Up there with my best

I have often been asked what my best sale ever has been. It is very difficult to state that unequivocally about any specific sale as there are many attributes which define a good sale. It is also not necessarily related to the size of the sale in dollar terms. However, there is one which I will never forget and here it is.

Well over a decade ago I was approached by an owner of a franchise “store’ (can’t disclose names due to confidentiality) looking for rostering and time and attendance hardware and software for staff assignment and payroll preparation. The approximate value of this sale for a single store location was to the order of $20,000. When meeting with the owner he explained that he owned three of these stores and that there were some 300 nationally across many franchise owners.

I decided to question further about how this all works and in essence here is what I found out over several meetings. Apart from rostering a 24-hour shift for his employees across the three stores, each fortnight he needed to aggregate the times for each employee and send that to the master franchise owner for them to reconcile and prepare pay summaries. Those summaries then came back to him to review and pay staff.

This all sounded reasonably straight forward, yet each pay period there were multiple errors which needed to be resolved in communications back and forth between the franchise owner and “head office”. The result was either delays in paying staff (untenable) or paying staff incorrectly and having to then make a correction to their next pay. At this point it should be understood that the employment and workplace legislation in Australia, including what is referred to as the “awards” calculations for wages payments, is exceedingly complex.

I then asked about how other franchise owners dealt with this and he said that they all had the same issues, had raised it many times with the head office, and that there had been little improvement over the last couple of years. They had given up complaining and were looking at how they could possibly automate their own processes to minimise the errors and impact. That is why he contacted me.

I asked the franchise owner whether he had any problem with me speaking with head office about the process in order that I get the full picture: he readily agreed that was fine with him. A call to head office led me to a senior HR and Franchise Operations Manager (in a capital city in another state) responsible for the payroll process, who agreed to meet.

Upon meeting with the Manager and discussing the franchise owners challenges I discovered that the head office Master Franchise holder was also frustrated with the process given the regular errors and time taken each fortnight. Despite the fact that the head office charged the franchise owners a percentage fee for undertaking this service, it was felt that it was costing, rather than making money.

Over the next three months I had various meetings with people in the head office, together with more meetings with the franchise owner, about how we could change the process entirely. What I eventually proposed was that the Master Franchise owner delegates the calculation and preparation of payroll back to each franchise owner and waives the percentage charge currently being applied. Consequently I needed to prepare effort and cost scenario modelling to justify this radical change for 300 franchise stores for both the franchise owners and the Master Franchise holder.

The result was that not only did the Master Franchise holder waive the previous payroll preparation charges, the benefits they gained from doing so enabled them to pay for ALL the franchise owners to purchase time clocks and rostering/time and attendance software. That then made it exceedingly easy for the franchise owners to undertake their regular payroll themselves, with much less effort and minimal errors. The outcome was that everyone saved time and money and thousands of employees across the country were much happier.

The best outcome for me though was that I sold all the hardware (time clocks) and software via a single billing to the Master Franchise holder for a sum of over $1 million plus annual maintenance. Further, every time a new store was built as they expanded over the next two years, I got an extra order coming through for some $30,000. All from an initial enquiry for a $20,000 solution!