Papa Murphy's Clarice Turner feels that if you forget the role of franchisees, your system is in trouble. Read or listen to an extended interview with Clarice Turner.

Are your franchisees on board with your efforts (in pricing, purchasing strategy and marketing) to ease costs?

We have 72 company stores ourselves, so we are very sensitive to cost pressures, and we see it on our P&Ls every month, too.

We are constantly trying to work with our franchise community so that we can come up with real solutions. Specifically, we're trying to provide some coaching and training and leadership around cash-flow management, around the basics of P&Ls. And making sure that we're enabling franchisees to share best practices with each other so that the crunch on the middle of the P&L potentially can be alleviated by some things that they haven't thought about.

How do you enable that?

We have a lot of internal and external communication. We have a bulletin that goes out to our community every month, and in that we share best practices that come in from across the country. At regional conferences as well as at our national convention, we facilitate workshops that are led by either an industry expert or one of our community. We start with best practices and then try to build on that so that people truly can come out of there with not only great relationships and potentially mentorships, but also great ideas and practices from other people.

Do the bulk of your franchisees have several units, or are there a lot of onesie-twosies?

There are a lot of onesie-twosies. We have almost 1,100 stores; we've got about 400 franchisees. A lot of franchisees began with one or two stores and have grown to be multiunit and, in a couple cases, very large franchisees.

Is there a difference between working with those two groups?

I wouldn't say different so much as understanding the needs of the franchisees in general. We try to recruit input from a variety of sized franchisees and not get stuck in a model where we're only listening to our largest franchisees.

What are the other key elements of your franchisee relationships?

Listening and really making an effort to understand the needs of the franchisees, and that those may be different across the country or by size. And then trying to find common ground and demonstrate that you truly care. You may not always agree, but it's critical to understand each other's perspective.

Most franchisors will have a committee structure within a franchise advisory board, which we do as well. One of the things that is a really important best practice here is to truly make those committees working committees so that people have skin in the game.

We craft it, very clearly defining roles and responsibilities up front, and a criteria of what it takes to serve on these committees. We're very serious about that. We want franchisees who are there for the greater good and that are viewed as leaders in the community. That's helped in these committees to quell some of the typical political maneuvering that takes place. It's still in process, but I've seen it help us engage our franchisees for the greater good of the brand and all the franchisees.