One 45 minute interview sold a $30,000 franchise

⏳ Read time: ~4 minutes

A franchisor put his hand up during my talk last week and told the room a podcast we recorded a fortnight earlier had already sold him a franchise.

The episode is below so you can watch it yourself.

Plus, Tim Collett from the Franchising Expo on why live events are pulling their biggest crowds in a decade, and what most brands get wrong on the floor.

I was on stage last week talking to our franchisors about long form content.

Nothing new to them. They have heard me say it plenty of times.

Then Chris Hansen put his hand up.

Chris has been one of our franchisors for a long time.

A fortnight earlier I had talked him into sitting down for a podcast.

Forty five minutes.

He told the room it had already sold him a franchise.

Someone watched the whole thing and got in touch. His words: I am in Prospect, you are the man I need to be speaking to.

Sale done. Thirty thousand dollars, around the average Jim's sale price.

Forty five minutes of Chris's time. All of it organic.

Watch it yourself. Nothing clever in there.

Chris talking about his division for 45 minutes.

I have said this for years and I will keep saying it.

Video does not close a franchise sale.

The franchisor closes it.

What long form decides is who walks in already convinced.

By the time the bloke in Prospect made contact, the persuading was over.

None of this is new to me. We hear it in training every intake.

People tell us they watched 100 or 200 episodes before enquiring.

What made last week different is where it came from.

Not me on a stage.

A franchisor in the room, telling other franchisors, unprompted.

Every franchisor should be doing long form. As much of it as they will stand.

I sat down with Tim Collett for the podcast the same week.

Tim is managing director of Specialised Events, which runs the Franchising Expo across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

He worked his first franchising show in Brisbane in 1993 and bought the event in 2013.

His last three shows pulled the biggest crowds in 10 years.

Nothing about the format changed. Something about the buyer did.

Tim put it plainly. We have all seen deep fakes.

We no longer believe what we see on a screen.

So we go looking for a person to stand in front of.

Same behaviour as the bloke in Prospect, pointed at a room instead of a podcast.

People are buying time with a human before they commit money.

$6,000: a 3m x 3m stand at the Franchising Expo
$2,000: graphics and furniture on top
$30,000: all three capital city shows across a year
3 to 4 seconds: how long someone takes to walk past your stand

Put the $30,000 next to one extra fran dev hire. It stops looking expensive.

Now look at how most brands staff it.

Tim described the bad stand without hesitating. Three people in the corner. Phones out. Eating lunch. Talking to each other.

Australians are polite. If your team looks busy, nobody interrupts them.

Eight thousand dollars gone because someone answered emails on a Saturday.

Tim's fix costs nothing. Put your best franchisees on the stand. They love the brand, they talk about it without a script, and they answer the question every prospect holds back: what does my week look like inside this system.

No brochure answers it. A franchisee in an aisle answers it in 90 seconds.

A visitor gives your stand 3 to 4 seconds before deciding to stop or keep walking.

Tim Collett has watched exhibitors buy attention since 1993.

The deciding factor is never the build. It is whether anyone on the stand looks up.

Follow up.

Tim's line: people are not going to call you, you have to call them.

Most exhibitors hold 200 conversations, hand out 200 brochures, then wait.

He flipped how I think about the brochure. Hand one over and the conversation ends.

Take the details instead, post the pack afterwards, and the delivery becomes your reason to ring.

The bigger thing brands leave on the floor is footage. Two days of prospects asking unscripted questions in a room no studio recreates.

We still publish vision captured at expos three and four years ago.

Chris sat down for 45 minutes and it returned $30,000.

A show floor is two days of the same raw material and almost nobody films it.

Glenn and I will have a booth at the Franchise Expo in Melbourne this weekend recording episodes live.

Please come up and say G’day, if you see me there on the day.

I would ring my best franchisees and ask for a favour.

No franchisee owes you two days on a stand.

The ones who champion the brand will say yes anyway, and they are the only people who answer the prospect's real question with any credibility.

I would book the videographer before I booked the furniture.

The furniture lasts the weekend.

I would block the two working days after the show for outbound calls and defend them, because unbooked time gets eaten.

The industry keeps arguing over whether expos work. Wrong argument. Everything works when you do it properly.

Almost nothing works when you do not.

If a prospect met your team on a show floor tomorrow, would they meet someone who loves the business or someone waiting for the day to end?

Joel

PS. Forty five minutes of Chris's time. Thirty thousand dollars. He did that sum in front of the room, not me.

Each week, I interview marketing experts or share insights from the strategies I have used to help grow Jim’s by 2,000+ franchisees.

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