6 Ways to Market Your Franchised Business

If you think of marketing as a building, the pillars that give marketing structure are advertising, direct mail, sales, promotions, public relations and online marketing. The most successful franchisors have been able to break down the six pillars of marketing, assign the appropriate resources, track their return on investment and continue to fine-tune and adapt as the results vary. Following are the most important aspects of these pillars.

1. Advertising
You may think of advertising as print media only. The truth is, advertising encompasses any media that allows you to purchase space to promote your marketing message. This includes print advertising such as magazines, newspapers and other printed formats, TV advertisements, radio advertisements, billboards, and now, with the onset of technology, internet advertisements, websites and more.

Although franchise advertising has been around for decades, today's advertisements tend to have a much different call to action that those of the past. Instead of the standard “Call Now,” ads direct viewers to a franchisor's website where they can learn more and engage via email with the franchisor's development department.

Franchisors who create innovative advertising campaigns across all platforms realize the best return on investment (ROI).

2. Direct mail
Most of us think of direct mail as postcards that we receive in our mailbox. This is still an effective option depending on the strength of the message and the offer. With the onset of technology, other direct mail options are e-newsletters, drip email campaigns (a series of email messages sent to a prospect over a short period of time) and other opt-in alternatives that send information via the internet.

3. Sales
An effective sales process is a must for every franchise system. It's imperative for every franchisor to have a systematic, step-by-step discovery process for their prospective franchise buyers to follow. This process should be simple to understand, since the prospective franchisee needs to have the information presented to them in such a way that they can absorb it, weigh the pros and cons and eventually make an educated decision. Methods of sales in the franchise world break down into the following sub-categories:

Person-to-person sales that you might experience at a tradeshow, discovery day or other discovery experience that the franchisor participates in.
Phone sales that take place on either an outgoing or incoming basis. It's important as a franchisor to have a designated in-house franchise sales expert who is trained in the entire franchise process so this person can present the opportunity to the prospective franchisee effectively, answer questions and handle objections.
Outgoing phone sales, sometimes called telemarketing, can also be effective. It is far more challenging today to launch an effective telemarketing campaign due to caller ID, do-not-call lists and voicemail. The important element of outgoing phone sales is to ensure that you are offering the franchise buyer information that is important to them and that provides them with an incentive to continue the discovery process with you.
Technology has expanded the sales process. Email, texting, web presentations and calendar syncing are as much a part of the franchise sales process as any traditional sales tool.
You will find that the best candidates will follow your discovery steps, will seldom miss appointments and will quickly get back to you when you leave messages. This is a good indicator of their ability to follow a system and of their enthusiasm and interest in your franchise concept. It also gives you an idea of their potential to be a successful business owner. One powerful tool is to utilize franchise-specific contact relationship management (CRM) software to keep track of your franchise prospects and their progress as they move through your sales pipeline.

4. Promotions
Traditionally promotions have been used to spark awareness and excitement in a marketing message. You've seen promotions like midnight madness sales, 24-hour sales, sweepstakes, giveaways, special events, customer appreciation dinners -- or any kind of special, out-of-the-ordinary promotion that's utilized by various companies to attract new buyers or existing buyers back again. Successful franchisors use a combination of traditional promotions and promotions that utilize new technologies. For instance, they may hold a sweepstakes advertised in traditional media such as print, billboards, radio and TV while also running the promotion on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. The internet options have given franchisors a low-investment way to reach masses of prospective buyers, allowing the smaller brand franchises to compete favorably with the bigger brands.

5. Public relations
Public relations may be the most underused pillar of marketing. Traditionally, public relations campaigns would consist of press releases, press kits, sponsorships and other goodwill events and campaigns that would usually bring brand awareness through publicity. In the internet age, we have found that public relations is still a very viable and important pillar that needs attention. However, the delivery has changed considerably, and in some ways technology has made it far easier to launch a successful PR campaign.

An example of this may be a press release that in years past would have to be printed, put into a press kit and mailed to 100 or 200 news and other media outlets hoping that the individuals at those outlets would find it interesting enough to write it into an article or a category of one of their existing articles or stories. It was difficult to measure success with this technique.

Today, successful franchisors enjoy the ability to release their newsworthy articles via blogs and on industry and business startup blog platforms. In most cases this is free, and the more creative and informational the articles are, the more traffic they will draw. This method is also measurable since the analytics can be evaluated at the franchisor level and fine-tuned.

6. Online marketing
Many franchisors are still pretty new at online marketing -- this gives new franchisors with strong online marketing skills an advantage. Not too many years ago, the “big boys,” or well-known franchisors, had the advantage because they had far more money and resources to market their franchise opportunities. Back then, the marketing and media options were very expensive, and the new emerging franchisors were priced out of the competition. The internet has now leveled the playing field because the barriers of entry are lower, giving creativity and not big marketing budgets, the advantage.

4 Ways Trump Could Change Your Business Taxes

In a small town in northern Michigan, Daniel Walsh, the CEO of Purebacco USA, has been spending a lot of time analyzing his company's taxes. Besides state and federal taxes, the Gaylord, Michigan-based vaping-components manufacturer pays use taxes, interstate taxes, payroll taxes, import taxes, property taxes, business-property-use taxes, and out-of-state purchase taxes. Tack on tax compliance and administration costs, and he can kiss 60 cents on every dollar of profit goodbye--and that doesn't even include sales taxes, which he says amount to another 6 to 10 cents.

"When you hit that 90 percent tax level, there is just not that much incentive to doing business," says Walsh, whose company landed at No. 169 on the 2016 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. "We're really not far from that."

So President Donald Trump's promise to slash the federal corporate tax rate is welcome news. "Tax is a big deal to us," says Walsh, whose 12-person company brought in $3.1 million in revenue in 2015. "We've been pulling back one region at a time since the business climate is so hostile."

Like Walsh, business owners across the U.S. are following Trump's tweets, speeches, and executive orders closely--eager for any indication that he'll make good on campaign promises to cut the federal corporate tax rate in half.

In a recent discussion with airline CEOs, Trump noted that there would be an announcement that would be "phenomenal in terms of tax" in the next two to three weeks.

While details are thin, if it's anything like what Trump put forward on the campaign trail, chances are good that as many businesses will be pleased as are dissatisfied--and you'll need to potentially make major course corrections to your business as a result.

"Doing large-scale tax reform is still a difficult thing, and it does involve winners and losers," says Joseph Rosenberg, a senior research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan tax-policy research organization in Washington, D.C.

Here's a look at four key ways your business's taxes could change, for better or worse.

1. Your tax bill could drop, or not
The president has, at various points on the campaign trail, called for lowering the federal corporate tax rate to 15 or 20 percent from the upper-level range of 35 percent. And while he has said the measure would apply to all businesses, both small and large, it's not yet clear if pass-through entities like LLCs and S Corps will be included. Most small businesses are structured as pass-through entities, which means a business's income is taxed on an owner's individual return.

The president may choose to favor a plan put forward last year by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wisconsin) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R., Texas). That proposal, named A Better Way, offers to create a separate low tax rate of 25 percent for small businesses. (Under that plan, bigger businesses would pay just 20 percent.)

Related: Small Retailers Grapple With Trump's Plan to Transform the U.S. Tax System

Of course, tax cuts have a price. Trump's revised tax plan, which he released in September and which includes cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, is expected to reduce U.S. federal tax receipts by $2.35 trillion over 10 years. Should pass-through businesses see this same tax break, the cost would tick up another $900 billion to $1.5 trillion over the same period, according to the Tax Policy Center.

2. Your import costs could jump
To account for some of the loss, the president is considering a policy known as a border adjustment, which would add a 20 percent tax on all imported goods. The Better Way plan from the House, which holds the border-adjustment proposal as its reform centerpiece, would transition the U.S. to what it calls a destination-basis tax system. So instead of basing a company's federal tax liability on both the location of production and the location of the company, it would stem from the location of its sales.

"That's probably the most controversial part of the tax plan," says Robert Willens, an independent tax and accounting analyst in New York City. "It would convert the system from income based to hybrid sales tax."

Should it pass, the border adjustment is expected to raise $1.2 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center. The president has considered more tactical options, including a tariff on U.S. companies that manufacture outside the U.S. and a 20 percent tax on just Mexican imports. However, he could wind up favoring the border-adjustment proposal, as it is more comprehensive and thus more lucrative. That could help him fund his tax cuts.

3. You may have to pay federal taxes on overseas earnings
Another revenue raising effort favored by the president--which has more big business implications--is what's called "deemed repatriation" of currently deferred foreign profits. It is estimated that U.S. companies like Apple have as much as $2.5 trillion in cash sitting overseas. Under the proposal, these companies would be compelled to bring those proceeds back to the U.S. and pay taxes, at a rate of 10 percent over 10 years. Like a repatriation tax holiday, a deemed repatriation would generate one-time federal revenues.

An earlier version of Trump's tax plan held that a deemed repatriation would pair with eliminating U.S. companies' ability to defer paying taxes on income earned outside the U.S. That element was omitted from his revised tax plan, so it's unclear how he would handle non-U.S.-generated income going forward.

The House Better Way proposal suggests implementing a "territorial" system of taxes by way of a 100 percent exemption for dividends from foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies. Translation: "It allows for the tax-free repatriation of earnings," says Willens.

4. You could lose almost all federal business tax credits
Trump is also calling for eliminating all but one federal business tax credit, for research and development. That includes putting limits on some companies' ability to deduct interest expenses, which could make financing capital asset purchases or servicing bank loans more costly, says Rosenberg. Currently, most companies can deduct interest expenses.

Under the latest version of the Trump tax plan, U.S. manufacturing companies can elect to expense investments in equipment, structures, and inventories--deducting them immediately--rather than depreciating these purchases over time, as current law requires. Businesses that elect immediate expensing would not be allowed to deduct interest expenses.

It's worth noting that there's disagreement within the tax community about whether this option would be given only to U.S. manufacturers. Trump has made statements suggesting that he may open up the option to all businesses.

The House Better Way plan, by contrast, doesn't provide an option. It simply allows expensing for all businesses without the ability to deduct interest paid. "They don't like that the tax code [currently] encourages leveraging," says Willens. "They would eliminate the preference for indebtedness."

Whatever the downsides may be, you won't hear Walsh complaining. "I'm excited about whatever Trump's tax plan is. He's a businessman," he says. "Hopefully the new laws will bring us some relief."

EPA head previously used private email for government business

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt used a private email account for official business when he was Oklahoma's attorney general.

A spokesman in the office of Pruitt's successor, Mike Hunter, told Oklahoma City's Fox 25 that Pruitt had used his personal email account when he worked there.

Pruitt was Oklahoma's top attorney from 2011 until the Senate confirmed him last week to be President Trump's EPA head.

Fox 25 discovered the email address in a public records request. The documents it received contained a redacted address, which Lincoln Ferguson, a spokesman for the office, said was a personal account that had been searched for the station's request.
The redacted address also appears in the thousands of pages of emails that Oklahoma released this week detailing Pruitt's and his aides' communications with energy companies and conservative groups, among others.

Pruitt had told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last month, as part of his confirmation process, that he had a personal email account, but he never used it for official business.

Using a personal email address for official business does not violate Oklahoma's laws regarding government records.

Hillary Clinton, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in last year's election, famously used a private email address on a privately run server for official business when she was secretary of State, a setup that played a key role in the 2016 presidential election.

Federal employees are not legally prohibited from using personal email accounts for business, but they must quickly copy the emails to a government system for record-keeping and transparency purposes.

Lisa Jackson, EPA administrator from 2009 to 2013, used an email address within the government system with a pseudonym, "Richard Windsor."

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), brought up Jackson's email address at Pruitt's confirmation hearing, and asked Pruitt if he would "refrain from taking any such action that makes it difficult or impossible for the public to access your official written communications under the Freedom of Information Act."

Pruitt said "yes," and added that he believes transparency is important.

6 Ways to Think Outside the Box When Marketing Your Small Business

Sometimes budget limits small businesses from executing their marketing ideas, but not every successful strategy requires a lot of money. Here are six outside the box ways to market your small business that are both inexpensive and effective.

1. Get personal.
Customers love the opportunity to make something their own. Studies have shown that 56 percent of consumers said receiving a personalized incentive would improve consideration of the brand. Think Personalized M&M'S and Share a Coke. If there's a way for you to allow customer customization, give it a try and see how your audience responds. Not sure how to add a personal touch to your business? Anything that gets your customer's name on your product works -- using frosting to write the order name on your donuts, or offering free monograming on your inventory of purses or apparel.

2. Promote customer engagement.
In today's social world, whatever you can do to make your small business more shareable is good for marketing. What is something you could implement that your customers would find Insta-worthy? Create an opportunity for photo opps and increase your social reach without spending a cent. A "selfie campaign" is a great way to encourage posting and sharing. You can even add a prize component to entice people to use your custom hashtag or tag your business in their posts.

3. Say thanks.
How often do you let your customers know that you appreciate them? You'd be surprised the power a simple "thank you" can have on creating customer loyalty. A study by TD Bank found that 77 percent of consumers like when brands demonstrate their appreciation. While a card can often be effort enough, let's try to remember that we're thinking outside the box and go for something bigger. How about hosting a special event where guests can sample new menu items, or showcase the season's new arrivals with a fashion show? Any event that builds excitement and celebrates the customers will do the job. Try utilizing Meetup.com or another event website that can gain the attention of new customers as well as current ones.

4. Develop a loyalty program.
If you're losing customers, you need to establish a way to cultivate repeat business. Eighty percent of U.S. Generation Z consumers are willing to sign up for loyalty cards in exchange for deals or discounts Your loyalty program can be as basic as a punch card or as elaborate as a membership that rewards customers based on how often they visit or even how much they spend. 

5. Utilize LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is one of the most frequently skipped social media networks for small businesses. But why? While not the most exciting platform, it does provide unique opportunities for marketing your business. Without even spending any money, you can connect with people in your community by creating a group and reaching out to other small business owners and potential customers in your area.

6. Survey your current customers.
If you're not sure what types of marketing or promotions your customers will respond to best, ask them. A simple survey can provide endless insight into what you're doing right and wrong, and what you're not doing that you should be. Include a raffle-like component, where one participant will win a prize (such as a $100 credit to your business) to encourage your audience to take part.

What works when negotiating a business deal?

Q I've read that the key to negotiation is to never go alone and always understand what the other party needs, not just what they say they want.

What have you found effective when negotiating a deal?

A It helps to have someone with you, but don't leave the negotiation to a professional advisor; you are the best person to judge the right deal.

The right price isn't just about price/earnings ratios or valuing the balance sheet; all that matters is what it's worth to you. If you plan to buy a business, before starting any discussions, get to know as much as you can about your acquisition target.

Don't just sit at a desk pouring over their figures. Experience the business first-hand. In my case, that has always meant visiting lots of the target's shops. You want to know more about the business than the person who's selling it.

Don't be too greedy; people who try to drive a hard bargain don't always finish up doing the deal. There's nothing wrong with being friendly with the opposite side; you're much more likely to reach an agreement with someone whom you like. Get to know the person you're negotiating with and work out what they really want out of the deal. If possible, try to achieve the right result for both sides, so that everyone is a winner.

Be wary when bidding for a business that's doing well. You will probably pay a fancy price and will have to work hard to get any return on your investment. As long as you have a turnaround plan, it's almost always better to buy poor-performing companies. It can be tough bargaining with the owner of a private business; people negotiating on behalf of public companies aren't dealing with their own money.

Once you finally agree the heads of terms, keep an eagle eye on your lawyers, who are apt to start a totally new round of negotiations, supposedly on your behalf, with the law firm acting for the other side. Keep close contact with your opposite number – the new best friend who has agreed the deal – to make sure that this legal bickering doesn't drive a wedge between you.

With luck you will sign a contract that follows your original agreement, but be warned: most lawyers will make sure that the exchange of contracts takes place in the middle of the night.

Five essential elements of scalable enterprise applications

Scalability has traditionally been about shifting resources or capacity up or down depending on demand. In the industrial era, it applied to factories and supply chains. Today, it increasingly means the ability to dynamically deliver the right amount of IT to support whatever your business needs, wherever it needs it. Waiting for new software or hardware to be set up or provisioned can be a death knell in a climate of massive business and digital disruption. If you can't move fast enough, your competitors probably can and will.

The ability to rapidly adjust capacity is one of the prime benefits of cloud-based enterprise software. It enables users to immediately adapt to changes in size and/or usage needs. In a cloud environment, applications are responsive to users in a way that traditional software can't be.

Since scalability is a fundamental requirement for supporting a growing organization, it needs to be an essential ingredient in how its enterprise application vendors build their products. That said, there are fundamental differences between different types of applications, and their scalability capabilities need to reflect that. Business critical enterprise applications like financials and HCM must be able to keep pace with overall enterprise growth and change, but in some cases they have vastly different types of requirements.

In HR, for example, there are seasonal needs such as open enrollment, annual reviews, tax requirements, and other cyclical events that change the required computing bandwidth of the system throughout a given calendar year.

Financial data, on the other hand, tends to grow rapidly, and has high transaction throughput requirements and heavy data analysis needs. Critical data around quarterly and year-end reporting is almost always growing — more data points, more connectedness among financials categories, and increased insight into what the numbers mean. CFOs increasingly rely on their financials applications as their daily dashboard for the business. Therefore, expectations are high, and businesses need to be able to deliver those systems on demand.

The challenge for cloud application vendors is to address these differences without having to restructure their architectures. The cloud applications that are scalable for today's needs were developed by vendors that have built their offerings on innovative architectural styles and technologies that allow their apps to be small and distributed, rather than monolithic and complicated. Here are five key attributes of truly agile cloud architectures:

Microservices: A microservices approach is the best way for a cloud vendor to build a foundation for scale. Shrinking and splitting apart large services to create new ones means that an application can better source and handle higher volumes of transactions. The services needed are the ones used for any given application need. As demand increases, the additional required processing activity can be distributed over these different services.

Open standards APIs: Look for vendors that support open standards-based APIs to allow complete programmatic access to business operations and processes, all in the form of services. It is optimal if they use an integration format (SOAP or REST) that enables microservices to be interoperable with leading client-side languages and integration middleware platforms.

Grid computing: Grid computing enables parallel distributed processing for jobs like payroll, financial close processing, report runs, and other types of transactions. A cloud architecture with in-memory computing gives the ability to process and analyze large sets of queries, aggregations, and other activities over very large data sets.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): Core enterprise applications don't exist as an island, so they need to integrate with other applications and services. To power and coordinate a scalable, services-based architecture, applications should be able to rely on an ESB that enables integrations to scale and interconnect, and that supports industry standards, protocols, and formats. The ESB should provide universal connectivity for all types of business applications, information, and processes.

Availability: There is a certain irony that the greater the need for an application, the more important it is for the application to be available. In order to scale, it's important for a cloud environment to operate in an architecture where potential points of failure are distributed. The cloud provides an optimal delivery and management environment in which to deploy modularized services, and that helps add new services and adapt existing ones as scale is needed.

We may never see the limits of how far-reaching enterprise applications can be, but there is no doubt that there will continue to be a hunger for more — more data, more availability, more usage, and more functionality. Organizations will need to make use of innovative technologies and optimized software architectures to remain scalable, and therefore, valuable to their customers.

The reinvention of teamwork

Disruption is the buzzword of business.

And why wouldn't it be, when tech-centric companies like Amazon, Uber, Netflix and Twitter are transforming the way we shop, travel, play and communicate?

Perhaps your business is trying to disrupt itself. If not, then you can be sure that someone else's is, and chances are they're doing it with quite different teamwork practices than what you treat as the norm.

Is it technology that's making the difference inside these disruptive companies? Yes, to the extent that product technology supports their exponential growth. However, inside the company, everyone has the same access to pretty much the same technology at the same time, everywhere. It's cheap, easy to use and mobile. And let's remember that instant messaging, email, smartphones, video, collaboration software and the like are tools – and tools only.

Where's the difference?

Share and share alike
There's a clue in the common purpose of many of these new technologies: to facilitate the sharing of information.

Indeed, this is exactly why the Internet was invented in the first place. Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are popular because people like to share. We have social brains, and our evolution has programmed us to connect (because it saved our early ancestors from the disruption of sabre-toothed tigers). Even Daniel Goleman, the acclaimed thought leader in emotional intelligence, now speaks of social intelligence.

We are genetically wired to engage and share with others and, in doing so, to adapt and respond and learn, which is precisely what the disruptive teams in places like Uber and Dropbox are doing so brilliantly. And they're doing it with the help (and at times hindrance) of new technologies.

Here are six things you can do to lead your team to be disruptors, or at least nimble adaptors.

1 Find the secret
We live in an age of information overload, bombarded with data 24/7.

We are most certainly sharing, and it's on a global scale that's faster, more frequent and, some would argue, less meaningful than ever before. The importance of focus can't be underestimated, as we must navigate through the distraction of always being ‘on.'

The better performers in this digital world derive their focus from the core belief that it's not so much which collaborative technology they use to share information (the tools are very similar), but whom they share it with and what they (collectively) do with it.

Fast disruptors know that technology can be duplicated, but there is one thing that can't be. In a disruptive world, the secret to success remains what it was thousands of years ago: the ability of people to work together toward a shared purpose. In a word, teamwork – but a more fluid and flexible style that suits a world that has seen its boundaries shatter in the face of globalization.

2 Make the secret scalable
While technology and globalization continue to disrupt the business landscape, they are not reinventing teamwork in their wake, but rather scaling it as a capability and culture.

The typical company circa 2016 has people dispersed across multiple locations and issues arising at the speed of light, which is why teamwork makes the business more than the sum of its parts. Great teamwork scaled across the business makes anything possible.

This is why a national 2014 employment survey in the US, as reported by Forbes, found that the skill employers looked for in their new recruits was the ability to work in a team structure. The second most important skill was the ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization.

3 Accelerate and share the learning
Business has always been a team sport, and there are many good reasons for this; however, one now stands alone as pivotal to organization survival and success.

Business is consumer-driven (or more specifically, customer-experience-driven), which means our teams must be agile, innovative and constantly learning how to optimize that experience for a customer who has abundant choice.

Shared learning is the key, because working alone or in silos of expertise reduces learning,growth and creativity. When there is no one to challenge us, we simply don't leverage our experience and ideas.

4 Escape the gravity of hierarchy and structure
Daniel Pink, acclaimed business thought leader, argues that we are now in the Conceptual Age, in which right-brain thinking reigns supreme. There is much evidence for this.

Pink talks of the necessity for organizational symphony: through empathy, intuition, play and meaning. The disruptive companies are enterprises more than organizations, unencumbered by the gravity of organizational hierarchy, process and division.

They play like they're in the Age of the Entrepreneur: risk-ready, nimble, wellconnected folk who thrive on change.

5 Harness the power of the whole team
The leaders of the most successful disruptive companies share their vision and move others to see it, too. They're marvellous storytellers, connecting with others, who in turn connect with them. They inspire people to think as one team, to move as one team and to learn as one team.

Think of a flock of migrating geese, which always fly in a V formation. Geese innately know the secret to great teamwork. They have a common destination and work in perfect unison. When a goose drops out of the V formation, it quickly discovers that it requires a great deal more effort and energy.

Geese help each other, too. When a goose gets sick or wounded, two geese drop out of the formation and follow their fellow member down to help provide protection. They stay with this member of the flock until he or she is either able to fly again or dies. Then they launch out on their own, creating another formation, or they catch up with their own flock.

6 Share the truth
The disruptors share the reality. They are not afraid of the truth. In fact, what they fear most are hidden agendas, silos and the status quo. As in professional sports, they make sure the whole team knows whether they have won or lost and why. The focus is always on what is best for the business, even if getting to the marrow of this takes some tough conversations. The leaders insist that they be challenged. They embrace feedback and tap into the power of their people, because a good idea can come from anywhere.

Make the secret yours
Technology gives us the power to communicate, collaborate and learn across great divides. Very few of us do this well. To prosper in today's markets takes real teamwork, and we are just beginning to harness technology to this end. Beware those who see technology as an end itself. Technology is the vehicle. It is who you take along for the ride and how you use the technology to share the challenges and opportunities that make the real difference. This is what it's really all about.