This $400k  house had been on the market for several months when the home owner hired  Showhomes to stage the home with a Home Manager.  Within a week, Showhomes staged the entire home and moved in its live-in home stager to prep it for showings and keep it in perfect show condition.

Within 30 days on the staging, a buyer fell in love with the home and put in an accepted offer! Homes in this price range are taking a long time to sell in this market; 2 to 3 times as long as it took to move this one.

The unique layout of the house gave the Showhomes home staging team a chance to get creative. The house had a large great room that was open for two stories. The team created a “southern style” gathering area in the kitchen staged with a love seat and two chairs in front of the windows. They also positioned a gathering area around the fireplace on the other side of the kitchen. These cozy gatherings made the home memorable to buyers and really increased the amount of time spent on showings – a critical point to selling a home for top dollar.

The house had neutral colors, lots of beige. “Vacant, it was all builder beige – it all looked the same. The furniture added life to the house,” said Matt. “It was colorful. It had a much warmer and cozier feeling.”

After the Showhomes Home Manager moved in, there was a noticeable rise in the amount of showings. “Showings increased after the Realtor put the new pictures up,” said Matt. “We had three to five showings a week for a home that was beginning to get stagnant.”

The Realtor was very happy with the staging and the sales results Showhomes provided.

Who wouldn’t be?

Great work, Showhomes Home Staging in Toledo!

You are buying a system for operating a business.

One of the most overlooked pieces of evaluating a franchise is how well the system is documented, how often is it updated and equally important, how accessible is the documentation.

Why is this important?

Most franchise companies use paper manuals – enormous 3-ring binders – that help you get your business off the ground. They may be broken into several smaller binders and labeled Operations, Marketing, Accounting or Grand Opening. These critical documents explain in detail how you open an office, ramp it up, generate revenue and at the end of the day, turn a profit. Following the ‘system’ in a franchise company is the quickest path to becoming a Top Performer.

Not following the system is almost always the quickest path to becoming an Under Performer. Remember, a franchisor doesn’t make money if you don’t so they have a vested interest in making sure you have a well documented, step-by-step procedure to becoming profitable.

Or at least they should. The truth is how do you know before you buy?

At Showhomes Home Staging, my company, we stopped using paper manuals all together. We use a very sophisticated and secure online manual that serves out information in the way you want – always accessible, searchable and secure. Our franchisees can use keyword searches to get basic questions answered, can access documents and can even suggest changes when they come across a hole so our documentation stays sharp 100% of the time. When we add new content, our franchisees get notification emails and have to check off they’ve read the new content so no one gets left behind.

On the franchisor side, we track how often every user accesses the manual, have metrics for how many pages they access and understand how long they spend on each page. This way we know what our franchisees want to learn and what parts are in use so we can always adapt. It also helps us understand what questions franchisees are interested in so we can develop more of what they want and need.

When I ask other franchise executives what percentage of their franchisees access their manual on a regular basis, the number is always shockingly low: 5-10% or less. That means a stunning 95% are not using the system documentation to help them make better decisions day-to-day. Think about it – a huge 3-ring binder is likely to sit on a shelf, gathering dust. Most franchisees have a need to access it but the format makes it difficult. As a result, they ask other owners or call their operations staffer with basic questions, over and over.

Does this hurt the franchisee? You better believe it! When that operations person – the most important person on the corporate team – is answering basic questions, they are not thinking proactively about how to help you grow. Face it – there are only so many hours in a day.

Because we pay attention to this, we know that 35-40% of our franchisees access and use our online manual on a regular basis. We know who does and who doesn’t and this helps our operations and field staff help franchisees grow. It makes for more specific conversations and because our documentation is online, it allows us to leverage the content whenever and wherever we are. Most importantly, it gives our franchisees the ability to help themselves 24 / 7.  We’d like that number to rise and because we measure it, it will.

Whatever franchise you look at, make sure to ask about the system documentation. Go beyond looking at the table of contents in the FDD. Ask franchisees if they use it on a regular basis and if it helps them run a better performing business.

Ask if it is online – in today’s online world, it should be.

Thomas Scott

VP Marketing and Systems Development

Showhomes Home Staging

www.showhomesfranchise.com

We used Kit Vinson from www.franman.com to help author our manual and port it online.

Home Staging Franchise Showhomes listed as best bet in down market by The Street.com:

The Great Recession has made some would-be entrepreneurs skittish about starting a business from scratch.

For them, it may make sense to buy a business franchise. While franchises have taken a hit, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) forecasts that the number of franchises will expand 2% from 883,292 last year to 901,093 in 2010.

“Franchising lets people get into business for themselves, but not by themselves,” says Alisa Harrison, vice president of communications and marketing at the International Franchise Association in Washington. Here are a few things to keep in mind when considering becoming a franchisee.

Advantages over entrepreneurship: Unlike a typical startup, a franchise comes with automatic brand recognition, meaning the franchisee doesn’t have to invest in getting the word out. Franchisees also receive operational assistance and management support from headquarters.

“Becoming a franchisee is a natural for someone willing to let other people make mistakes on their behalf in advance,” says Jason Earle, founder of 1-800-GOT-MOLD, a mold-detection company best known for the mold-sniffing Labrador retrievers it employs. Founded in 2003, the company recently secured its first franchisee and is looking for more. (Earle, incidentally, holds a Guinness record for acquiring his stockbroker’s license at age 17.)

“We’ve really built something that’s turn-key,” Earle says. “You walk through the door, and you get a four-legged partner who becomes your calling card.” Disadvantages compared with entrepreneurship: The difference between starting a business and buying a franchise is analogous to the difference between building a house and buying a condo. Much as condo owners must adhere to the rules of the condo board, franchisees are required to operate their franchises according to a franchisor’s preexisting restrictions and procedures. Thus, the franchise model doesn’t leave much room for creativity, which may rankle entrepreneurs who are used to making and breaking their own rules. In the franchise model, they are required to play by the rules of the brand.

“You don’t buy a McDonald’s and decide you want to sell hot dogs,” says Alisa Harrison, vice president of communications and marketing at the International Franchise Association in Washington. “You have to follow the system that has been laid out. Veterans make awesome franchisees because they’re very disciplined and are used to following a system.”

Investment requirements: The initial investment that franchisors require depends on overhead and the complexity of running the business. The commercial cleaning company Jani-King, which boasts more than 12,000 franchise owners worldwide, offers investment opportunities for as little as $3,000. McDonald’s, on the other hand, requires a minimum of $500,000 in non-borrowed assets before it will consider a potential restaurant franchisee.

What to look for before you leap: All franchisors are legally required to provide a disclosure statement, also known as the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) at least 10 days before the signing of a franchise agreement. Potential franchisees should read through the document for basic information such as additional fees, designated sales territories and available training programs. But they should also look for red flags such as litigation and bankruptcy histories. It makes sense to scour the Web for chat group discussions about any given franchises. “If a group of franchisees isn’t happy, they’re going to talk about it,” Harrison says.

Best bets: The fastest-growing franchise fields include quick-service restaurants, real estate and retail food, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Franchisors in these fields include Great American Cookies, which requires an investment between $170,000 and $300,000; the home-staging company Showhomes, which requires an investment of $43,800 to $74,000; and the drive-through coffee franchise Mountain Mudd Espresso, which requires an investment of $105,000 to $1.9 million.

For more information, visit www.showhomesfranchise.com