Finding the right person to be a franchisee for your business should be a simple thing. Someone says "Boy, I’d love to be a member of your team. Where do I sign up?" and voila! You have a new franchisee all set to make their mark with your brand and bring you mega profits and wonderful exposure along the way. Unfortunately, life and making that just right match are not necessarily all that simple. Your business is a complex entity with many aspects that must be carefully considered and matched with a prospective franchisee so that both your company and the franchisee can profit from the arrangement. It’s rather like two cogs that are attempting to mesh. If the individual cog –or aspect- does not fit well into the space on the reciprocal wheel, then someone is in for a bumpy ride.

So how does one locate the perfect potential franchisee? Actually one of the first steps should be an assessment of your company’s "lifestyle"- those things that make your company what it is. We are talking about such things as management style, leadership style, and how your company motivates its employees and franchisees. Once you know where your company stands on such things, then it is going to be easier to make sure your potential franchisee fits, that his or her ‘cogs’ mesh well with the company’s wheel.

Let’s take a look at just one cog: motivation. Motivation is that thing that prompts us to move in a certain way. And it is our personal value system that sets the stage for the motivation. What we value pushes us in our decisions regarding what we spend our time, energy and money on and what experiences we seek, in other words, our buyer motives. You have probably heard it said that you can tell what is important to a person by looking at their checkbook stubs. If we update that, then it’s their debit and charge card statements, and their PDAs. The part of this that is important here is that what is motivation for one person is not necessarily the same for everyone else. Therefore, it follows that as a franchise business it makes good sense, good business sense, that a potential franchisee’s motivations which are based on a personal value system, be in accordance with a franchise business’s motivations and business value systems. Those seeking to become a franchisee should be seeking an experience that mirrors the same type of value system they have. And those who are looking for a franchisee should ensure that there is a mesh between them and their new partner.

Motivation is only one of the cogs in franchise assessment or franchise profiling to make sure that you are getting the top performers, the ones that are going to be the "voila!" in your franchise business.