An Epic 2024 Franchise Conference
James Cutting
?? Football Fun Factory Franchisor - Helping passionate football coaches run their own football coaching business where they live!
This article is designed to provide value to franchisors who are considering plans for their next franchise conference. Having just delivered ours, here's what we included and what worked well.
The Environment
For me, I believe that it's so important for the setting to be inspirational. We chose Sherwood Forest Center Parcs for our annual get-together.
Football Fun Factory is the football provider across all Center Parcs UK & Ireland villages and it's a brilliant place to bring the team.
Being on site at Center Parcs feels like a bit of an escape from the day-to-day and sometimes the lack of phone signal in the forest can be a blessing too!
The conference facilities are superb and the perfect professional environment for a franchise conference.
The Format
I won't bore you will the full schedule, but the day included:
Networking and Building Relationships
We always find that the part the franchisees love most is having a chat with one another! They love to share challenges and opportunities and what's going on within their business. We facilitated this in both relaxed and informal settings as well as within our workshops throughout the day.
Face-to-Face Time With the Head Office Team
As the Founder, the conference may be the only time I see some franchisees face-to-face. Whilst my Co-Founder Jonny and I meet with many franchisees throughout the year, it may be that our only face-to-face interactions with some people are at the conference. This makes time spent together so valuable and an opportunity not to be missed.
In planning your conference, consider how you can get to speak with everyone on the day. For example, sit and eat lunch with a group, spend breaks with different franchisees and if you have an evening social, take time to catch up with everyone that you can. As your franchise network grows this will of course get harder.
Each Head Office team member leading a workshop for smaller groups is a good way to achieve interactions with each individual franchisee across the Head Office team.
Content Creation
Our franchise brand has gone all in on content creation. We have a Head of Content and another Content Creator within our team and for our conference we hired two more talented videographers for the day too!
On the day we had three stations set up for photo and video content and the whole day was captured by a team of four people.
Keep an eye out for some epic content, coming your way soon!
Giveaways
Everyone loves a freebie! This year we decided to give everyone a branded travel mug. Funded by our kit supplier, 3Q Sports, we thought this gift was a useful thing that would be. day-to-day reminder of a brilliant annual conference.
Choosing a Date
One last tip, do it in the summer if you can! The world's a better place when the sun shines and everyone will have fond memories of a nice sunny day. Although I appreciate this is somewhat beyond your control.
We were fortunate to have a nice warm, sunny day and it made the conference even better!
Feedback
Finally, be sure to ask for feedback as soon as you can after the event.
We sent out a simple Google Form the next day after the conference and captured some valuable feedback.
Good Luck
Your franchise conference should be an inpirational, motivational, educational, landmark event. It can support retention in a big way and influence the way that franchisees think and feel. If you get it right, it will be a big feature of your franchise offering.
Good luck with your next conference.