Engaging Success for Molly Maid Franchisees
January 2023, Maidenhead, Berkshire
Industry leading Franchisor Molly Maid and its Franchisees recently celebrated a record year for sales in 2022, another 5-Star Franchisee Satisfaction Award and their fifth consecutive year in the top 15 of UK Franchisors in the prestigious Elite Franchise 100 – the highest ranked domestic cleaning franchise. While the booming market for domestic cleaning and the company’s instantly recognisable logo and name are helping the 37-year Franchisor to set new records in every area of their business, Chief Operating Officer, Jonathan Holden, says the company’s constant focus on improving systems and processes to help Franchisees has had played a huge part in their success. “I can’t recall a period when we have rolled out so many improvements across so many areas of our business.”
Talk with any of the Top 15 Franchisors in the UK and they will tell you how important a constantly changing feedback and improvement system is – because it helps Franchisees to adapt to market conditions – but they will also tell you that it’s probably even more important to think about how you help Franchisees implement these improvements. “You can come up with the best idea to help Franchisees but if you don’t spend as much time figuring out the best way to communicate it to them, and then help them to implement it, it won’t be nearly as successful as you wish.”
It’s this reason that coming out of the pandemic, when most companies were shying away from getting people together, Molly Maid did the opposite by increasing the number of Franchise meetings. “It seemed like a crazy idea at the time – planning to bring people together more frequently when the pandemic was still lingering – but we knew that getting Franchisees together (carefully I might add) to share their experiences with each other and roll out our new initiatives and improvements, would be even more important than the initiatives themselves.”
Case in point is the Molly Maid R&R weekend which happens the second weekend of January – a time when perhaps many are still developing their plans for the year but for Molly Maid it’s become an important time to bring their Franchisees together to help them celebrate their success, learn from each other and start the New Year with a bang. Molly Maid launches many of its new initiatives for the ensuing year in November and December, so the January timing is also important because it gives Franchisees the opportunity to share how they are taking advantage of them (the initiatives) and for Holden and his team the opportunity to get direct feedback on them from Franchisees.
More frequent meetings aren’t the only way that Molly Maid has increased engagement levels with Franchisees though. In 2021 the company invested in Workplace from Meta (think Facebook but for your company) to provide an easier and more expansive way for the company to share their new initiatives, as well as helping Franchisees to better connect with each other. “Coming into 2022 we had so many different activities to help Franchisees that we knew we needed an even better way to keep track of them and see how they were working in other Franchises”, adds Holden. “But what I like most about Workplace is seeing Franchisees help each other. Someone will post a question or a challenge they are having and then everyone contributes with their own ideas on how to solve it. It’s what happens at our Franchise meetings, so I guess in many ways Workplace really just allows us to bring Franchisees together every day of the year.”
Throughout the past two years most successful Franchisors have stepped up their engagement levels with Franchisees in response to their challenges of managing in the pandemic. But Molly Maid have increased their engagement levels even more to help Franchisees take advantage of the huge growth their market, which Holden adds, shows no signs of slowing down. The company is forecasting growth in January alone of almost 10%, the result of continued high levels of interest from new customers which is bucking the trend for many businesses and industries in the UK. Holden knows the domestic cleaning market is playing a large part in these results but he also knows that finding new and more ways to engage with Franchisees is what will help the company reach their longer-term goal of doubling their business in the next 5 years.
Read full article in Elite Franchise Magazine Here
For more information contact Marketing Manager Kanika Srivastava, ksrivastava@mollymaid.co.uk.