particularly in a vehicle-based franchise, can’t have been easy. How did you get your franchisees on board?
We had the help of Mark Foster at a national sales conference, who illustrated through his personal achievement how you can reach amazing goals by making incremental improvements to every aspect of your performance. The programme that we launched had 5 aspects and as you would expect with each business owner being different, each owner took up about three varying parts of the programme on offer as suited their strengths and weaknesses. With respect the mind coaching part of the programme, we were helped by our launch being just after the Olympics when the huge positive impact of mind coaching was being written about in the press a lot.
With regards franchisee recruitment, you have very clearly defined, multi-layered processes – would a similar approach have worked when you were a young network?
When we were a young franchisor we would have benefitted hugely from knowing all that we know now! With respect to recruiting new franchisees who will love being Autosmart business owners, and get everything they want out of business ownership, the extra interviewing we do now and the use of personality profiling simply mean that candidates are a better and better match.
Our process has evolved to be based around a mutual fit. We are a lot more rigorous, checking motivations and profiling the candidate to check whether we are a good business match for each other. Our candidates then go on to have several days out with franchisees, where they learn more about the business. Our final stage is a “try before you buy” with the regional business manager, who will eventually become the franchisee’s business coach. The candidate then returns to the head office for further discussions and feedback.
Rewind the clock 35 years and our process was very different. We had the whole of the UK to fill and no precedent was set; our sales team managed the recruitment of new franchisees, and they relied a lot more on their instinct. We knew the type of candidate we were looking for, but hadn’t yet introduced the psychometric profiling.
The goal for our recruitment process today is to look for long-term business partners. We can see that our thorough approach to selecting candidates is paying off as our franchisees stay with us for on average 12 years and 90 percent are ahead of their business plan.
Your top 3 tips for growing franchisors?
- Your franchise owners come first
- Make sure that they have a competitive advantage in their market place, and that you have help on offer when they want it
- Be clear about what the responsibilities of the business owner are towards their franchisor and fellow franchisees
Interested and want to know more about Autosmart?
The Autosmart profile outlines all aspects of their franchise opportunity and allows you to contact them for further information or to ask a question.
