Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2011 | Page 18

Grow Market Lead

By KEITH GERSON

Anatomy
of a Start-Up

Our Brand’s
Secret Ingredient
Part 3

EarthFruits Yogurt Café’s HR recipe

I

t’s not our products. It’s not our
price. Pay attention as I’m about
to lay out our secret competitive
weapon right here for all to see.
Are you ready? It’s our people!
Okay, not exactly a revolutionary
strategy, but how many companies actually transcend their category through
their customer service? I might be
getting ahead of myself in the sequential story line, but we actually
made a five-store franchise sale to a
franchise prospect who completed the
entire discovery process with a leading
competitor and was given a contract
to execute. Although she was passionate about the other concept, she realized she had been going to several of
their yogurt shops at least five times a
week for two years, and their employees never even bothered to learn her
name, let alone her favorite products
and preferences. Service is truly our
advantage, from the executive level
down through the employee ranks.
We believed a well-executed human
resources plan, consistently delivered
from location to location, would provide our EarthFruits Yogurt franchise
system with its greatest competitive
advantage—but it would have to become an inextricable part of our franchise culture and DNA.
In my experience, delivering the

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