Joy and I drove to St. Augustine twice this weekend. We drove there and back once and stayed over night once for a three day symposium that my future franchisor was holding in St. Augustine.
Sunday Night
The first night there wasn't a whole ton of fun for Joy. We had just driven two hours across Florida to some social function that was slightly out of Joy's comfort range. To make matters worse, we had slept in and had a really late breakfast. Then we totally forgot about lunch so by the time we were in St. Augustine Joy was really hungry. I didn't stop to get anything to eat for her along the way, either, and that made things worse. My thought was that she had packed a good deal of food to eat just for the trip, and barely touched it the whole time.
Anyway, we arrived hungry and got into a bit of a fight. That made the night worse for Joy even though things calmed down once food was found. There was a really funny moment though! Joy was wanting food this whole time before the event started, and I was motioning her to just wait and we'd have dinner with everyone else. Well, Joy didn't want to walk in to the ballroom and be hungry the whole time, so we went on this long hunt for food only to come back to the ballroom and see this extravagant spread of appetizers and bar ready for us to enjoy. I get a kick out of that, but Joy... she doesn't think it is that funny.
This first symposium dinner was pretty neat for us, because we sat at a table with the corporate comprtoller, one of the top three producing franchisees, and a couple who just started out less than a year ago. This was great because they joined us in succession and we got to talk at length with each couple and get to know them and get some advice for our new business.
We had to participate in this dinner, which actually worked in my favor for that night. The one time Joy was happy was when we went up to introduce ourselves to everyone involved in the company... all the corporate empoyees, the franchisees, the president, etc. Normally, I am really nervous with public speaking, but that night I did a pretty decent job. Joy did an even better job with a quick one-liner she tacked onto the end of my introduction, but that made everything even sweeter. We got aplause and cheering, and Joy was on cloud 9.
Monday
The next day we didn't need to be in St. Augustine until 1:45PM, so we decided to drive back and forth instead of getting a hotel. Joy's job gives her a car, pays for the gas, and takes a fixed amount of money from her paycheck to cover personal use of her car so it is a lot cheaper for us to just drive back and forth than pay $100+ for a night in a hotel.
So we drove back to St. Augustine and spent about ten minutes trying to find a bed and breakfast. We needed a place to park the car, because that cost $10 for all day parking pretty much anywhere close to the Casa Monica (that's where the symposium was being held.) We had checked out a few, but Joy wanted to do deeper research and get a better deal, so I told her that she could pick out the B&B, and I would go on ahead to the symposium.
At the symposium we watched a video of one of the production processes/facilities. Then we had this panel discussion, which I thought was really fun and awesome to attend -- considering I am not yet a franchisee. Basically, every major player in corporate sat at a table while all the franchisees took turns grilling them with questions, complaints, suggestions for improvement, etc. It was awesome. I got to hear first-hand all the problems that the franchisees had during 2005. Attending this panel disccussion helps tremendously in my decision making process. At the end of the discussion and throughout the rest of the symposium several of the big franchisees came to me and gave me statements about how this isn't how it always is, and that people were just voicing the worst of the worst complaints, comments, etc because this is the one time of the year to do it in front of everyone. Another cool aspect of the panel discussion was finding out how to affect change within the company. Basically, if you have a problem, you need to talk to the other franchisees to get it fixed or have it be really legitimate on its own -- then the company will do what it can to help you. A few people didn't get help though, because they had no support and their desires cost a lot of money -- money everyone else wasn't willing to pay.
At the end of Monday night we had a even more extravagant dinner. Joy was so pleased and impressed with the food that the hotel had for us. We had some of the best quality shrimp we'd ever had, stone crab claws, pork tenderloins with hollandaise sauce, OK, you get the idea. tons of fancy entrees, vegetables, and desserts. It was nice.
The end of this dinner was really fun and informative too. It was an awards banquet so I got to find out who the top producers are, what you can win from year to year, and how much business the very top producers do in any given year. This is helpful to me, because I also got to know what the "Rookie of the Year" franchisees did to win and now I can gauge about how well I can do in this business in my first year and in years following.
Posted by David at January 18, 2006 02:58 PM