Hite Digital offers branding, web design, and digital marketing services throughout the United States, but more importantly, it is committed to you and the growth of your organization. This was the incentive for JC and Karen Hite to franchise their firm. When you recognize that you have the answers to an industry’s most pressing challenges, the best you can do is to create a way to share, in a wide range, those solutions. It is an example of proactivity.
Nonetheless, transitioning is not simple. Regardless of your existing business model or the franchise structure to which you are going, navigating every change with strategy and forethought will serve you well. So, how did this power couple manage to have 22 franchises in 4 years? Follow through this article for tips:
Go Alone, And Fast, Or Go With Others and Far.
If they could go back to when they were transitioning, they would give themselves a pat on the back and go easy on themselves. Change is complex, and successful transitions require time and careful planning.
When you rush into a changeover, you essentially put everyone involved in a tricky position and try to tell yourself there isn’t much at stake. By operating in this manner, you are ignoring all the changes occurring and the management required for this development to succeed. It would help if you could comprehend every change and its repercussions. This requires effectively expressing the plans and requirements and allowing people to conceptualize the vision. You need a strong, intelligent, committed team to succeed.
REDUCE is a framework for eliminating five significant change barriers: reactance, endowment, distance, uncertainty, and supporting evidence.
The concept behind this barrier is that when individuals are pushed, they will push back. When they converted to a franchise model, they gave their implementers several months’ notice and did not encounter more resistance than anticipated. To prevent a reaction, avoid pushing. Encourage individuals to push themselves, or much more so, to persuade themselves. With Hite, the most reasonable course of action was picking a small subset of implementers and socializing the franchise concept somewhat earlier. With additional time, they could incorporate feedback on the rollout, acquire buy-in, and circumvent opposition.
People place a higher value on the status quo than on other rewards. According to research on the endowment effect, individuals place a higher value on what they already possess. In the case of Hite Digital, possession was the status quo, and the prospect of change caused implementers to place a higher value on the existing model. To overcome this obstacle, you must be clear and persistent about what will remain constant throughout the shift.
Distance refers to the distance between the existing and future states. To reach the next state, stakeholders must acquire new knowledge, accept unusual circumstances, etc. Advancing too quickly and too soon can be intimidating and aggravating, but everything appeared more doable because they were moving in tiny increments.
Uncertainty: Every change is accompanied by a degree of uncertainty. There is no way to avoid this. Hite members were understandably anxious when discussions regarding franchising began; JC and Karen Hite had to ask themselves similar questions. Would this new model be on par with its predecessor? To make people’s lives easier, they provided examples of what was to come and simple actions and checklists to manage expectations explicitly. These actions mitigated the danger and unpredictability caused by the changes.
People desire corroboration of evidence. It is considerably simpler for stakeholders to embrace change when there is evidence of future benefits. When transitioning to a franchise model, JC and Karen Hite presented instances of organizations that underwent comparable adjustments and flourished as a result.
All that said, the success that this duo is experiencing is attributed to a strong positive organizational culture.
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