Sponsored content by AnswerConnect.

New opportunities are like buses; you wait ages for one, then three come along at once. But what does that mean for your franchise business?

Responding to demand

With seasonal demand you can anticipate your staffing needs and adjust accordingly (even if that still requires advertising, hiring and training every year). But many businesses simply can’t predict with that much accuracy.

Escaping the linear-growth model

The fact is, as long as you have to hire in-house, your business is stuck on a linear growth pattern. Your receptionists can only answer a certain number of calls per day. To answer more calls, you need to hire more people. But then, when there’s a dip in calls, your team is left twiddling their thumbs. In other words, your response capacity isn’t scalable.

Worse, if you don’t get their numbers right, you could leave callers on hold. And callers won’t wait long; 64% of people will hang up after waiting more than five minutes on hold. In the franchise world, those missed calls can mean a wealth of missed opportunities. Worse, they can damage your reputation and limit future growth opportunities.

Refocus your team

Every minute you and your team spend answering calls is time that could be spent on other tasks. That’s before you even factor in the frustration of being distracted by a call on a job. And every distraction moves you further from the job at hand. So what’s the solution?

Every day you face a choice; disrupt your work to answer every call, or let it ring out and hope they leave a message or call back.

Reclaim your personal time

For smaller franchise owners, answering calls is just one of many roles you may have to fill yourself. That’s why, for many owners, their personal phone is also their work phone. But when you blend work and personal time, you risk blurring the boundaries between the two.

You get a call just before you go to bed – do you answer? Likewise, you don’t want to take work calls while on a job, but what if a family member calls you?

In short, it’s important to build a buffer between work and home. For your clients, a separate work number ensures they receive a professional response when they call. Just as importantly, it means you can switch off when you get home. That’s important for your mental health and your time with your family. The value of a balanced work-life day can’t be overstated.

Embracing flexibility

An answering service enables businesses of any size to scale their support capacity according to need. You can upgrade or downgrade your account each month to respond to changing demand. Best of all, you can do away with all the time-intensive tasks of hiring in-house. And it means you’re not faced with the ultimate predicament of how to let staff go when demand dries up.

Adaptation is a vital business skill, particularly in times of economic instability. As Darwin said in the Origin of Species, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Find out more about building scalability into your franchise business here.