Teleconference Recap: Catering for Franchisors

A recap of one of Erle’s Dardick’s Brown Bag session with seven executives from major Fast Casual companies. The conversation covered:
• How and why to centralize control points
• The value of online ordering , and
• The advantages of providing an ordering method mix

Last week I was fortunate enough to sit in on the latest Brown Bag session that our CEO has been hosting for QSR and Fast Casual Executives. The subject was: implementing catering for QSR and fast casual franchisors.

In on the call were seven executives from major Fast Casual companies; the conversation covered:

• How and why to centralize control points
• The value of online ordering , and
• The advantages of providing an ordering method mix

Why centralize catering?

There was agreement in the group that centralizing the order process is better for everyone. The goal is to offer a repeatable process that fulfills the needs of walk in guests, call in orders, fax orders, emailed orders, and online orders.

Franchisees tend to wear too many hats. They are less likely to invest in a new add-on business like catering when their core business is already in flux. But as a franchisor, you can’t let this reluctance to innovate at the franchisee level squash a potentially lucrative brand extension – an extension that is in your best interests, and in theirs. There is a lot of money on the table. The question is how to get at it.

To capture this new business, you can’t rely on people answering the call at the store: they aren’t specialists, and there can be rushes or other situations that distract the store staffer from really handling the call well.

To implement catering across franchise operations you need to pick and choose the control points or the brand experience will fall short.  Establishing a catering operation gives you an opportunity to take control of these points as you build from the ground up:

1. Enable franchisee opportunities for catering with minimal disruption of the restaurant operations.

2.  Tighten control at the central level of the brand experience, such that it plays out at the franchisee level.