The F-Word

Your target group doesn’t consider franchising as genuine entrepreneurship. That’s what they want. That's what society needs.

Last week I posted an article about an opportunity to become a Entrepreneur Franchise Partner for Speak Social. I received a lot of actionable feedback. Among this, that comment.

I feel they are generalising. I accept though and others have written about young people being turned-off by franchising. If I am wrong, then we will need to change our target group and bring older people into making this change happen. Hardly a worse case scenario.

The G-word

Franchising can help business owners expand quickly without spending an exorbitant amount of time, money and resources in order to scale. This applies to both franchisor and franchisee. As a social enterprise, operating at the margins of what the majority of investors favour, and with a societal issue to be tackled as vast and complex as human migration, diversity and culture; Speak needs to scale as efficiently as possible. Speak seeks to crowd-source entrepreneurship through a network of franchisees. These franchisees need to be able to scale up locally owned enterprises as efficiently as possible.

Our goal is to build an international network of locally owned, financially independent and self-sustaining enterprises to create value and solve these issues. This is the value of successfully franchising an enterprise; for profit or fair-profit, the aim is the same.

We want what Galen Welsch (30) of Jibu describes as,

Eye-to-eye partnerships with local entrepreneurs to solve a pressing issue

What Galen also says, is something I have recognised through my experience of working to support entrepreneurial people in hard places. Typically the tools designed to support entrepreneurial people in hard places, or to do hard things, are designed to recognise and reward “pure entrepreneurship”. This conception of entrepreneurship is influenced by the the pattern through which entrepreneurship has reached a level of legitimacy and celebrity. Not so much the actual entrepreneurship that will bring about the new social, economic and environmental order society needs. An example would be micro-credit. Rarely do vehicles like these offer enough of the supports, network capital, platform and tools to deliver business growth and success.

Entrepreneurial franchising is considered a paradox by many. Young people apparently sneer at franchising. They may view it as a top-down model, formulaic and a rigid approach to doing business, lacking the freedom they want and the opportunities to be creative. This is what “real entrepreneurship” promises.

Well we want and need franchising to be more akin to what Bryan Scudamore described as,

Our entrepreneurial growth machine!

Choosing to franchise Speak is an effort in crowd-sourcing entrepreneurship. It is about creating a learning environment. It is about building a system. One person cannot expect to have all the answers. One organisation cannot reflect the diversity of the beneficiaries or reflect the complexity of the marketplace. All three enable us to leverage the investment which is interested in a blended return, support each other, and grow in a sustainable way. In this way joining Take Speak to Your City is an invitation to be a contributor and a learner within a collaborative accelerator. Far more than just opening a single business in your city.

Franchising can only be perceived as top-down, if your perspective is locked to the existing and waning systems of organisation and infrastructure. Speak’s technology and the access to the internet-of-things to enable culture and language exchange, enables horizontal, community-based approaches. Together we can create the conditions for co-production and co-creation of what the social enterprise looks and feels like at scale, and how it achieves it fair-profit objectives. If we had chosen to grow a single business, we would have worked just as hard to create an innovative, learning environment and culture to nurture ideas from intrapreneurs and entrepreneurial teams. Social franchising multiplies the labs, incubators, accelerators into an international entrepreneurial system with even less hierarchy. Risks are shared, no one is isolated, rewards are aggregated, local leadership is retained and genuine local community ownership is fostered. There is, admittedly, little room for ego in this entrepreneurial situation.

I would like to speak to young people willing to rethink and reframe their perceptions about franchising. Social franchising has the potential to reinvent this approach to scaling a really good idea; and can create an entrepreneurial growth machine.

Start a conversation about joining this collective effort by emailing me at [email protected]