Just as I told you before, to have your business fanchised, you’ll need everything on your business to be standardized. This is why you should develop documents of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). With a good SOP you won’t be bothered by your franchisee asking how to operate the store, how to pay their employee’s salary, etc. You could compiled and explain everything they need to run the business in the SOP document. SOP is made as detail as possible, so even people with no clue about running a burger outlet (assume this is a burger franchise) could be an expert on the business just by reading the manual. Yeah, it’s just like the manual book included on your notebook, reading this SOP as a manual to run the business is a smart way for a franchisee.
SOP documents are unique between one business compared with another, each business has its own characteristic so the manual must developed in a specific way that suits your business characteristics. To tell you the truth, it’s not that hard to develop those SOP documents. To make it easy, you could use a preparation document, I usually call it as Document Control, in this document we divide SOP as three major parts : Entry, Operating, and Exit. Each of them will be your guidance for you to develop a procedure related to the part.
1. Entry (This would consist of manuals that will give franchisee and/or franchisor a guidance on how to start a franchise outlet, for example : Outlet startup procedure, Market research procedure, locations survey procedure, franchise agreement, etc)
2. Operating (On this part you must develop SOP on how to operate a franchise outlet, starting from warehouse management, financial management, marketing tools, customer service manuals, serving food & drinks manual, etc)
3. Exit (Consist of SOP on how to end a franchise agreement)
Those are Document Control, developing SOP for your business will be much easier when you setup them with this Document Control guidance.