Making the Most of Franchise Discovery Day

Are you ready for what could be the most important 24 hours in your business life? I’m talking about Discovery Day, the day, usually held once a month, when franchisors welcome potential franchisees for a visit. Whether Discovery Day involves carefully sounding out a business proposition or simply surviving a daylong sales pitch depends on the franchise. But one thing is for sure: Discovery Day is a unique opportunity to find out what you’re getting into before you sign on the dotted line -- so don’t let it go to waste.

By the time you attend a Discovery Day, you should have completed almost all the due diligence required to make a decision to invest in a franchise. But there are some things you can only, er, discover by coming face-to-face with the franchise team you may be working with for a long time to come. So how do you make the most of Discovery Day? We asked Rick Bisio, a Bradenton Beach, Fla., franchise consultant and author of The Educated Franchisee to help put together this checklist.

• Show up properly dressed, prepared with a useful list of questions, and ready to listen and learn. Franchisors have their own discovery day agenda, Bisio cautions. They want to find out if you are going to be a good player on their franchisee team. So find out ahead of time what appropriate attire is, put on your team player face, smile and look them in the eye. Meanwhile, don’t forget what you came to do.
• Meet with people in operations, training, technical support, and marketing. Until now, Bisio notes, you’ve communicated primarily with the franchising salesperson. Now is your chance to put faces to names of the other people you’ll be working with in the future.
• Look over the facility and physical infrastructure with a critical eye. Does it have what you need? A business that seemed very impressive on the Internet and over the phone could turn out to be run out of a spare bedroom, Bisio says. Looking over a company’s bricks-and-mortar gives you information a website can’t.
• Put on your emotional intelligence cap and examine the organization’s personality. Do people come up and literally hug you? Do they stand at a distance and offer a handshake? “Every organization has a personality,” Bisio says. “It’s hard to get that over the phone or Internet.”
• Listen to the language people in the organization use when talking to each other. How much respect is shown to people from different levels? Are senior executives open to suggestions from lower-level employees?
• Expect a chance to meet with the president. When you do, pay attention to how the top leader describes the vision of the company and where it’s going.
• Keep your eyes and ears open for indicators of whether the company and its people are trustworthy. “It’s hard to pin down,” Bisio admits. “You need to trust your gut. But you’ll know.”
• Do some cross-checking. In particular, does what the franchisor is telling you jibe with what franchisees told you when you checked with them prior to Discovery Day? “If it doesn’t match, that means the whole system is not on the same page,” Bisio warns. “There’s a disconnect, and you need to dig into that.”
• Resolve your most important remaining specific questions. Don’t bring a list of 100 questions. Keep it to about a dozen, so you can focus on soaking up intangibles.
• Be ready to give cogent explanations about issues you haven’t resolved before now. For instance, maybe the contract requires you to buy a new vehicle, but you feel the one you already have is adequate. Issues about territories, contract details, and the timing of required investments could require a face-to-face discussion of the kind only available at Discovery Day.

With all these do’s, there’s one thing you should not do. Don’t sign a franchise agreement on Discovery Day. A reputable franchisor will sit down with the team the day after and jointly decide whether you would be a good addition to the team. Assuming you and the franchisor have both made your cases, an offer should be forthcoming. But you shouldn’t need your contract-signing pen on Discovery Day.