Audio Q&A: Roark Capital Franchises Swap Stories
Steve Romaniello, managing director of Roark Capital Group, brought together chain leaders from the private-equity firm's 14 franchise brands to share best practices.
By Mary Boltz Chapman, Editor-in-Chief -- Chain Leader, 7/1/2009
 |
| Steve Romaniello, managing director of Roark Capital Group, brought together chain leaders from the private-equity firm's 14 franchise brands to share best practices. |
| Listen to a downloadable extended interview with Steve Romaniello. |
Tell me about how you brought the group together.
We brought all of the CEOs together and brainstormed: What are the common issues that your companies are facing that would be beneficial to discuss. We identified a number of disciplines more so than issues.
What we ended up doing was bringing together all of the vice presidents, directors and brand presidents.
In which disciplines?
Areas like human resources, leadership development, real estate, information technology, franchise development, marketing and a few others. There were about 90 of us here in Atlanta. We broke up into different functional groups and let them come up with the common issues they wanted to discuss across the portfolio.
For example, even though we have Money Mailer, which is a direct-mail company, Batteries Plus, a specialty retailer, and McAlister's Deli, a restaurant concept, all of those groups have a franchise operations group dedicated to training their franchisees.
Can you cite specific examples of what they shared?
It was really a fascinating experience seeing companies like Focus Brands taking the new-store-opening process from Fast Signs and seeing elements that would improve their process.
Real-estate modeling, franchise sales, staffing and compensation policies, management protocols-all those types of things were discussed.
Marketing was fascinating. Each of the companies has dabbled in or dived into social-media marketing. And listening to their different experiences so far with Twitter and Facebook and how they were using those tools-they all came out of there with so much to talk about that they set up an ongoing group with regular meetings.
Were there any fears that this was an effort to combine silos and rejigger some staffing?
It was never our intention. And based on the free flow of information and sharing, I would doubt that was a fear.
Is it an ongoing initiative?
That was a learning from last year. We had this great meeting and there wasn't a lot of follow-up. When you're bringing 90 people together across all of our companies, it's a considerable amount of expense, so we wanted to make sure it's worthwhile and takes on a life of its own.
What will you do different next year.
We did a survey, and they want to spend more time in their groups, and they want to extend the duration of the conference. And we also want to expand the disciplines that are included. Finance and accounting will have a more prominent role. And hopefully we'll build on the continuity that's happening.
Listen to a downloadable extended interview with Steve Romaniello.
Talkback
Related Content
Related Content
View All Blogs
