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Keep ReadingAnd 41 Powerful Coaching Questions
Many franchise business coaches are confident supporting clients with operational issues, marketing, and brand strategies but struggle with conversations about financial goals and KPIs. Like the franchisees they support, not all coaches have strong financial backgrounds. Still, armed with a structured approach and some basic foundational knowledge, all franchise business coaches can influence financial discipline and results.
The best advisory systems within a franchise or a network of business advisors have a recipe for financial coaching. One that leads coaches and clients to collaboratively create insights, goals, and action plans that improve financial performance.
Here is a 5-step coaching framework that works for any problem-solving process, including financial coaching. The key is to have a robust supply of thought-provoking, open-ended questions that guide the client to discover issues and solutions.
Step 1: Assess the Situation
What’s Going On?
With franchisee client and coach side-by-side, review financial statements, goals, and KPIs. Make two lists: What is going well? What needs attention?
Powerful Questions to Assess the Situation
- How are results trending? (leads, conversions, average ticket, sales, gross profit, labor cost, cash flow, etc.)
- How do results compare to the franchise system benchmarks?
- What stories do the numbers tell?
- How would you like it to look? What numbers do you think are attainable?
- How would you summarize all this?
Step 2: Prioritize Issues
Which Areas Deserve Your Focus Now?
Results are important but what matters most is what causes them. Go behind the numbers, considering the conditions that drove them. Priorities might be adhering to systems, developing teams with skills and capacity to scale, lifting employee and customer satisfaction, or improving operational efficiencies.
Powerful Questions to Prioritize Issues
- If you could fix just one thing, what would it be?
- How could you get a quick win?
- What is the most important story the numbers tell?
- What concerns you most?
- What will happen if you don’t do anything about it?
Step 3: Brainstorm Solutions
What Drives Success?
The best way to find a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. And brainstorming works best with a variety of brains. Expand the think tank. Include team members or a cohort of other franchise owners focused on priorities in common. Make coaching scalable by getting people together for this step.
Powerful Questions to Brainstorm Solutions
- What drives success for the priority areas?
- What opportunities are you not exploiting to their full potential?
- What is holding you back, getting in the way of success?
- What have you tried already?
- What needs to change for you to become even more successful?
Step 4: Measure Performance
What Goals and Metrics Will Keep Everyone On Track?
Next, choose measurable milestones to keep the team focused on its priorities. These will become your framework for future coaching conversations. Choose leading indicators that measure drivers of the improvements they seek. Set quarterly targets extending through the coming year. Later, contrast these goals with actual performance to launch future assessments.
Powerful Questions to Measure Performance
- How will you know when you have succeeded? How can you measure it?
- What activities could shift results? How could you measure them?
- What does “good” look like? What is a “good” number?
- How big of a stretch is that?
- What goal would inspire you?
- If there was a bigger goal behind this goal, what would it be?
- Let’s put that goal aside and investigate others. What other goals would keep the team focused on the priority?”
Step 5: Engage the Team
What’s the Plan?
The first four steps won’t change anything without step 5—the plan. Consider these questions to give the planning process a productive start.
- What do you need to know before you can decide on a course of action?
- Who should be involved in developing and executing this plan?
- What structure will keep the plan front and center with you and your team? (Select meeting cadence, reports, dashboards, accountability partners, mentors, etc.)
Powerful Questions to Engage Your Team
- How is the business different if you reach the goal? (Reveals actions that could be taken now.)
- What needs to happen so you can do this?
- How is your current strategy working? What could make it work better?
- What must you start doing, stop doing, or continue doing?
- Who on the team is accountable for getting this done, and by when?
- What are the next steps?
- What are the milestones for the next quarter?
The First Answer Is Never the Best Answer
Accepting low quality information is a rookie coaching mistake. Never accept the first answer. Follow-up questions like these can get to the good stuff.
Powerful Follow-Up Questions
- What do you mean?
- Tell me more.
- Where does that lead you?
- What other angles can you think of?
- Can you name just one more possibility?
- What could be causing that?
Keep It Going
Create a Cadence for Accountability
Before ending your coaching session, make sure everyone is clear about:
- When the detailed plan will be written, complete with targets, dates, and assignments.
- Annual and quarterly financial and non-financial performance goals.
- The top initiatives and milestones to accomplish before the next meeting.
- How and when to measure, review, and assess progress.
Coaching franchisees to reach their own conclusions gets more traction than giving advice. It is tempting to take the quick route and tell them what to do. After all, franchise business coaches are experts! But plans that aren’t “owned” by a franchisee seldom come to fruition. When coaches lead franchisees to discovery through inquiry, the solution is their idea. And people don’t argue with their own data!
A franchise business coach who has a solid framework, a curious mind, and a collaborative spirit can outperform one who relies on subject matter expertise to solve problems for their franchisee clients. When the measure of success is improved financial performance, it’s the process, not the advice, that influences results.
Thank you to Profit Soup for being a sponsor of the 2024 FBR Summit.
The Only Event Designed Just for Franchise Operations & HR Teams
How can you make an immediate and lasting impact on your franchisees’ success? Find out at the FBR Summit, October 28-30 in Austin, TX. The Summit is an intensive, franchise industry event created just for operations leaders and their teams that directly support franchisees. Don’t miss it!