5 Books About Franchise Operations and Growth (for Franchisors)

The bigger your franchise gets, the more important it is to continually improve your franchise operations.

Your success depends upon your ability to enable success for all of your franchise partners, which means you have to keep your skills sharp and keep your awareness of the current best practices. As a leader, this requires a lot of “big picture” thinking and learning from the experts who have gone before you.

To help inspire you and assist with navigating this ever-changing space, we compiled a list of the five best franchise operations books we could find. Most are written by successful franchisors or operators. Some get into specific tactics, while others focus on the mindset and leadership aspects of your position. Read on to discover more ways that you can… read on.

Note: this post does NOT contain any affiliate links — these are our genuine picks for franchisors, no strings attached.

1. Franchise Your Business

While at first glance this book looks like it’s for first-time franchisors as they are getting started, it’s packed with actionable tips that even established franchises can benefit from.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

Expert franchise consultant Mark Siebert delivers the ultimate how-to guide to employing the greatest growth strategy ever — franchising. Siebert tells you what to expect, how to move forward, and avoid costly mistakes as he imparts decades of experience, insights, and practical advice to help grow your business exponentially through franchising.

Learn how to:

• Evaluate your existing businesses for franchisability
• Identify the advantages and disadvantages of franchising
• Develop a business plan for growth on steroids
• Evaluate legal risk, obtain necessary documents, and protect intellectual property
• Create marketing plans, build lead generation, and branding for a new franchise
• Cultivate the franchisee-franchisor relationship

2. The Secret To All Things Franchising: How franchising is the secret to a life of passion, purpose and prosperity

In this essential guide to franchising, 20 successful franchisors, franchisees and franchising experts candidly share their stories, strategies and insights for finding the right franchise, starting, building and growing a profitable and sustainable franchise business.

Here are some more details from the Amazon listing:

Franchise business opportunities are found in every industry you can possibly imagine. There are thousands of brands with another 300+ each year to choose from.No matter what your background, skills, passion or what you want your lifestyle and legacy to look like, there is a franchise for you. Are you seeking an alternative to the high-stakes, high-stress, rat race of corporate America? Many of those exiting their corporate careers are choosing a different direction. Owning a franchise has given many the option of designing their life instead of just making a living. The franchise business model has allowed thousands of “average” people to escape the 9-5, generate wealth and live life on their terms.

If you have always wanted to own your own business but just didn’t know where to begin, this book will give you an insight into how plugging into a franchise will help you achieve your dream. Transform your future through franchise ownership by reaching out to our expert contributing authors. They will share how you can be in business for yourself but not by yourself.

3. The Franchise MBA: Mastering the 4 Essential Steps to Owning a Franchise

This comprehensively researched and deftly written franchise guide brings together experience and facts to give you the tools you need to understand which franchise is right for you. With insights from respected franchise leaders and a thorough understanding of franchising, this book will help you understand and master the 4 Critical Steps to finding the Ideal Franchise:

1. The Introspective Self

2. The Franchisor

3. The Franchisees

4. The Legal and Financial

4. WTF (Willing to Fail?) How Failure Can Be Your Key to Success

1-800-GOT-JUNK? Founder Brian Scudamore has penned a book about the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and how to turn them into strengths. Whereas the titles above focus on operations, this one is more about mindset. In a list of five books about operations and growth, we had to include some inspirational material too.

Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster of trial and error, laughter and tears, confusion and triumph. In WTF?! (Willing to Fail), serial entrepreneur Brian Scudamore takes you on an adventure that will convince you once and for all that you have exactly what it takes to succeed.

With engaging stories from his thirty-plus years of failing upward, his book is full of lessons you can apply to your own endeavors—developing a clear vision, creating an awesome culture, finding gratitude in challenging times, and using setbacks to change your business for the better.

Being an entrepreneur means letting go of fear. WTF?! (Willing to Fail) gives you the encouragement and wisdom you need to begin stumbling toward greatness.

5. Vivid Vision

Vivid Vision is a revolutionary tool that will help owners, CEOs, and senior managers create inspirational, detailed, and actionable three-year mission statements for their companies. This is another one that helps with the kind of strategic thinking and purposeful action that can make a difference for a growing franchise.

In this easy-to-follow guide, Cameron Herold walks organization leaders through the simple steps to creating their own Vivid Vision, from brainstorming to sharing the ideas to using the document to drive progress in the years to come.

By focusing on mapping out how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of business, without getting bogged down by data and numbers or how it will happen, Vivid Vision creates a holistic road map to success that will get all of your teammates passionate about the big picture.

Better Franchise Operations with Software and Automation

A common theme among all of these franchise operations books is the importance of scalable systems. Having great ideas and best practices is only half the challenge. Communicating and implementing those ideas is a much more difficult task. You need to establish repeatable systems that all of your partners can use successfully and monitor their progress from headquarters.

Vonigo’s end-to-end franchise management software platform helps mobile franchises improve upon their systems at both the corporate and franchisee levels. Everything from centralized job booking, scheduling, customer communications, invoicing, payments, and reporting can be handled on the Vonigo platform.

To learn more, book a free, private demo of Vonigo.