Global Franchise 9.1

sector average of around 70%, creating a more stable business to provide continuity of care for clients. “When we launched in the U.K., we could only be carer-centric by repeating none of the mistakes other providers were making,” explains Visiting Angels U.K. CEO Dan Archer. “We analysed what was wrong with the sector and what we needed to do differently to fix it. Our market research involved looking at close to 50 care business competitors – franchises, corporate and independent. We found that all of them had service-focused mission statements, which did not make sense to us as we operate in a people industry. So, our vision, mission and culture were developed exclusively for the benefit of our caregivers.” Central to the brand’s ethos is to address this problem. “Part of the solution is retaining valuable team members with a raft of innovative solutions, rather than relentlessly recruiting. We haven’t prioritised staff retention; we’ve prioritised rewarding staff fairly, which results in better staff retention,” says Dan. “We’ve done this from day one, leading us to our mission to lead the U.K. care sector as an Employer of Choice by 2030, creating an environment where our carers can care more, clients can live better, and families can feel assured. “Staff who are competent and confident in their skills can better cope with the high demands of the care sector, contributing to a more resilient organisation which can sustain operations during difficult times. We place carers before anyone else, providing specialist training, a clear career path, numerous perks and rewards, and wages above the national average. Our culture is paving the way for the future by reducing staff turnover, which enables families to choose their own caregiver and ensuring stability, continuity and quality of care.” DAMAGE LIMITATION Solid pre-crisis planning will make a business more resilient, but what steps should a franchise take to ensure its well-prepared? Sally Ann Butters shares her three-step plan: 1 Create a crisis comms plan. Share it across the business, highlight elements during your initial franchisee training and review it regularly. Once you’ve got a plan, crises can still arise but you can react quickly and with intention. Having draft holding statements for stakeholders and the media for key risks means that in the event of a crisis, you’re not starting from scratch. Creating these in advance gives you time to reflect on the appropriate way to phrase responses and what methods to use to share those out. You can then add key details to tailor should the need arise to use them. 2 Maintain a risk register. This should be a live document available to your management team, kept up to date as new information arises and reviewed in a monthly teammeeting. Creating a crisis comms plan will allow you to determine common risks within your business and the general environment within which you operate. Alerting your team to these common risks helps them to identify and log issues with the potential to escalate into a crisis on your risk register, giving you the chance to also de-escalate quickly with appropriate support. 3 Have a centralized crisis communication strategy. A good franchise network thrives on mutually beneficial outcomes. In the case of a crisis, people can be nervous to face the media as the brand spokesperson, so I generally find franchisees are happy for the franchisor to offer to step in to manage stakeholder communication. They will often compose statements from head office, share with the franchisee and use local systems to share with the location’s stakeholders. Then head office can move on to communicate more widely as appropriate. GLOBAL-FRANCHISE.COM 67