Leadership Summit January 2019 was spent in the Bahamas with Top Gun franchisees across all Neighborly Brands. The collective power of shared best practices was evident in our scheduled meetings, over dinner conversation and during fireside chats along the beach. The commonality of true brand engagement became evident as the week progressed. Franchisees invited to the Summit were not there by accident – they earned it due to the high level of engagement with their brand’s leaders and fellow franchisees, engagement with their brand’s systems and engagement with brand-sponsored meetings. This level of engagement creates brand alignment in its truest sense: everyone moving forward in the same direction and gaining momentum along the way.
How does engagement affect your personal and business success? Let’s use gym membership as a comparison. If you have joined a gym, following this year’s holiday feasting, you have become a part of “the club”. You have gained permission to access a world of information, tools to tone and build muscle and people with whom to collaborate and share best practices. If your daily routine at the gym amounts to a chat around the water cooler and watching a group cycle for a few minutes, you will notice zero physical results from your efforts. Showing up at the gym is only the first step. You must make use of the equipment provided and ensure you are utilizing each one the correct way for optimum results. At The Grounds Guys we call this Participation, Implementation and Compliance. In short, we show up, we use our stuff and we use it the right way.
Our 2018 Rookie of the Year award recipients, Daniel and Meredith Stockner, were invited to the Leadership Summit to participate in this high level of engagement. I asked, during dinner, what engagement meant to them. Meredith pondered this question overnight and then sent me this text message: “Engagement: If you aren’t present, you’re passed over and your opportunity for a successful future diminishes. You ultimately become irrelevant.” This is a powerful view of engagement, which also translates to operations and daily outcomes within each franchise location. Is your level of brand engagement and brand alignment producing the right results?
We have owners and team members from eight of our brand’s franchises returning to Waco for Encore Training this month. This is a sign of great engagement by franchisees who are hungry to relearn our core systems and advance their learning in many of the new systems rolled out in 2018. Make it your aim this year to show up at meetings and events, use the systems provided and be sure to use them the right way. I believe engaged franchisees will not only be successful and relevant within their brand, but in their local business as well.
