When it comes to policies and procedures, most quick lube operations have them. But what about a company "playbook," otherwise known as a model of how each franchisee's employees should conduct each service to have the same quality and consistency every single time. Yes, like policies and procedures, rules can be written out on a piece of paper somewhere for employees to reference, but how do you get your employees to embrace the model on their own? Former Take 5 exec turned franchisee, Pete Frey, has been in the industry for over 30 years and knows the playbook front to back. In fact, he's the one who wrote it. Here's how he implemented his playbook into Take 5's culture and his own franchise.
Competing With Each Other, Not Against
Once Frey and his team established what the Take 5 model and playbook were going to look like, they created programs built around it to implement into Take 5's stores. One of which included holding friendly competitions between the store's then 21 locations.
"We'd compete; we'd let the shops compete against one another," Frey says. "We called that a Crew Challenge."
Frey and the team would have someone from the community come to the shop and get a complimentary oil change from the crew members. And during it, another franchise location would be watching, grading and scoring how the crew performed the service from the time in the shop all the way until the vehicle left. Frey says every single little thing down to the last detail was graded.
Before, when the shop was made up of only 21 stores in the early days, according to Frey, that's how they implemented the playbook into the shop.
"It wasn't about what you sold. It wasn't about the ticket average," Frey says. "It was all about what was on that sheet, what was in that playbook."
Not only were crew members able to memorize every single detail of the playbook, but it was fun, too. And Frey says it brought all of the franchises together toward one common goal.
"I think that builds a tremendous amount of comradery from store to store and it creates a more 'we're all in the same boat rowing together' instead of 'it's my shop versus your shop' atmosphere," Frey says."It builds character amongst your people."
Executing on a Smaller Scale
Frey says the company has continued it to some degree today. However, with the company's 500-plus stores, it's much harder to execute.
"It becomes difficult to bring crews from one store to the next when you have 500+ [franchises], but I still think that you can do things like that in a smaller setting or environment," Frey says.
Frey says it's extremely challenging to take on these crew challenges on a larger scale. If he was a five or six store operator (currently, he's just a one-man operation), however, it'd be just the right amount to hold crew challenges at least quarterly between his shops.
