Thomas Scott and Brett Larrabee Share the Top 5 Qualities to Expect in a Franchise Recruiter 

 

Check out the full transcript here:

CEO and Founder of Brand Journalists is joined by franchise recruitment expert, Brett Larrabee, on the What The Franchise Podcast to share the top 5 qualities all franchise sales professionals must possess.

Scott and Larrabee share laughs, wisdom and personal experiences explaining why successful franchise recruiters are curious, enthusiastic, positive, urgent, disciplined and natural-born storytellers.

Check out their full conversation below:

Thomas Scott: Brett, thanks for joining us today, it is really good to have you on the call. I enjoy talking to you on a regular basis and I think other people really enjoy listening to you as well.

What is the core problem with recruiters today? Why in our industry is there such a dilemma around finding good recruiters, and why do so many recruiters and so many owners of franchise systems, and CEOs struggle to get recruitment results?

Brett Larrabee: Well, look, there’s a lot of great salespeople out there. But, selling a franchise is not only a high ticket investment, but it’s a lifestyle investment. It’s something that is turning the ship not only for the person who is buying it, but typically their entire family. So, the decision process is one that people are challenged with.

They’re coming to franchise salespeople for a solution in their life, and the franchise salesperson is somehow looking at this as them going through the franchisor’s process or their sales process. Increasingly with COVID and everything that’s gone on over the past, even two years, people are resistant to working within the lines of a brand’s process. The pushback of that would be that this is franchising and there are rules. If somebody’s not willing to work within the lines, maybe they wouldn’t be a great franchisee.

I would argue that buying a franchise has a lot of resistant currents to it. There’s a lot of things that are pushing against people to in fact, not buy. Not just fear of failure, but fear of change. Other voices coming at them for different reasons, and you need to be able to really understand that person’s buying dilemma. Their challenges and what’s in their head. Because at the end of the day, there really isn’t franchise selling. There’s only franchise buying. That’s the only way anything happens in this business.

Somebody that buys may in fact be a great franchisee and will work within your system and work within your lines. But, getting them to the point of buying is a bit of an art and science that’s learned over a period of years. The challenge is that a lot of these sales people come in and force people into a rigid process, or they force them into their sales mantra, giving them their information and really talking over or through the franchise prospect in a way that they lose interest. The franchise prospect is looking to solve an individual problem, and if you’re not willing to get to know that person on the individual basis, and understanding what their needs are and how to solve those needs, you’re never going to be a great franchise development person. In fact, you’re going to burn a lot of money in lead generation, in time, in payroll, and the frustrating thing for franchisors is that they see people following the supposed rules of the franchise sales process, but they are not getting the results that they demand to move their business forward. That just costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of time that you can’t get back.

The best part about this is that there’s a solve for all of this. You can actually do better if you choose to do better. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of legacy people in this business that are resistant to change, and to looking at the franchise development process in a pragmatic way in order to move their business forward.

Thomas Scott: Yeah I would agree. You know if you had 100 qualified candidates come through any kind of franchise recruitment website or through any lead source, we would generally say that 5% or 6% of the 100, are probably closable people. People that could, with the right skill, management and attention to detail, could actually buy the franchise, and buy it for the right reasons. It’s a good fit for them and what their goals are. What we see is that most franchise recruiters kill 90% of their closable deals. Even a good one chews through.

Brett you and I were talking a year or two back, and I needed to make a change in my internal franchise sales staff, and I made a change. Through a lot of conversation we came up with a list of the five really important qualities that really make a difference for franchise recruiters. And we’re going to go through this list one-by-one here. But, I think this is an important list to have if you’re trying to evaluate where you have a breakdown with the person at point on your franchise recruitment. Whether it’s you or somebody that works for you, or you’re trying to recruit somebody new – hire for these five things. These five things are what are an essential piece of what it takes to get a positive result today. If you’re missing any or all of these, that person is going to underperform and you’ll spend $200,000 on advertising and wonder why you don’t have much to show for it. It’s almost never a lead issue. It’s almost always the person on point. Their skills, attitude or their whole orientation to how to recruit somebody and help them make a good decision.

So let’s start with number one. This was just one of your issues, and I want to hear you explain this. The person has to have an innate sense of curiosity. What does that mean when you say that?

Brett Larrabee: Well, if you’ve ever been in a conversation with somebody that knows everything and talks over every piece of the puzzle back and forth, and doesn’t let you add your two cents and, and really is trying to solve for x without any input from you.

Sales is about listening. Oftentimes the less you talk as a salesperson, the more you win. Being able to understand other people is really based in this idea of curiosity. If I’m curious, and I really want to understand why did you come up with the idea of calling me, or coming to our franchise organization as a possibility for changing your business life, that’s a big question. It’s a big question to know, what is it that you enjoy? What is your family into? What do you do? What is it that you’ve done in the past that brings you to this place? Really asked questions not just to build a relationship, but to really understand the prospect. This idea of curiosity is not something everybody’s born with, and I don’t think it’s something that everybody has.

A lot of people are great at talking. But they’re not great at listening, because everybody actually just loves to hear their own voice. The truth is that the more you can get the franchise prospect to talk about themself, the more they’re going to talk themselves into this idea that you have as a franchisor. I find that ultimately nobody wants to be sold. They just don’t. It’s a repugnant idea.

So, you really want this idea to become their idea. That’s your job. Your job as a salesperson is to understand them, and give them the roadmap, so that they can make this their idea and find the finish line for themselves. It’s a much more successful process.

Thomas Scott: I went to school for journalism and was a newspaper person in my early adult career. Curiosity is really important. If you’re going to be a journalist, you have to have an innate sense of curiosity to learn about the world around you.

When it comes to the relationship with a prospect who you’re just meeting for the first time, and  you have a franchise recruiter who walks away from an hour long call, and they really don’t know much about the person, it’s probably because they lack curiosity.

Somebody with innate curiosity wants to know the story behind somebody. They’re like “Tell me how did you get here? What do you do for a living? Do you have kids? Where do you live? Where’d you go to school? What’s your career? Walk me through your career.” Then you start talking and you find common ground. You’re not asking those questions, because you have to if you have innate curiosity. It’s a reflexive, innate quality that just happens. You can’t connect with somebody in a real, meaningful and authentic way if you don’t have a sense of curiosity. That just means simply asking questions. You can teach yourself to be more curious by training yourself to ask better questions in a certain sequence in order to really probe and uncover. You know, in journalism, they say you have to ask the same question five different ways to get to the root answer, because people will often tell you a surface answer. Then you ask it again and it gets deeper and deeper, until you get down to the real kind of core of the issue when you ask it.

A franchise recruiter, somebody who’s selling, it’s a very difficult thing to recruit for. It takes years to master. It’s a very long sales cycle. There are 10,000 things that can go wrong to keep a deal from happening, but curiosity is where the real relationship starts.

Brett Larrabee: Absolutely. When you think about the most important people in your life, they’re the ones that are concerned about YOU. They’re the ones that listen to YOU. They’re not the ones that preach at you. They’re the ones that actually help you think through your life strategy by asking you questions, by compelling you to think for yourself, not telling you how to think, but giving you the opportunity to empower yourself to move forward.

Thomas Scott: I mean, yeah. This is a good example, every time I see you, or we talk, I ask how Ulga, your Ukrainian wife is doing, and whether or not you have any plates in your kitchen, because she’s famous for breaking all the plates in your kitchen then she gets mad at you. Which is a fascinating story. I know that because I’ve asked you questions about it. I’m really innately curious about how much chinaware you have in the cabinets at your house, because I find it really entertaining to hear that story.

Brett Larrabee: We’re not quite down to paper plates yet, but we’re getting there.

Thomas Scott: But that’s a good example. If you get that kind of real, meaningful connection with somebody, that’s the basis of a relationship, and that comes from curiosity. What we really mean is that if you have a salesperson who naturally asks a lot of questions, they’re going to be more successful than somebody who doesn’t.

A person who doesn’t innately want to learn more about a person, ask questions, and that is reserved and doesn’t like people asking them questions, that person is not going to be as successful as the person that asks questions. It’s just a fact.

So when you’re looking for someone count the number of questions they asked you in the interview. That is a great place to start and gauge: is this person curious or not. Another is what would they have learned? You can ask them “what did you learn from our meeting? Tell me three things you’ve learned, like unique things about me, my background and my company.

Number two is, (and we’ve worked with so many recruiters who are not good at this), but is positive energy. Like somebody who has a high level of enthusiasm. You have to, have to, have to be a highly enthusiastic person to be successful. For any length of time in franchise recruitment.

Brett Larrabee: Oh, absolutely. Here’s the reality. We all have people in our life that bring energy to our everyday experience. Then we have those people that drain us. And some of those people that drain us, they don’t even need to say a word. Their negativity just just zaps our energy and doesn’t allow us to move forward.

Thomas Scott: Like Eeyore on Winnie the Pooh.

Brett Larrabee: Kind of like Eeyore. But Eeyore is the most positive example of a negative person. There’s much worse than even Eeyore.

Thomas Scott: And the franchise industry is full of them.

Brett Larrabee: Yeah. And I think the reality is that some people are just not into what they do. It’s not their wheelhouse. They’re doing it because it’s a job, or they want to make that next commission. And that is all the wrong reason. A sense of enthusiasm has less to do with an artificial peppiness and more to do with this desire to help people. To actually provide something beneficial to another person, and there’s a lot of books written on this.

One I think is called the “Go Give”, I can’t remember if it is “Go Give” or “Go Getter,” but the reality is you have to give more than you get. In order to build a life and a business successfully, you have to be able to provide other people some benefit. Even if you just give some information, some enthusiasm, a relationship, or a sense of friendship. The way I look at this is over the 35 years I’ve done this, a lot of people communicate with me on an ongoing basis decades later. Not because they have to, but because they want to. There’s something about our relationship that is positively influenced. We’ve positively influenced each other. Maybe that’s the true currency of what we do in franchise development – is that sense of relationship and that sense of community that we build over time.

Thomas Scott: You know, it’s interesting, because the genesis of this list was me trying to add a new salesperson to my staff of outsourced sales people. I ended up hiring a hockey coach. He is a young, 30 year old who coach’s travel hockey. He was very interested in having a career in recruiting and sales, but was really a hockey player. So, he brought this like super high positive enthusiasm to his work, because that’s what a lot of athletes do. They can’t really be a competitive athlete without a high sense of positive outlook. People with negative outlooks lose. People with more positive outlooks have the mental fortitude to win most of the time, and they win because they’re positive. People are attracted to that and it’s a really strong quality. I think I’m just going to hire hockey people from now on, it’s been the best move I’ve ever made from a recruitment standpoint.

You know, the next thing on our list, which also kind of fits in with hockey is a high sense of urgency. You have to have somebody who is moving faster. At a very early point in my career, I was at an IFA super session where I listened to the head of franchise development for Hilton Hotels give a speech. Somebody stood up and said, “What are the qualities you look for when you hire a franchise recruiter or a salesperson?” He goes, “Well, I only asked one question.” Everyone was like “One question? That sounds ridiculous.” He says, “I ask if they have speeding tickets. I won’t hire someone if they don’t have speeding tickets.” People started laughing and he said “No, I’m really serious. Like, if you ask all the top performing salespeople in this room, if they have tickets, they’ll almost all have tickets. Those people are going a little faster than everybody else, and they’re so focused on the end result. They’re more results oriented. They get there quicker. They do more. They have a higher sense of urgency to accomplish the mission, whatever it is. I think that’s been true. I’ve seen salespeople that have no sense of urgency allow candidates to drift, and drift kills deals.

What do you think about that quality?

Brett Larrabee: Well, this is something interesting because a sense of urgency is not the negative connotation of “aggressive behavior.” It’s “assertive behavior.” It’s allowing yourself to move with a sense of purpose. To a certain extent, a lot of great salespeople aren’t even aware of this, because that’s just who they are as human beings. The difference between those that are great, and those that are maybe not as great, is the fact that they don’t understand that today is the day to move things forward, and tomorrow almost never comes.

So, when you have somebody in front of you that allows you to communicate with them, who allows you to enter their life and present a positive change, now is the time to create the roadmap to move forward. Now is the time to create the agenda. Not tomorrow. You may not be able to get back on the phone with this client tomorrow.

You know, hockey is a really good parallel for this. You have to move quickly in hockey in order to be where the puck is. The puck is not gonna come to you. I think this is something that is innate in sales, right? You kind of have to know where this conversation or this franchise development process is going. You need to move the client there. They’re not going to move there by themselves. They don’t know how to move there by themselves. A lot of these people haven’t bought a franchise before. They’re not sure how to navigate a FDD, or, navigate the process of going through the financing or the validation phase of your sales process. You really need to help them manifest that and move that forward. Some people need you to walk them through it step-by-step and side-by-side, and that is done with a sense of urgency. It is not done with a sense “Oh, here’s the process. If you’re willing to take the energy to do it yourself, then that will make you a great franchisee.” This idea of self selection is important, but you also need to be the teacher. The person who is providing that context for them to succeed. I think some of the best relationships I’ve had in life, are those people that reach out and say, “Hey Brett. I’m going to show you how to succeed at that.” I may think arrogantly, “I don’t really need that help.” But, I did and I appreciated it.

Thomas Scott: You know, in terms of a sense of urgency and when we tend to think about systems today, and in the work we do here at Brand Journalist, some systems have a culture of development. Some don’t.

When we say a system has a “culture of a development”, then that system, the whole system, all of the leadership oppositely from Ops, everybody, is committed to grow through development. It’s not an either or. It’s not like we’re going to choose development over driving same store sales and increasing positive franchise relationships. These systems are just committed to growing the brand through adding new units, training and supporting new owners and making them successful.

We’ll see systems, and we have seen this with our brands in Home Based Franchise Group, Dryer Vent Squad and Frost Shades, we have deals that close sometimes in three or four weeks from the point of new lead to closed deal. Sometimes it is three or four weeks, sometimes five weeks. I’ve heard you talk about some of the deals you do that are five week deals, even with Little Caesars sometimes. Big, expensive things. It’s the sense of urgency. You really can see, through enough franchise recruitment and enough brands, that there are people who close deals that have very short sales processes. Taheir sales processes are not shoddy. They’re really well thought out. They move people through. They answer questions. People make good decisions. It’s not that the prospects are slow.

Then there are systems where it takes six or nine months. Maybe they will close them, maybe they won’t. They make people hang around on the sidelines for months at a time for no particularly good reason. In that case, everybody lacks that sense of urgency. However, the recruiter is the principal person that drives that.

Brett Larrabee: Right! They are the driver of the bus. So many times the recruiter is placed in a predicament where they have to find, internal alignment, which is elusive, and they need to

get support from different departments, which doesn’t come quickly. Quite honestly, we’ve heard this time and again, that time kills deals. It really does.

Thomas Scott: It does.

Brett Larrabee: Those people that are willing to buy, are really willing to buy now.

Thomas Scott: Now, not tomorrow.

Brett Larrabee: Not later. I’m not saying that you should hurry somebody through the process, or push them through this process. But, you should definitely assertively work to move things forward. Because without that sense of urgency the process lacks energy and it dies on the vine. There’s a lot of competing ideas during a franchise sales process. There’s a lot of personal things that happen in people’s lives that are good, bad and indifferent. You compete with that. Plus, the person that’s looking at your franchise is also looking at a number of other ideas. Your idea has to have the most energy. It has to have the most enthusiasm. It needs to be compelling. It needs to be a life choice of positive association. That is the best way I can explain it. Where you actually want to hang out with these people, because these people are the ones that are most interested in you. That is how you believe in something.

Thomas Scott: You know, you’ll hear people talk about dating and marriage analogies when they’re talking about franchise recruitment to underscore for people to understand the types of relationships that we have.

If you were dating someone, when you were younger, you got excited over the enthusiasm and the positivity of it. You wouldn’t just have one conversation or text a week. You would probably have a couple of conversations the first day, one or two the next day, there would be text messages as it gets its footing. With a franchise it’s not like: Hey, we’re gonna have our first call on this date and I’m going to send you my LinkedIn profile so you could maybe look over it, before we talk next week sometime. That’s ridiculous. Nobody would do that. But that’s the way we handle these people. The truth is, when someone is starting a business, the relationship with their recruiter, if that person is doing a good job, and I see this in my own staff when they get a really good prospect and they get footing, meaning that they’re aligned, and there’s transparency, authenticity, energy and optimism, they’re having four, five or six calls in that week and then another four, five or six and it just moves really fast. It’s not moving fast to your point because they’re pushing them, it is moving fast because it’s a natural progression of human nature. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. Then the next person in the queue, the second salesperson comes along and they’ll have one conversation and I’ll ask them three days later, “what happened with Joe Smith?” And they will say, “Yeah, I need to call him back.” That’s a deal that the salesperson killed.

Brett Larrabee: Yeah. I think there’s this battle between courteous professionalism and those development people who understand the need to get from like, to love quickly.

Thomas Scott: Right!

Brett Larrabee: Those may be corny words to a lot of people. But…

Thomas Scott: You look like the kind of guy that would get to love pretty quickly.

Brett Larrabee: Hahaha. You only want to do business, or you only want to hang out in life with people that you love. You know? Maybe that’s corny, but that’s real.

Thomas Scott: It’s real.

Brett Larrabee: I’m not gonna write a check for $40,000, $50,000 or $100,000 to somebody that I’m not even sure I like. You know, maybe they’re professional. Maybe they have all the great details. But how many times have you gotten all of the facts or the instruction book, but you can’t read it because it’s boring, or it’s not interesting. It doesn’t compel you to comply with its messaging.

Thomas Scott: Right, so messaging is a good segue into the number four kind of thing that we think is mission critical for a recruiter. I would call that storytelling. It is the next thing you would say to somebody to help articulate their future. But the ability of a franchise recruiter to leverage stories and to talk in the form of story format, again coming from a journalism background, stories are the way humans communicate. The stories are the way we make sense of the world around us. They’re how we relate to one another. They’re how you make decisions in life. Stories have a way of helping us orient to ideas. Just like when somebody meets you, and they learn that your wife likes to break all the plates in the kitchen and she yells at you, which is a really humorous story that I can’t really unhear. Now that’s forever part of my whole relationship with you as a person. So, when we see really good recruiters, they’re not selling stuff. They’re just telling enthusiastic stories.

It is like “Let me tell you about our Frost Shades, the window tinting franchise that we’re growing, how it is having a great year.” Let me tell you about “How many windows there are on a typical Street.” Let me tell you about “this franchisee in DC who on their first day went out and did a $20,000 job from the Washington Redskins, just out of the blue.” Then let me share how it happened. You just tell the story. Nothing other than a real, factual story of a day in the life of this business. Tell a story about the founder. Tell a story about franchisees that are similar to the particular person you’re talking with. Stories are what help people see the future and see themselves in that future.

If you listen to a lot of calls, storytelling is not very common. In a lot of sales calls for they’re just reading bullet points and bombarding people with the story in the way that they think it needs to go out.

So, what do you mean by storytelling?

Brett Larrabee: Look, I think people don’t want to be told anything. I think they want something compelling and interesting that creates the context for them to make a great decision. One of the ways that we do this now in the current reality is: we get on our iPhone and we look at the news. The great journalists of today know how to bring people into a story. They know how to create interest. They know how to create an opportunity for somebody to learn perspective.

Regardless of what that story is about, they pull you into another world for a few minutes. Then you see yourself in that context. Great franchise sales people learn how to tell a story that involves the prospect in a way that they could see themself in the context of that business. They might not say that implicitly, but they know how to talk to people in a way that’s genuine and honest, which gives them an idea in their head that says, “Hey! I could do that. I could see myself being a part of this. This makes sense.” It’s always that aha moment that we all have as kids on the beach when we find a treasure, or crab under a rock, or whatever it is that makes us go, “Oh! Well, that’s where it is. That’s, that’s where the fun lies in all this.” Storytelling gets you to that place where you have that aha moment and where you can connect your reality with the franchise development person’s business mindset. You create those connections. That’s what stories do. They take other contexts in life and they give you an opportunity to build a bridge to other people.

Thomas Scott: That’s really all franchise recruitment is. It is a series of conversations full of stories. But a good one. A good, solid, tactical and efficient story. You don’t move people along by pushing them, you pull them along by giving them stories that help them understand what it looks like, what it feels like, and it answers their questions without you selling them as much. To your point, nobody wants to be sold. Nobody wants to talk to a mattress salesperson, or car salesman. When you’re a storyteller, you take yourself out of the equation. It’s not about you. It’s about the story which is about another person. It becomes “Let me share with you. Let me explain kind of how it works.” Then it is “What do you think about that?” And they say  “That’s kind of cool. “I was really amazed when that happened.” Then you can say “Here’s something that happened last week.”

Walls come down when you storytell. It’s the basis of all the lead generation we do with content marketing, conversational marketing and conversational lead generation for Brand Journalist. It is absolutely the way that you should focus on this type of business.

Brett Larrabee: One way I like to explain this to other franchise development people is that: objections are either intentional, or are kind of couched in conversation. Instead of creating a context of arguing why those objections are right or wrong, stories allow you an emotionally intelligent way to connect with people without creating conflict. You’re allowing them to win. What they’re telling you is their reality, and you need to connect with their reality.This is why the Curiosity thing is so important. If you don’t fully understand their reality, how are you going to connect with them? How are you going to tell them the right stories? How are you going to give them the context, the bridge if you will, to move to your position.

Thomas Scott: Yeah, and if you’re curious, and you ask the right questions, they’ll tell you exactly what stories they’re looking for. So, it makes a franchise recruitment process much simpler if you follow these guidelines.

This brings us to our last kind of key quality of a franchise recruiter that you have to have to be successful. It is just the sense of being disciplined. You have to be able to help somebody move through the process. You need the discipline to make the calls. You need the discipline to be there and be fully present for the person.

What do you mean when you say you have to be disciplined?

Brett Larrabee: You know, a lot of franchise development people are great at getting on the phone, setting up the next call and moving through the process. But they’re not great at being directional. There’s a time that we all have in every franchise development process where we know it’s time to ask the prospect to move forward, and to do it now. Often people don’t pull that trigger. They don’t tell people it’s time to move forward. The prospect is looking for that direction. They’re looking for you to take the wheel and to move this process forward. When you don’t, they will simply wait for that to happen. Oftentimes, it never happens. Because the assumption is that the prospect is going to make that decision.

Maybe that’s the case, but often not often. Often the prospect is buying a franchise because they want people to help them through this process. Your job is to be directional. To have the discipline to create that opportunity to close. Time and again I’ve watched franchise development people just talk right past that opportunity.

Thomas Scott: Oh yeah. They just get in their own mind and they have an agenda, and they don’t realize they totally missed the hook they needed to move someone through.

Discipline also means just being disciplined to make calls. It means to have the structure that it takes to connect with people. It means being able to sift through the leads. We get really frustrated. If you’re a lead generator like we are, we see really good quality deals fall through the cracks because salespeople don’t want to make the calls or they don’t want to be bothered sometimes with the hard work. Some of this business is just plain and simple: hard work.

What do you think about discipline on the front end of the pipeline?

Brett Larrabee: Well, discipline on the front end has a lot to do with the conversation you have as a franchise development person in your head. If you’re telling yourself that the next call you’re going to make is just another waste of time…it’s just another

Thomas Scott: portal lead or Facebook lead

Brett Larrabee: whatever, you know, you’re telling yourself “it’s rainy today,” “it’s too close to Christmas,” “it’s Easter,” “it’s New Year’s,” “it’s Valentine’s Day,” you make the excuse. There’s 1000 reasons not to pick up the phone or communicate with the next prospect. But, some of the best franchise development people just have their time that they are going to make calls. They get in their head that this is what they’re going to do, and they’re going to do it now. They don’t find 1000 reasons to make it not work.

Thomas Scott: No, they’re not listening to records in their head. The stories that franchise recruiters make up about… it’s as if there are 100 people in a room and they all get together and say, “Okay, we’re all going to be franchise portal leads today.” 76 of us are going to go into the witness protection program and never answer the phone or talk to the person, so, we’re going to go to this side of the room. 10 of us are going to say we have a lot of money, but we really don’t.

If you talk to franchise recruiters, that’s the way they view large numbers of leads. It’s like there’s some connection between each person and they have a conspiracy to doom this franchise sales effort. The truth is every single person is a unique person. When you talk to a really fabulous person like yourself, or Lori Osley at Sonic who does an amazing job. She gets 300 or 400 leads a month and she calls every single lead herself. She doesn’t use a lead screener. She does amazing work at that brand because she puts in the effort to see every person. She has amazing results over long periods of time where people that she talks to two years prior come back after they’re financially qualified and end up becoming owners.

That willingness to see each person as a unique person, and the discipline to reach out to them even when you do run into runs where nobody has money or it’s Christmas, or Easter, or New Year’s or whatever, who cares. This is the business we’re in. We are reaching out and talking to people and getting traction with the ones we can, and not really worrying too much about the ones we can’t. Just always having the discipline to stay focused and positive. You just have that kind of sense that the one person you’re talking to is the one person that could buy a franchise and is trying to change their life through business ownership.

Brett Larrabee: Absolutely. Many times, it’s timing. Maybe, you call that person at the wrong time of day. Or it could be the wrong whatever. But having the discipline to go back and give people a second chance, to think through why people may not be reacting positively to you all of the time, in an objective way, allows you as a franchise development person to just kind of be a kinder soul and give people a chance to buy.

Again, I would say most people that are looking to buy a franchise need somebody to be directional and help them through the process. They don’t know what the process is or what it looks like. They’re not sure if you’re a good person or a bad person. They’re looking for you to show them the way, and that only happens through some level of a disciplined approach. Add some curiosity, some positivity and a real sense of allowing people to win. I think that’s really the sum of this.

Thomas Scott: That’s good, because it’s been a great conversation. Just to summarize, we discussed the five qualities we think are essential for someone today and it’s worth evaluating your current recruiters or anybody you would interview for a job. Number one was curiosity with a high sense of enthusiasm, number two was someone with a high level of positivity, someone with a high sense of urgency was number three. Number four is someone who is a form of a natural storyteller, who has the ability to leverage stories to help people understand abstract concepts. Lastly, discipline. Someone who just has the discipline to do this job without excuses or without negative narratives.

Brett, thank you so much for joining us today. Hopefully someone can get some value out of this. This is a core topic that I think anybody in franchise development needs to ponder on and think about because it’s the key to creating a performance breakthrough.

Brett Larrabee: No, thank you.

Thomas Scott: Good deal.

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