A Bright Idea In this feature, we bring you a bright idea from a CFA member – a simple tip, piece of advice, or business / life hack that you might want to adopt. If you have a ‘Bright Idea’ you’d like to share with CFA members, please send an email to editor@cfa.ca highlighting your idea.
Matt’s Bright Idea:
Make instilling culture amongst franchisees a key objective Matt Crowell, Founder and CEO, GetintheLoop www.getinthelooplocal.com/lovethegrind
W
e talk about the culture we’ve built at GetintheLoop a fair bit. We’ve grown from a small team of three or four to over 140 “Loopers” across the country and finding ways to instill our culture has been a key objective. Of course, a strong culture helps keep turnover down, but we’ve found that a strong culture also fosters greater innovation, problem-solving, and teamwork. I think it’s been a really unique process. We always talk about how our culture is built by the team growing together and everybody inside the team builds on it. Culture grows from within and our small original team built the template or pillars of our culture that exists today. To start, for us it was all about being a company that truly cares about its mission: giving small businesses a local voice and inspiring consumers to shop local. When dollars are spent with locally owned businesses or even businesses that just hire local employees and pay local taxes, much of that money stays local and supports a thriving community. The second pillar that’s particularly important to us when hiring new team members is a high level of dedication, commitment, and teamwork skills. We actually call ourselves the Wolf Pack and I think that speaks to how we support each other and how persistent we are at working toward our mission. While not exactly a formula, there are a few things we do that foster our culture: • Create transparency in a super flat organization: Every single member of our team and every single franchise owner across the country has direct access to me or any member of our team and vice versa. We’re all working together to grow GetintheLoop. Creating transparency and an open environment helps create a culture of innovation. There’s
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no such thing as a wrong question when we’re all pushing forward together. • Over-communication: We are always thinking about how to improve communication with our franchise owners and home office team members. We host webinars where everybody can call in and ask questions and learn from each other. Our local owners and franchise support teams communicate and chat through Slack regularly and the executive team holds video ‘open house’ fireside chats where anyone can ask a question. Anybody on the team can ask a question, call a meeting, and push forward a project at any time. So, it’s a really open mindset where there’s a lot of communication. • Having a lot of fun together: We just held our first Wolfpack Summit, where our local franchise owners came to Kelowna for three days of learning and excitement. It was a great opportunity for our local owners to meet and network with like-minded counterparts and entrepreneurs from across our group. It was amazing as everyone was “cheersing”, having a coffee together, and getting to know each other. We try and make sure that when we get together and facilitate these events, that it’s a good time and that it helps build the culture. We really believe the whole mantra here at GetintheLoop is ‘you gotta love what you do’. That’s what Love the Grind - my personal blog - is all about. Again, it’s another way we are learning and communicating to benefit the entire group. We are launching a podcast this quarter as a way to connect with entrepreneurs considering buying a GetintheLoop franchise while at the same time, we are creating an internal podcast exclusively for our team. It’s another way we are innovating our approach to communication and culture. The one thing we’ve known from very early on is that culture builds from within, and together. It’s something that continues to evolve, and it builds like a snowball.
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