Franchisor-Franchisee Relationship Counseling

chain leader:

Since Clarice Turner joined Vancouver, Wash.-based Papa Murphy’s as president and chief operating officer in spring 2008, she’s been putting her operations background to work targeting consistency and efficiency. The take-and-bake pizza chain has been achieving positive growth in same-store sales and unit counts, but it suffers from the same cost pressures as the rest of the industry. Chain Leader spoke with Turner about how Papa Murphy’s works with franchisees on cost pressures and more.

Are your franchisees on board with your efforts (in pricing, purchasing strategy and marketing) to ease costs?

We have 72 company stores ourselves, so we are very sensitive to cost pressures, and we see it on our P&Ls every month, too.

We are constantly trying to work with our franchise community so that we can come up with real solutions. Specifically, we’re trying to provide some coaching and training and leadership around cash-flow management, around the basics of P&Ls. And making sure that we’re enabling franchisees to share best practices with each other so that the crunch on the middle of the P&L potentially can be alleviated by some things that they haven’t thought about.

How do you enable that?

We have a lot of internal and external communication. We have a bulletin that goes out to our community every month, and in that we share best practices that come in from across the country. At regional conferences as well as at our national convention, we facilitate workshops that are led by either an industry expert or one of our community. We start with best practices and then try to build on that so that people truly can come out of there with not only great relationships and potentially mentorships, but also great ideas and practices from other people.

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