in the business of franchising globally, and his aid of specialization is franchise relationships, which is one of the key factors of the franchise system. And I have Mr. Garmariah, Chairman of the Franchise India Group, and my other brother, who will be joining me for this broadcast this afternoon. Some of the house rules will be displayed on the screen, so we would be taking a lot of Q&A in the end of the session, and we also would be encouraging a lot of interactions through chat option, which is available. What we want to achieve in almost one hour is an opportunity to sort of understand from a global point of view how franchising is operating in present times, and we also want to look at understanding from Greg and Gaurav as to how the relationships during these times have been affected. Without much due, I would request Greg to sort of make a quick introduction about yourself, and you also have a small presentation which you can start. Thank you, Sachin, and I'll be sharing my slides, so I need to have the slide share option, please, as a co-host, which to be able to show my slides to everyone. So if you could arrange for that, please. Thank you. You could die now. For calming, may need to do that. Thank you. You could die now. Still not there. Apologies to everyone on the call. Here we go. There it is. Tremendous. Thank you. So I love the way that you published my picture, by the way, with a guitar plectrum background, because I'm actually a guitar fanatic, and I've got 40 guitars, and sometimes I weave the music into my presentations. But I've been running the Franchise Relationships Institute now for 32 years, and we are passionate about the importance of healthy franchise relations between franchisors and franchisees. Guru, before I just start on the presentation, the formal presentation, is there anything that you wanted to say or set up to get us on the right direction? Sure. Thank you, Greg. I think today we would like to be more on the listening side, because we have the greatest minds in the room, and I've always maintained Greg over my 23 years of experience, and I'm a little straight on that. You are the greatest minds in franchising I've seen, because you have been able to articulate the most important part of the franchise ecosystem, which is relationships, and the way you have defined what we all, I mean, all our human lives are all about relationships. But just to define, and you know, micro-defined rather, I would use it, this relationship, and how you build abilities in organizations, companies, their team members to understand the importance of relationship, and how they can build that within franchise systems has been remarkable. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. Now, look, I do have a hope for this session, and I'm talking to everybody who's listening in at the moment. I'd like to make this interactive and to have you engage. So I've got a question to put to everyone in a moment, and it's going to involve you opening up your chat box, the chat where you can type in, and my question is this. I'd like to know what is your physical energy at the moment?  If you're a 10, you are feeling fantastic at the moment, and you could be anywhere in between that, and Sashi's jumped in, fantastic, Sanjay's jumped in with a 10. So I'd like everybody on the call to jump in and tell me what your energy number is, and I've got a reason for doing this too.  So I'm seeing, oh, they're flooding in, and I think from the numbers that are flooding in now, I think our average is 8.3 at the moment, which is extremely high. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon for you there at the moment, is it? That's right. Well, it's 7.30 in the evening for me. My energy is pretty good. I'm about a nine, but my question for everybody is this. I want you to think about whether you found that the process of thinking about and naming your energy number caused the energy number to go up a little bit. So I'd like people just to think about this because this is actually a technique. And when we reflect inward and we think about what's going on for us at the moment, what are we thinking? What are we feeling? And we give it a name, we call, I call this name, name it to tame it if you're feeling a little bit unwell. It actually causes your brain to focus and your functioning level goes up to a higher level, which is particularly useful if you're under a lot of stress at a present time to sit back, reflect, stop and ask yourself, what is my energy level at the moment or what's distracting me or what's on my brain? So that's a little technique that I'm sharing with you. We use it all the time and in our business. And it's very important if you're going into a very important meeting, like this is a very important meeting for me in talking to you at the moment. Now, in terms of the content that we're going to cover around relationships are likely to feel strained at the moment, both Gurav and Sushen, you were both mentioning about personal relationships and business relationships are both important in life. And the thing I love about franchising is that it's very personal because for the franchisees, they're often investing their life's savings in a business opportunity and they can be extremely passionate about it for that reason. But that can also cause relationship tensions because people do get very emotional at times if they're stressed. We'll talk about the three characteristics of sustainably great franchise networks. I'll share some research on how franchisee attributes and how a culture that develops in a franchise organisation affects the performance of the franchisees as well as the franchisor and the experience of the customers. And I've been asked to share a little bit about what's been going on strategically in the Australian franchising sector at the moment. It's a very interesting, quite a mature market here. And I think there are some lessons that you may want to take on board in the Indian market. And for those Indian companies that are coming to Australia, I understand there's quite an interest. I think it's important that you are across some of these trends and things that are going on in Australia. And of course, we'll take some questions as well from everybody. So I want everyone just to reflect for a moment and just to imagine that you were sailing this boat across a lovely calm bay. There's a gentle breeze blowing. The hull in the boat has got a little bit of rot. And maybe there's some tears in the sails, but they haven't caused any major problems to date. And then along comes COVID-19 and along comes the shutdown and the stress and the uncertainty. And now we're in rough seas and there's strong winds and our boats getting bashed around and our sails are stretched to the limit. And the rot in the hull perhaps might be, you know, giving way and water starts to come in. And we're pretty soon going to be in trouble. And relationships are like this. So in calm, predictable times, any underlying tensions are going to remain there. They're not going to cause any major problems like the rot that's sitting in a boat. But as the stress of change and uncertainty hits and stretches our coping resources, our existing relationship weaknesses are going to be exposed. Now, some of you may have experienced an increase in relationship tensions in recent times, particularly if there's been some unresolved issues. And I don't know whether the two brothers on the call here have had any relationship issues, but you two guys seem to get on extremely well together. But it's normal during periods of intense change, not just at work, but also on the family and the home front that, you know, like families have been locked in lockdown together and in Australia. And I'm sure in many countries the governments have said, we don't want you going out. And so children are at home and people are trying to run their businesses at home.  However, there are things we can do to strengthen our relationships and to repair relationships that may be a little strained. And I want to now give you eight tips, tips will just jump into these that we've found are useful. So through our research, we have found that even in calm times, when you're in a franchise network together, and you're sharing a brand, and everyone's reputation is affected by the actions of everybody else, there is often a certain level of tension and such and we were talking about this earlier, you were saying you'd like me to cover the interdependence of a franchise relationship and how we can get this operating at a really nice high level. So here's eight tips to resolve any issues that you may find in your relationships. And this relates to not just work, but it could be at home, could be with your colleagues, it could be with your staff, or if you're a franchisee with your franchise or if you're a franchise or with your franchisees. And the first one is to genuinely listen to what the other person is saying with an open mind. And I'm referring here to really listening for understanding, not just the words that people are saying and it helps if you can paraphrase back to someone what you understand they just said and why it's important to them. This is extremely powerful and franchise or executives on the call, if there's one thing I want you to take away from this session, is the importance of showing empathy and empathy is demonstrating that you understand someone else's point of view and that you're showing a certain level of respect and compassion from their perspective. Now the second point is to focus on what you have in common. Now in the case of franchisees and franchisors there's two things that are connecting you and that is your brand that you're sharing and your love and commitment to your customers. So this is often a good thing to come back to and say what is the right thing to do here that's going to be right for the brand and right for the customers if there's some disagreements. The third thing is that it's very helpful to show up express your appreciation even for small positive gestures that people make. A thank you or an expression of appreciation costs nothing but it actually stimulates good feelings in other people and those feelings are very powerful. So don't underestimate the importance of being grateful. The next point is about forgiveness and it's one of those words it's easy to say oh yes forgive and forget but I often see situations where people feel resentful they feel their franchise or their franchises have done the wrong thing and they hang on to that and it uses up a tremendous amount of emotional energy and it leads to distraction and it actually can lead to a corruption in the culture. So you know and it physically can create ill health if people are holding on to resentment and anger so genuinely letting things go is extremely important. The fifth point is about we call it nipping things in the bud so what that is is if something is niggling you or bothering you don't let it build up conflict never just appears out of nowhere it's often a build up over time until someone says something and then the other person explodes because there's been this build up of frustration so it's good to just be able to express yourself take responsibility for your emotions and say look I am feeling a little bit frustrated by this and here's why and I've even got a suggestion of what might help here and the next point is about valuing differences so my wife I love my wife dearly which is extremely the opposite to me in personality and why would I want to marry someone who is exactly the same as me because it's the differences that make up the whole in life and if we look at high performing teams they've always got a diversity of personalities and a diversity of experience but sometimes we get frustrated by the differences because people don't think the same way as we do so I think there's a lot of value in reminding ourselves that we can understand the point of view of the other person and that creates the whole now here's the rub in franchising franchisors are often tied up strategically they're planning they're in their head offices it's very easy to lose connection with the the real world of what's going on in customer land whereas the franchisees are experiencing customers and what customers are looking for day in day out so smart franchisors listen very carefully to the franchisees perspective on things number seven is my favorite and that is about having a growth mindset so what is a growth mindset I would define it simply is that I am focused on improving myself rather than proving myself so when we're trying to prove ourselves we justify and when we try and justify and prove that we're right what does that do to the other person it makes them wrong right and nobody feels good about being wrong so it takes a lot of courage and humility to hold strong opinions loosely and I find it's very useful if you can have a curious mindset and really try and understand almost like a journalist try and understand the other person's point of view sometimes it lowers your defensiveness and it builds a much more strong not only do you learn something about how the other person's feeling but it also builds that respect and I'm going to come back to the importance of respect in a few minutes and finally don't feel too proud if you've got attention in the franchise relationship to seek help from a trusted advisor a colleague or a professional if you need it I have often bought in a facilitator in my own business from time to time to help us resolve any sticky issues so I'm just going to pause for a moment because we've been talking about the importance of relationships and I've got a question for everybody on the call I think you'll enjoy reflecting on this and then I want you to type in your thoughts into the chat box and the question is this what is something that you've done recently to help maintain a healthy relationship at work or home can be the smallest thing but I'd like everyone to just type in something into the feed something that you've done recently that you think has helped to strengthen or repair a relationship with anyone but let's see who's going to jump in first thank you Prem so Prem is I love that Prem Prem is a listening and just sometimes we need to zip up our mouth and listen and we've got some Cheyenne is saying he feeds around 20,000 people so he must have a big network of stores again we've got giving and taking valuing other people showing that you truly care giving other people space we've got someone is saying giving job opportunities that's terrific Prachi to 100 people sharing the burden with my wife I'm sure your wife would appreciate that hurrying hard yes Prachi saying he donates to an orphanage that's terrific we've got Prince saying that he gives his services for free and that builds trust so there's a terrific list there and and my guess is as you're typing these you're feeling pretty good because it reminds you it doesn't take a lot of effort to to strengthen a relationship but it's those little things that can often make the difference Prachi saying that she's doing counselling for domestic violence victims wonderful so Guruv I'm going to move on now and I'm going to talk a little bit about the franchise relationships institute and why we do what we do and then I'm going to share some research with the group is that good absolutely good and then he sent ice cream to all his franchises and I love the last one there Rajiv is just saying listening in again I think that's terrific and Janak saying they loved it right so let's just talk about franchise relationships institute for a moment look before I founded this organization 32 years ago I was a psychologist and I was doing research on the brain at Monash University in Melbourne and Frank but but while I was studying to be a psychologist I had worked in company owned stores for a bakery group and I became pretty good at the baking work and serving customers and making bread and so on and a multi-unit franchisee called me and he asked me Greg would you like to come into business with me I'm about to open my third store and you can you could be my operations manager and my business partner and I thought that would be a great idea so I took out a loan and I became a multi-unit franchisee and I was particularly interested during my time as a franchisee about my relationship with the franchisee and then I was asked to join the franchisee so I experienced life as a franchisee or executive heading up the marketing department and the operations department but what I in reflection what I was finding is that when I was a franchisee I often seemed to be at loggerheads with the franchise or team and arguing with them and saying telling them to stop bossing me around because I owned the business but when I joined the franchise or team I seem to often be at loggerheads with my franchisees because I was wanting them to do things and they were telling me to stop bossing them around because they were their own independent business owners now and I did seek out some help to try and understand the nature of the relationship because very interesting and because not an employee employer relationship and it's not a business partnership strictly but I couldn't find any books I couldn't find any training programs to be how to be a successful franchisee or how to be a successful franchisor so I founded the Franchise Relationships Institute to find answers to these franchise relationship challenges that I was seeing everywhere all my colleagues in other franchise groups were experiencing the same thing and I wanted to share our research and our insights with the rest of the world like we're doing right now so as specialists in the psychology of the franchise relationships we're passionate about our mission which is to foster the creation of profitable partnerships in the global franchising sector and over the past 32 years we've conducted research and education programs with over 500 different brands across 16 countries and we're continually identifying what does best practice look like and creating tools and models and books and education programs and we're extremely passionate about what we do and this is I want people to pay particular attention to what I'm about to say because I don't want you to make the same mistake that I see so many people making when they get into the franchising business now I thought that because I knew everything about baking and selling bread right that I could effectively lead and motivate my franchisees now the reality is that all franchisees and franchisors on the planet are in two businesses you're in the business of selling your product or service your ice cream your pizzas whatever it might be whatever service you're delivering and you've got to be excellent at that but you are also in the business of franchising and to be in the business of franchising whether you're a franchise or all franchisee you need to understand the nature of the relationship and how to effectively collaborate and Gurav I'm sure you've seen this where people are amazing at their product or service but they don't know how to lead effectively and how to influence and collaborate I can see you not in there yeah absolutely yeah so over the past 32 years we've worked with hundreds of brands like these and lots of others and we've learnt that all franchisors have similar challenges all franchisees have similar challenges in this challenge of collaboration but the best franchisors in particular I want to just talk from the franchise or perspective for a moment draw on the same best practices so whether you're in dog washing or cleaning or making bread or selling clothes there are similar practices in franchising that translate across industries now what I found that there's only about 20% of the hundreds of franchise networks that we've worked with that I would classify as being sustainably great in terms of how they operate their businesses and the reason these people are in the top 20 20% is they consistently do certain things now we would put these people in the top 20% because they're growing consistently their franchisees are profitable the franchise or is profitable they've got low levels of disputation and their market share is also growing so let's look at the three characteristics of these sustainably great networks and the first one is that they do understand that they're in the business of franchising now it starts with ongoing well managed innovation and understanding that a franchisor's capacity to innovate is always going to outstrip the franchisee's ability to accommodate so in other words the franchise or is often going to be pushing franchisees to do things and the franchisees are going to be resisting all right now this is particularly important at the moment also because all franchise networks have had to innovate very quickly to adapt to the pandemic and the challenges that this is is thrown to all of us now to innovate well you're always going to go through the sigmoid curve so you can see the curve you've all seen this curve before I call it the curve of life it applies to every living thing on the planet people plants animals careers products services and of course businesses now the sigmoid curve predicts that when something new is initiated in a business like your your launching a new product or I've got one client who in 10 days they transitioned 10 000 franchisees from operating live in terms of their links with their customers to delivering their products and services remotely it was amazing but that's an example of quick and rapid change now you're always going to experience an initial dip in performance when you introduce something new like the changes that we're experienced like working from home most people when they were forced to start working from home were struggling with how to use zoom or whatever platform they're using how to connect to the office how to communicate with their with their teams and so on but over time we start to get better and and we start to our performance goes up now we can do our best to accommodate and grow and often we will but nothing is forever and so even when things start to go well if we don't innovate again we're going to see a maturation and a drop in performance so it's important that franchisors are innovating constantly and we find the best franchisors innovate they they they get the new innovation through and then they'll start innovating again and again and again now this curve also applies to every franchisee who's listening on the call today as well your individual business will also go through this curve and in five years even when your business is going really well you are going to need to reinvent yourself you may bring in a partner you may renovate your premises you may move to a new location you may become a multi-unit franchisee to keep yourself motivated and growing all right so this is absolutely critical and the next thing that I want to talk about when we talk about excellent franchisors is clarity of purpose so if you're in the franchising business yes but it's absolutely essential that you are clearer about your values as an organization what do you stand for and why do you exist now our best clients are constantly talking about the difference they make to the local community the difference they make to employing people the difference that they make to the health of the economy and so on and I think you can't talk about this stuff enough this is what creates a healthy culture and the other thing they do is they put all major decisions through a filter so like it's like a coffee filter I've got here and the question is is this going to be right not just for our brand and for our culture but for the various stakeholder groups all right now one question I want everybody on the call to think about for a moment is who are the most important stakeholders in your franchise network and I'd like everybody please to pick like if I was to ask you to prioritize when we look at customers shareholders franchises members of the franchise or team staff who who work for the franchise company who's the most important and I'd like you to pop in now I'm not saying there's a right or wrong answer here because people have different perspectives but I'm just interested in your perspective so some people are saying the staff who deliver some people are saying the customers some people are saying the franchisees some people are saying customers and franchisees that's Sarnil you're cheating there because I only want you to give me one Sachin you and Gaurav might like to put in so most people are saying the customers now and Janik saying it's absolutely the staff now this is very interesting now Richard Branson would say it's the staff if you have happy staff they will deliver excellent service to the customers Sarnil says Gandhi says customers are God now I want to introduce you to somebody so this is Cheryl Bachelder now I interviewed Cheryl Bachelder a few years ago when she was the CEO of Popeyes Chicken very successful franchise network in North America 2600 stores so this is a group you'd want to pay attention to and she'd previously led Popeyes through five years of consistent sales and profit growth they had a 400 increase in their share price from when she came in a CEO to five years later and they had a cure franchisees wanting more stores and she told me that the first question that she tackled with her executive team when she became the CEO was this question who is our most important stakeholder which is the question we're all wrestling with now she took them all the way on a retreat and they locked themselves up the days and after discussion and debate you know the marketing person said it's the customers and the finance person saying it's the shareholders and the operations managers saying it's the franchisees and the HR managers saying no no it's the staff right so they're debating and everyone's got a point of view but they did come to a conclusion and they decided the franchisee is the most important stakeholder and they figured that if the franchisee's doing a great job in running their business and and motivating their staff and leading their staff the customers are going to receive great service sales are going to go up the company shareholders are going to get a great return on their investment investment and everyone's going to be happy and she said from that point when they decided the franchisee was the key stakeholder everything changed and they put every decision through this filter how is this going to impact on our franchisees they ran regular satisfaction surveys for the franchisees they set up franchise advisory committees to listen to the franchisees whenever even when they they rolled out a new store design at the convention and that spent you know hundreds of thousands of dollars developing and setting up these prototypes of store designs the franchisees came to the convention and they asked what do you think and they said we don't like it it's too expensive and they were pointing out all the flaws now the store design team got very defensive and they're saying well you know we've researched this and Cheryl said no we're going back to the drawing board and for the next 18 months they had to redesign the whole thing and she said but that delay was a win in the update it's you know lose the battle win the war because when they did roll out the store designed that the franchisees had had input to into 90 percent of franchisees signed up for it immediately and sales started to grow as a result of this because everybody was on board so you understand what i'm saying here we need to get the franchisees on board we need to treat them seriously as a strategic partner now i've always argued this that if the franchisees are doing a great job everything else is going to fall into place now let's look at the third characteristic now of best practice franchise networks and that's where we come into this issue of collaboration a collaboration means working together to maintain a competitive edge and that means that the the franchisees are focusing on the things that they need to focus on the franchise always focusing on the things they need to focus on there is a middle overlapping area which is the collaboration area but collaboration also means we're not doubling up and this is how we create a nice healthy high performance culture now there's a word accountability which is different to responsibility so we can all be responsible for working together as a team and creating the culture but accountability you can't share the buck has to stop with somebody so the franchisee is accountable for three things let's look at them the first is to turn every customer into an advocate for the business and for the brand by delivering exceptional customer service and an exceptional experience franchise all can't do that franchisee is leading the team at the at the pointy end of the business the second thing is the franchisee must focus on maximising their profit by growing revenue and controlling costs and the third thing is they must participate constructively in the franchise network by engaging in activities and supporting important brand initiatives if you aren't prepared to get behind the initiatives and do the right thing by the brand you should not become a franchisee now the franchise or also has three accountabilities from the first one is leadership to lead with credibility now that means that you make good research based or evidence based decisions you are trustworthy and transparent with the information and you are caring about the personal and business success of your franchisees the second thing is you need to provide relevant support that matches the evolving need of each franchisee and the third thing is you need to protect the brand and not allow anyone to do anything that could embarrass or damage the reputation of everyone else right now I'm going to show you something very interesting this is in one of the books I wrote called profitable partnerships and it's a case study now these are sales figures of four stores that when I was operating a region in the Brumbies network and I was very interested that the sales changed significantly at a certain point in all these particular stores and this sale increased suddenly it was not driven by marketing it was not driven by product innovation it was not driven by any change to the store location or design what changed these points is the franchisee who was running the stores so in that top one the blue one there a company manager for the store became a franchisee and suddenly the sales started to increase so never underestimate the significant role a franchisee plays in driving the performance of the business and for all the franchisors on the call your royalty revenue will come from the performance of the franchisee so you have a vested interest in making sure your franchisees are performing at a high level I have a question for everybody on the call and if you like you can put your response in the chat box I'm interested in what percentage of a store's performance do you think is driven by the franchisee the person as opposed to the brand the location the processes all the support that they're receiving so you might like to so I've got some percentages coming in some people are saying 60 percent 70 percent when I asked this question to a group of 60 franchisor CEOs once there was a guy sitting there and he said a hundred percent franchisee and I said oh that means that your brand is worthless and your systems are worthless he said 50 50 but look I can tell you from our research so we've got some interesting figures coming in there it is about 40 percent now don't underestimate 40 percent this is on average because the brand should be very powerful the location of the business your business systems can make a huge difference to the performance of the business but 40 percent is huge and I want to now talk about how the attributes of a franchisee interact with the attributes of the franchisee or team to drive performance and you'll find grab you'll find this particularly interesting because I know that you're you're a very thinking sort of a guy and interested in the latest research now we did a study looking at the relationship between people and performance because as a psychologist this absolutely fascinates me and I love researching this stuff and we've done a lot of research in this and this is a study it's been published in a very prestigious journal called the Journal of Business and Psychology now two attributes in particular that we know drive sales and profitability are what's called proactivity and brand passion now proactivity is where a person makes things happen they take accountability they say if it is to be it is up to me that's a proactive person's philosophy brand passion is I love my brand and I am going to talk about the difference we make and how fantastic our products and services are to anyone who will listen to me if you've got a franchisee with that attitude they create a very vibrant culture around them which drives performance so we can prove through research that brand passion and proactivity drive profitability and drive a great customer experience that what about the franchise or a team what influence might they have on a franchisee's performance so we looked at this we asked nearly 1800 franchisees from 74 franchise networks how the level of love and support they were feeling from their franchise or team so in other words do they feel there's a supportive franchising culture and there's a couple of questions there we asked the franchisees to respond to in the survey do you feel that you're treated with respect and do you feel the franchise or team genuinely cares about your success and what we discovered is when the franchisee disagrees with these statements and they don't feel the love and respect their proactivity drops their brand passion drops and that has a dampening effect on their performance all right however the good news is when the franchisee's agree with the statement and they feel that they are part of a supportive culture and that the franchise or does care about them and so on their proactivity goes up they get more motivated they get more energy and that drives the customer experience and that drives performance and we get this beautiful virtual cycle royalties go up the franchise or has better revenue and everybody's happy so you understand that this care this culture of caring is so important to the financial performance and to the experience that customers are going to ultimately have now i'm going to say a few more things and then we're going to open it up to to q&a that earlier i introduced you to a concept called the sigmoid curve and we discussed this in terms of the franchise or network but i want to look at this from the impact of a franchisee for the moment now every franchisee goes through this journey there are stages so the first stage is we call this investigation should i or do i want to join this franchise network is this something that matches with my aspirations and my values once the franchisee signs the franchise agreement they then move into initiation now initiation is where they're going to be trained by the franchise department and they're going to learn all about how to run the business and so on and then the rubber hits the road and they open their business and we call this the perspiration stage now my point is this i said earlier that the level of service and the nature of the support that you provide to your franchisee has to change as the franchisee goes through this journey so franchisees in the perspiration stage are very stressed out they need a lot of hand-holding a lot of reassurance and a lot of practical support but gradually their confidence grows their sales grow they reach make even they start to make money and this is beautiful we call this the consolidation stage i am now all across my business and i've now got staff who know what they're doing i've got regular customers coming back i've got regular cash flow and i'm in a really nice place however as we learned before nothing is forever and if we do not reinvent ourselves as franchisees our sales are going to start to decline so we call this the maturation stage and it's up to the franchise or sometimes to give us a little push or a poke to remind us that we need to perhaps reinvent ourselves and reinvest in our business and we call this the reformation stage so six stages six different types of support franchisees need and everybody in the world at the moment is going through the reformation stage because all our businesses have been turned upside down now gurav you asked me to talk a little bit about australia and what's been going on in australia and i've got a photo of someone when i put this up a few weeks ago someone and i said who is this they said i was at jk rolling you know who wrote that harry potter books no this lady is an investigative journalist called adel ferguson and adel ferguson has written a series of articles she's a very good journalist a very thorough on the franchising sector all right and now we're all moving through volatile and uncertain times at the moment but the franchising sector is also been moving through volatile times particularly in australia now in 2015 adel ferguson targeted the 7-11 brand all right in australia because that there was systemic underpayment of staff by franchisees within the system and as a result of a series of articles and television documentaries that appeared on a current affair and so on it led to a change in the laws in australia and it all happened very quickly to make franchisors legally responsible for the conduct of their franchisees particularly where the franchisees are paying and managing their staff correctly now this sent a massive shockwave through the franchising sector not only in australia but globally particularly in in america because in america there's been a debate raging now for over six years on whether franchisors should be held accountable if franchisees are not doing the right thing by their franchise if the franchisees aren't doing the right thing by the staff this is a legal debate going on with the national labour relations board and it's called joint employer liability but this is actually coming to australia as a law now so um that's been one thing that that has occurred because some franchisees were doing the wrong thing and we don't you don't want this because it puts enormous um compliance costs on everybody and now the franchisors are spending time and money checking up on payroll of franchisees when they should be focusing on other things now Adele Ferguson then went after a company called RFG and RFG were a multi-brand franchisor they've got seven or eight different brands and she exposed poor conduct by the franchisor at the time in how franchisees were being supported and treated and um but then she started writing articles about the whole franchising sector accusing the whole sector of being greedy and taking advantage of franchisees and so this led to a number of bad newspaper articles and the franchising brand suffered and as a result of that the federal government in australia did an inquiry and they had a parliamentary inquiry and last year the parliamentary inquiries report was handed down and this is significant the report was called fairness in franchising and it focuses particularly on franchisors being transparent in how they deal with their franchisees and being fair and respectful in how they deal with the franchisees now we've been arguing for 30 years that this is is absolutely vital that franchisors are fair and respectful and transparent in terms of how they lead but now in australia this is becoming a legal responsibility of franchisors to do this and it's a pity because i think this is just a basic thing that everybody should be doing now because of covid the the the implications of this report haven't yet been set in stone in terms of changes to the law but my prediction is in the in the next six months the government are going to come out with some changes to franchising laws in australia that are going to force franchisors to be more transparent about how they're running their businesses how they're pricing their supplying products and services to franchisees the level of any rebates that are being passed back to franchisors how they're spending their marketing funds and so on now to complete before i we open it up to questions we've just completed a major study on franchisee satisfaction with over 7 000 franchisees looking at what drives franchises to have what we call an ace mindset now an ace mindset is where franchisees are advocates for the franchise network so in other words if someone asked one of your existing franchisees what's it like and would you recommend this business the existing franchisee says i love this business and you're crazy if you don't you know buy one of these businesses that's an advocate the second thing is whether the franchisees want to reinvest and expand into multiple units and invest in their own unit and the third one is being fully engaged in supporting the initiatives that's that constructive participation i talked about earlier now the biggest predictor of whether or not franchisees are going to have an ace mindset is whether or not their expectations are being met now i'm not just talking about how much money they're going to be making but also how they feel they're being treated do they feel they're being treated respectfully do they feel that the franchise or is being fair with them in terms of not doing special deals for some franchisees but not with them so i would argue that expectations and the management of expectations particularly in the early stages of the relationship is probably one of the most important things that a franchisor and a franchisee need to align on now i'm going to pause at that point and i'll stop sharing my screen and i'll just pass back to you gaurav and sachin thank you very much it was really full of learning then i think it was very very helpful for all the audience there sachin over to you you have a lot of questions for greg and let's get going on your mute thank you great that was wonderful you know franchise relationship surely is the is the key to any system success my first question is that how do you prioritize you know you usually speak about this personal journey and business journey so so how do you differentiate and how do you prioritize great question now the two journeys often there's a paradox here and they often cause confusion so i said earlier that when a franchisee starts the business and they're struggling and then the group the business starts to grow and develop sales start going up and they start to make money all right and you would think that at this point people get happy right because my business is succeeding and you know what happens the opposite so as the franchisee gets more experience and starts to understand how much profit they're making their satisfaction starts to drop would you believe that so we have another we have another curve one curve the the satisfaction starts high and it goes down and and we have names for these stages so we say the franchisee is in glee initially and then they start to look at how many fees there's they're paying to the franchise also they go on the fee stage and their satisfaction drops and then they look at how hard they're working and they're saying i'm putting in so much hard work and the business is all about me and what are you doing for me and so we call that the me stage and then they want to break they want to push the franchise all back and say stop telling me what to do and i went through all this as a franchisee right and i call that the free stage and at that point conflict is most likely to occur however sales may be going up while satisfaction is dropping and this is where sitting down together and having these conversations and this is why i opened the session today with those eight tips on how to resolve conflict this is so important for franchisee and franchisor so the two journeys sales are going up profit going up satisfaction is going down but then satisfaction will come back up and then we'll get aligned again normally about two to four years in and also just to add i mean there's a very interesting story i like to share there's a company which we we advised from the start and it was just a startup and and they went to about 200 franchises and the founder invited me to speak to all their franchises and i was sitting in the group and waiting for him to first speak and then i was supposed to speak and he went up and he said look we have done this and we have done that and and we are now successful 200 franchises and we are now bringing a new logo for a brand and we want you to change the boards and new signages you want to do right and somebody sitting behind me said why didn't he pay for us to change the board why should we put money for the board and i was then called to speak and i said look what is this what is all happened when he was he was just a startup he had nothing you bought into his idea you went and put thousands and thousands of dollars into the business you trusted him you trusted the business now the business is built very big you know and everybody is making money but now you don't want to put a thousand dollar more and you want him to pay for this just because what has happened is that there is no excitement left and this all has gone this whole structure is fatigue and that fatigue actually causes a lot of problems and you rightly said unless and until you are able to discover that it gets into very me time and gets even more difficult and most people start placing egos too well you need to do this for me and you know i know better than you yeah most of the competition for great franchises has actually come from the most successful franchises of theirs who actually went on and open up their own brand just because they were very successful and they were not recognized and because they were not recognized they became the biggest competition for the franchise that themselves you know so so that's happens you know this is very important to assess that if somebody is really become well at both sides they bring in active dialogue and start doing it what we call in india we are doing a lot of programs in what we call err how do you encourage recognize and reward continuously your franchises and their belongingness would increase and your belongingness increase then obviously they would stay committed to the network and appreciate the changes excellent and if i could just add something to this guru just from a psychologist perspective that the brain at your brain and my brain and sachin's brain and everybody's brain on the call today is the product of evolution of millions of years all right so all our brains have evolved in a similar way and the the brain is very sensitive to status all right now there's a reason for this because the higher your status if you were a wolf or an ant or a bee or a dolphin or a monkey or a human being the higher you are in the hierarchy the better life you have just a fact right and we subconsciously know this we're born with this knowledge so when people are respected and given that that sense of respect and reward it it it's very the brain loves it and it releases positive chemicals in the brain and people feel good if you treat someone with disrespect and don't give them that sense of importance they get very angry and they can feel very distressed and that can drive people to make decisions that are commercially even not sensible but they're so sort of they feel so strongly about this they'll go and they'll say no i'm going to do this to prove to other people that i can do this because i don't feel that i've been respected i've lost face so that's the first thing so this is from a psychology point of view from a genetic point of view we must recognize and give people respect now the the other part of this is fairness and gurav that case study you gave where people where the franchise or says to the franchisees i want you to spend money the question in the franchisee's mind is is this fair all right and fairness is also programmed into us even my dog if i don't take my dog for his walk at five thirty every day he gets very angry because he feels that's unfair because he's he's expecting that all right so fairness is in the eye of the beholder largely however you need you need to be able to explain to your franchisees why that decision is fair all right so the reason why i'm asking you to spend a thousand dollars is we've spent a hundred thousand dollars on the research to come up with the signage now we're going to share the cost of implementation with you and you are going to get a return on your investment for spending that that's why we feel it's fair it's not because we're telling you to do this absolutely yeah so so thank that's a brilliant case study thank you what else have we got yeah my next question is to gurav you know we speak about relationships and you also run rematch which is one of the largest franchisee scene so so one of the things that normally speaks about the brand passion so what do you want to sort of make this brand passion with a great large one one one twenty five thousand franchisees of rematch and how this is kind of translates how this passion translates into these very large franchisee network he wants to know how to translate passion yeah in the large groups okay so it's very simple that we have a virus going around at the moment all right it's amazingly contagious we should learn from the virus because brand passion is contagious and if you are passionate as a leader that will infect everybody you touch and the higher we talked about hierarchy the higher you go up in the hierarchy the more power you have to infect other people this is how culture is created so if you are in a leadership role you have to look in the mirror every morning and say how do I honestly feel about going to work today how do I honestly feel about my business and if you've lost your sense of purpose you need to dig deep and find it now a few weeks ago I was it was raining and it was winter in Melbourne at the moment and I was tired I'd worked very hard and the following morning I was to deliver a virtual forum we run we run these virtual forums for field managers all right and so I had 50 field managers who I was going to be talking to for 90 minutes and it was nine o'clock at night and I had to go home and prepare for this talk and I started to think oh poor me why I'm gonna have a late night and I'm tired and I suddenly stopped myself and I said Greg what are you doing you started this business to help field managers and to make a difference and tomorrow morning you have the opportunity to touch the lives of 50 field managers and help them and when I reconnected with my sense of purpose I got this surge of energy suddenly my passion came back and I got home I prepared my talk and the following morning I had a ball you know delivering this session so we need to make sure we stay connected this was the second point that I made about high performing franchisors sense of purpose what why do we do what we do and constantly reminding yourself and your team that would be my answer and for a real estate agent to give people the opportunity to own their own home their dream home changes people's lives and that's what they're in the business of doing giving people a better life absolutely and just to add on that I think all great organizations have two very strong things which I've seen and remax is one and and there are all other networks also there's a network which is all over the world called BNI and there is a there is a sense of what to call power of giving you know so unless and until we build this is a culture within and then create a nucleus within the franchise organizations and they should be given only one culture and say power of giving if you are able to continue to sport and give an an honest sport to your franchisees you will sign sooner or later this would start reflecting on them and they were they would start recognizing the importance of the that you were around at that time helping them and if these two things are very clearly defined and we become champions on that and then no conflict between them then the relationship lasts much better absolutely BNI are a client of ours they're a global network they're in 70 countries they've got thousands of franchisees and they have a mantra givers game and I love this so it's the idea that when you give it will come back to you and it's it's very much embedded in their culture and I think this is what you're saying that when we have this attitude of giving and being helpful it's very it's actually physically very good for the brain as well these chemicals released when you are helpful it's called the helpers high so we don't need marijuana and other things we get high on just being helpful and giving and this is a very healthy attitude and philosophy to having business and life absolutely have we got time for any more questions one last one I've been wanting to ask this and this is exciting so one is you know about royalty and royalty you know so you say that the relationship of franchise and franchisee is around royalty which they get but soon it kind of grows into franchisee become the most important part of the network so so and particularly from Australia you have a lot of international franchises so you know how how's it spending out there yes so look it's very important that people get value for money and this comes back to fairness from their royalties and the litmus test there's a couple of litmus tests here so the first thing is could the franchisee make more money and be more successful if they weren't paying royalties and were out inventing their own system and trading under their own brand name right and if that's the case there's something wrong because the competitive edge that comes from being part of a franchise network means that you should be able to charge higher higher prices for your product because the value of the brand people say oh this is wonderful this jacket that I'm wearing actually I bought it in Delhi when I was I came over to talk at your conference and I went to a shop and I could have bought the jacket cheaper at another store but I loved the brand this particular brand was a chain and I was happy to pay more money for this right and happy to because of the value of the brand and I felt a sense of trust in the quality right but also there should be productivity improvements and and buying benefits that enable you to get your cost of goods down that also allow you to make more money this is why people join a franchise network so that's the first thing that are you able to make more money money the second thing is the franchisor should not be making more money from royalty than the franchisee is making from profit all right so if the landlord is making more percentage on revenue than the franchisee is making there's something wrong and if the franchisee is making more money from royalty than the franchisee is making from profit there's something wrong with the model so that there would be a a few thoughts and I'll leave you with this saying and it comes from a franchisee who filled out one of our franchisee satisfaction surveys he said quote when I started in this business I was treated like royalty and now my franchisor treats me like royalties that sums it up and he wasn't very happy that's right it's very valuable and I think it was a learning always meeting you is refreshing our our thoughts and what they are contribution to the industry and franchising we are also looking forward and working closely with Greg's team and trying to see that if we can have a full session and invite him for for having especially CXOs and there are a lot of companies in India we have about 4,500 franchisee systems active in India and I think a lot of top CXOs also need a bit of a learning understand how how franchising is evolved over the times and how they can better their management systems and we would love to do that and get the the CEOs and the executives together from the franchise or team and share our research and knowledge and my CEO Anthony Cannells on the call and Anthony will be nodding his head vigorously because he's passionate also about our products and service you're on mute there Anthony I don't know whether you wanted to say something hello everybody I've been listening to you Greg and you've been in fine form tonight and I think we would love to run some sessions and and and spread the word of positiveness around the franchise industry the franchise sector in in India I think there's a lot of learnings that they can they can come to absolutely absolutely thank you very much thank you very much and thank you everybody. Namaste from India. Namaste.


Hi everyone, Joe for jazzy's casebricks.com doing a quick little random number block randomizer for in case picker team three So this is an 18 team Number block. It's a lot of teams in there, but we but we still discounted a little bit too. So big thanks to everybody Coming up in the next list. That's how it works right there the number blocks But big thanks everybody here for getting into the action right there So took advantage of that value and in the dawn in the rust hanger the dawn risk hanger 10 break Big thanks to those who got in and think and congrats to Brian He got two spots and zoom in got a spot in there as well. So let's roll it Let's randomize each list four and a one five times for each one one two three Four and a one fifth and pound time after five times. We've got zoom in down to Nick's Dover Arzirania With a home run He just broke the record. Yeah, I broke the rookie record for most home runs in the postseason Dust off those Arzirania cards four and a one five times for the numbers one two three four and a one fifth and final time Six down to one All right, zoom in with six Robert with five leaves you out with Chen with zero zoom in with two Nick Benningfield with seven Brian with three Kang with four Brian with nine Corey with eight and Nick with one Let's order these numerically So Chen is gonna get is gonna get any and all redemptions for all of these teams right here Including one of one redemptions Nick you'll still get live one of ones there the break itself coming up in a separate video. I'm Joe I'll see you for that one. Bye. Bye


Get ready for the most festive weekend! WPL heats up from Friday, March 15th with the Eliminator. And we close out the weekend with the hotly contested final on Sunday, match night, 10am in the Eastern Cabin, 9am Jimmy Catine, it's on Sports Max and Sports Max Crickets on the app. Catch the buzz! Stream on the Sports Max app!


Hey everybody, JR Fisher here. Welcome to this morning. It's gosh, the first day of July. I wanna welcome everybody here. And hey, I haven't seen you guys in a while. I've been out for like a week. A week without you guys. Oh my gosh, really tough. But today's gonna be a great session because I'm gonna help you prevent mistakes. All those mistakes that new people make when they go online and they try to sell stuff. So I'm gonna go through all those mistakes today so that you don't have to repeat them because most people are gonna hit on some or if not all of these mistakes. And I don't want that to happen to you. If you're new to the channel, make sure that you subscribe. Hit that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray. If it's red, it's a warning. It's telling you something. And you wanna ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each time I go live or if I upload a video. Make use of that chat box guys. The more you make use of that chat box there in the right, the better off you're gonna be. In other words, if you're participating, if you're part of the conversation, you're gonna be able to learn more and it's really gonna kind of draw you in and it's gonna help you accomplish all those things you wanna accomplish. So I do wanna get right to it today. I do have a free course below. You can grab, you just click and earn and learn all that good stuff. Okay, does it cost you anything? You don't have to have a credit card or anything. So go ahead and grab that free course down there. But I do wanna jump into it today. Today is a really interesting session because it's about mistakes. I mean, we're always talking about how we're gonna do all these things that work. But what about all these things we do that don't work? What about all those things? That's what I wanna talk about today. And I know you think, well, if I get a product and I put it online and I get it designed all cool and all that, then I'm gonna make a lot of money. And it's just not true guys. It's just not true. Just having a website is not gonna make you successful. You've gotta do certain things. You wanna make your e-commerce store the best it can be. You wanna minimize cart abandonment. When people go there and they look at stuff and then they just leave and they never buy it. So you've come to the right place. Even if you're not watching this live guys, I would suggest that you put some comments down there. I will come back and answer any of those comments you put in there. And you don't have to be live to participate in this conversation. Though if you are, you should participate. I mean, why be live and not participate, right? I mean, that's what you wanna do. You would be part of the conversation. So I'm gonna talk about common e-commerce mistakes and there's a difference between just having an online store and having an online store that gives users an awesome experience. And it's not that hard to really do that. Excuse me. Any business owner should be focused on really making it a better store. And that's what I'm gonna help you achieve today in this video. So you do wanna watch to the very end. So let's consider why it's important to avoid these mistakes. People are spoiled as far as a choice to where they can go buy stuff. All these retailers now, they all have websites people can buy from anybody. So why would they buy from you over anybody else? They're unlikely to return if it's an unpleasant experience and you can make it pleasant, you can make it easy. Maybe they'll leave a poor review though, if you don't persuading other people not to come to your website not to buy from you. And we don't want that to happen. All of which highlights the importance of reducing the friction in shopping. And when I say friction, I mean all the things that prevent them from actually buying from you. So what I've done is I've categorized these into several different areas. And the first area I wanna talk about is not understanding your product or your audience. There's that thing, if you build it, they will come. That's just not true. It's the exact opposite of best practice. You don't just build it, you have to build it to where it's gonna work for them. If you don't understand your product or audience, you're gonna be guessing what they want. And if they don't buy it, you won't even know why. Okay, so it's really important to do that. And I'm gonna talk about a couple of ways you can do that too. What you need to do is identify the need of the market. Okay, you wanna serve the market. And by learning what your audience wants and the frustrations they have with existing options, you can offer things that they truly do want. So you can actually look at your competition, see things they're doing wrong, and you can improve those things. It's not harder, it's just different. Then you'll have lots of potential customers all rushing to buy from you and hand you money. And that's what you want. So the first thing I would say when we're talking about this is not understanding your market research. It's really important to go fishing where the fish are. Fishermen don't cast a line in the first pool of water they come to and just hope the fish will come. Instead, they do some research. They go to where the fish already are and they offer something they can't refuse. If you've ever watched, what's the Alaskan show? The Deadliest Catch. They're always moving around to where the fishing spots are. And that's kind of what you have to do. Market research, these fishing holes are all around us. Google searches, Facebook groups, YouTube videos, comments, reviews for your competitors forums. The list is endless. Each of these fishing holes give you a treasure trove of information. From product information to customer service expectations. And these holes are excellent places for you to test the waters of your e-commerce business. You gotta check them out. Now, regularly spend some time just listening to the feedback and use it to target your customers. The conversation that you hear will be invaluable. It really will. The other mistake I see is failing to define who your target audience is. Imagine trying to sell a staircase to somebody who has a one-story house. Now, that's ridiculous, right? You know, it doesn't matter how good the price is. It doesn't matter, you know, the service or any of that stuff. It's the wrong product for the wrong group. And worse yet, they're probably getting irritated by hearing from you. And they may tell your friends and family to ignore you too or block you or to say that you're spam. If this sounds far-fetched, consider this. 56% of consumers believe businesses to have a deeper understanding of their needs. And 51% of consumers believe brands send too much irrelevant content. So we don't wanna do that. At a starting point, think about what the problems are that your customers are gonna have that you could actually solve for them. As you get this information, you can create this buyer persona, what this customer looks like, which can even be used to reach more people who are likely to buy from you. That information would include all kinds of different things. Like I don't know, the preferred platforms, are they on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, where they at? How they actually make purchase decisions. Their interests, their hobbies, demographic information, their age, gender, marital status, income, all those things. If you need examples of how to do this, just go online and look it up. It's not that hard to do. And the next thing I see is pricing products with no research. Now, most people think, well, I'm gonna look at my competitors, I'm just gonna price below them. That's wrong. When you've collected research on who your target audience is and what they want and how much problems you're solving for them, you'll also have an idea of how much your product is actually worth to them. But one of the most common e-commerce mistakes is to avoid this research on pricing. And it's a big problem. If your manufacturing costs are higher than the market is willing to pay, obviously nobody's gonna buy from them. But what if your potential customer would actually pay a premium for a better product? You could actually maybe be charging more. So it's not just what your competitors are charging, it's what they want, what they're gonna receive from this. Let me get my iPad, just die here. I think I don't have enough power to the iPad. I'm not gonna worry about that. I've got you on my phone here, guys, so I can answer your chat right here on my phone. All right. And I think we've had a little problem in our feed here. Is it okay? Let me know if it's okay in that chat box. I know my phone here went out and I don't know if it's just my phone or what's going on here. So let me just try this real quick. And something went wrong. I hope you guys aren't experiencing this on your end. But this is part of going live. This stuff happens. Okay, all right, I'm all right. Yeah, it's working on here now. And don't forget, even though I'm rattling on right now, guys, put your comments, put your suggestions in that chat box there. Start the conversation. Very important that you do that. So the next thing I wanna talk about is improper tech stack, improper tech stack. Now, what is tech stack? Tech stack is all of the technology platforms that you're gonna use. Now, the lowest barrier to entry starting an e-commerce store is a double-edged sword, okay? On one side, you can start today with incredibly low cost. That's true. Great. On the other side, not all tech is equal. From user experience to security to customer retention, choosing the right platforms or tech stack, you know what that is now, for your online business, it is crucial that you do that. It's crucial that you start off with the right things first. So choosing the wrong e-commerce platform. There's a lot of e-commerce platforms out there. I gotta tell you, most of them I don't like. I like Shopify a lot. And we should have a link to Shopify below where you can get a discount on it. So check that out in the description section. And I also like Hartra, okay? The significant difference between e-commerce platforms, some offer only the most basic features and not always an option to upgrade. Now the thing I like about Shopify is that they have great, I mean great customer support. They're gonna be there for you when you have a problem and you will have problems. You're gonna have to talk to customer support. Others may have seen appealing at first, but then they surprise you with hidden costs, making it more expensive than choosing a platform with an upfront fee. Basic e-commerce platforms are less likely to have native customization options, either being reliant on third-party solutions or not having access to such features at all. So I would say go with something like Shopify. On top of that, you wanna use something like Hartra for all your email marketing and that type of thing. The right e-commerce platform will grow with your business which features you'll need. You know, you go to Shopify and it's a beginner one but it's also a very high level one where people are selling hundreds of millions of dollars. So that's very, very important. If you're just starting out, spend some time researching the best e-commerce platforms. There's other good ones out there. I happen to like Shopify. I think it's easy to use. It's very responsive. They have great customer support. This is overall a good one. Now the next one is kind of interesting, not investing in security. This is part of your tech stack. Every new business owner wants to watch their money. Okay, and they don't wanna spend a lot of money. I get it, but people who are scammers have an endless amount of ways to attack your website, including financial fraud, phishing scams, infected links, all kinds of stuff, guys. It's a matter of when, not if your entire store will get targeted in some form and not having the right security in place can be really devastating to your company. So I think it's really important that you do invest in the security upfront and let me just hear it on the screen here with them. Let me get you guys back up here so I can see what's going on. But it's really important that you do that. It's really important that you invest in the security upfront. So don't skip that step. HTTPS appears as a padlock on your browser as shown in a lot of websites. You'll see on your website when you go there. Now, the next thing, creating your own e-commerce CMS, creating your own content management system, which is CMS content management system, to your own requirements can seem appealing. In reality, you're opening yourself up to external frustrations and problems. It sounds great to create your own, but I tell you, people before you have already figured it out and you can just use their platform. Once again, Cartra and Shopify, and you'll find links to both of those in the description after this video is posted to Facebook, or excuse me, to YouTube. So first off, it's really difficult to create your own. That's not easy stuff to do your own. You're gonna need to provide some kind of training. Your security becomes a lot more difficult. The lack of support or integration with other softwares is more difficult. You may underestimate the amount of features that you're gonna need. So really, if you're starting out, grab a platform like Shopify, grab Cartra and use those platforms. If you wanna build your own, you can certainly do it. I don't recommend it. I think it's a big mistake that newbies always do because they're trying to save money. The next mistake I'm gonna talk about is issue with product pages. Your products have to sell themselves.  That's not what's gonna happen. You're gonna need to be where your customers are with pictures, with videos, that type of thing. And I see people making a lot of mistakes like not using social proof, okay? Social proof tells potential customers that your buyers like your products and they're worth purchasing. As a matter of fact, 76% of consumers admit they're less likely to purchase from a retailer that doesn't have reviews. So if you don't have reviews on your site, you need to do that. Borough and other sites use social proof effectively. Like if you have a product that has no reviews, then you have a product that has like 750 reviews, you're gonna go, wow, this one's got 750 reviews. It can be the exactly same product, but if you've got these reviews there, it's gonna help a lot. Product photos that don't showcase the product.  Seem like something that people wanna buy. The best item can be made to look unappealing with the wrong photography. While professional imagery can make your products really shine and look good. So it's really important that you do that. A product imagery is a master class showing how any product, like let's say our food from Survival K Food looks appetizing. Looks like something you'd wanna eat. So it's really important that you do that. The next thing here that I got on my list is lackluster product descriptions. And before I get into the product descriptions, add videos guys, make sure your website has some videos. Maybe explainer videos, maybe review videos, but videos are really good. They're gonna come up higher in the SEO ranking. So it's really important that you do that too. And product descriptions, which I just mentioned, product images don't do all the work, okay? They need to be paired with compelling, persuasive descriptions. It's gotta be something interesting. It can't just be facts about your product. We describe our Survival K Food can meet as something that tastes like your grandma's pot roast. And people always relate to that. They're like, oh my God, yeah, I remember that. That was really good. So it's really important that you have really good descriptions that really make people wanna buy it. Now, the next thing I see is a poor mix of this media, videos, imagery, all these things. Your website's primary goal is to encourage, okay, potential customers to buy. This requires giving enough information to make the items appealing without seeming like they're overwhelming, okay? So it's really important that you do that. It's really important that you pick up on the fact that if you don't do that, they're not gonna buy, okay? A common mistake is to throw everything in the kitchen sink or on a site or product images. A mix of media, including imagery, videos can be very persuasive, but overdoing it can push people away, okay? Like you don't wanna have testimonial videos. They say two or three is really good. But if you have 50 testimonial videos, it looks like you're overselling it. It looks like it may be BS, okay? If you have too many of those. If the site takes too long to load, it's slow to navigate, but the visitor feels confused and overwhelmed, your site is working against you. We don't want that to happen. Every decision you make when building your e-commerce site, okay, should be focused on providing one thing, the best user experience. You know, I see so many businesses and they talk about, well, we do this because we wanna do this and we do this because we wanna do this. And I always ask them, I say, what's best for the consumer? What's best for your customer? Is that what you're looking at? I remember going into a restaurant one day, my wife and I are sitting there and one of the managers came over and they said, you know, how's things going? We said, man, we're freezing in here. This place is so cold, we're really uncomfortable. He goes, well, it's comfortable to me.  Well, we're here and we're customers and you should be catering to us. So user experience is everything, okay?  So it's important that you get it right. Here, I wanna explore a few of the most common mistakes that people do. The first thing is I go to a website, there's no categories. Guys, you gotta have categories. Categories are so very important. The potential customer needs to be able to find the products they want. Categories tell your visitors where to go. They can also encourage visitors to look at items they weren't even looking at before. Once they hit that drop-down of categories, they see some categories that they're interested in. And let me set one thing here on my computer, so there's one thing's off here, give me one second, guys. The Wi-Fi is on, okay. I was having trouble connecting over here and I wanna figure out why it's doing this. Okay, back online, I'm good, okay. I had lost you guys for just a second. I don't want that to happen. All right, click here. So this user experience, guys. I think it is so underrated. It really is. And having these categories can help them so much, okay. A clean and concise user experience where it's easy to navigate. You know, it's like, I always point to companies like Chick-fil-A or In-N-Out Burger. I mean, everything about them is clean and easy to navigate. I mean, their apps are good, they're fast, they're easy to use. I've gone to McDonald's and well, McDonald's is actually pretty good. I've gone to Burger King and Wendy apps and they're terrible, they're very difficult to navigate. So even that little thing makes a big difference. Next thing I would say is providing a little service information or product, or excuse me, or business contact information. Guys, don't hide from your customers. I know you think, oh my gosh, I don't wanna put a phone number, I don't wanna put an address because somebody may come by, somebody may call me. These are super important, guys. If you wanna keep customers, the buying decisions are influenced more by just the product. Customers also want to know about shipping rates. They wanna know how long delivery takes. They wanna know what the return options are, how to get in touch with you for questions. And a lot of times people will never use these contact points. They won't call you, they won't email you, but if they see that it's there, they know that if they ever have a problem, they'll be able to get in touch with you. I know so many people are leaving Facebook right now because they can't get in touch with anybody if they run ads or if they have problems. They just get all these automated emails and they're seeing a flood of people leave. Their stock is one half of what it was about a year ago because they don't take care of their customers. Their customers are the users of Facebook or the advertisers of Facebook. And instead they just bar people and they close people's business accounts. I use YouTube for ads and I use Google and there's always somebody I can talk to. I mean, that minute on the phone or chat or whatever I want, they're there for me. And I pretty much left Facebook for that reason because nobody there wants to help you. It's really, really important. The next thing is poor navigation. So as I'm explaining when I was talking about designing categories, good navigation is also very, very important. Navigation is something that people need to be able to do. Your site has great products, contact information, details and shipping and returns, but can visitors find all this information? Is the navigation easy to use? For an example, a great navigation would be something that has everything visitors are likely to need. Clear product categories, including corporate sales as well as links to the contact page and shopping cart, all these things are important. Potential customers needing to move the footer has links about us page, frequently asked questions, contact information and additional ways to connect with you. All these are important. The next thing I see this one all the time is not having a guest checkout. How many times have you added something to the card and then abandoned it because you had to make an account? The answer is more than zero. I can promise you that. You already know why not having a guest checkout option in your checkout process is a mistake. There's an obvious reason why e-commerce stores do this. Making an account increases the amount of customer information collected. I get that in the number of email subscribers. However, giving the business owners an opportunity to email customers for future offers is great, but if they don't wanna do it, you're gonna lose the customer all together. The average abandonment rate right now is staggeringly high, okay? They've calculated the average card abandonment based on 44 reported statistics to be almost 70% and sometimes it's much higher. It should be a priority to make the checkout process simple and smooth so that you keep your card abandonment as low as possible. If you're absolutely going to force an account to purchase at very minimal, make it easy for your customers, but I don't recommend it. I recommend you having a guest checkout if they wanna have that, okay? Next thing is content that is exactly like your competitors. You go to your competitors, you see their description to see what you're doing and you do the same thing. You go, well, they're successful, so I'm gonna be successful. And the point is, if it's working for them, that's great, but what are you gonna offer more than them? You can have some similar stuff as them, but you need to make yourself distinguished above them. You need to have stuff that is gonna be better than them. You need to have stuff that they can't find at your competitors and that's what's gonna make them buy from you. Next thing I would tell you is not using your analytics to improve marketing tactics. So very important that you do that, guys. These analytics are free. For the most part, you can use Google Analytics. Effective marketing blends creativity and data. Your e-commerce store's marketing strategy should be influenced by customer behavior. Consider this, emails are personalized and set based on customer behavior. They generate 29% of all email purchases and have conversion rates of 359% higher than non-personalized email campaigns. And while accounting for less than 2% of overall email sent. So using analytics to improve your market tactics can give your online store a huge boost over the competitors. It's also quite easy to do because most platforms will provide clear data on traffic sources, card abandonments, popular products, and on-site behavior. And if you're using something like Cartra, you can target these people, use tags and that type of thing to create your campaigns. Next thing I'm gonna tell you is lack of payment options. And you know, I don't think I did this well in the beginning. I had like MasterCard, Visa, American Express. Now we have Google Payments, we have Amazon Payments, we have American Express, we have MasterCard, we have Visa, we even added AfterPay where they can break up the payments. And it's funny, the other day I was at the gym and I get notifications on my phone and I'm going through my emails. One of my emails said that somebody just got their card decline for a $215 sale. Which meant they didn't have enough on their credit card. But within two minutes, I also got another notification that I had a AfterPay payment, excuse me, for $215. Now the AfterPay is where they can take the price of the product and split it into three payments and they finance it through AfterPay. It doesn't cost them anything, it's zero interest. I've added that to my website and now people are actually using that and I'm getting more sales. It's crazy not to do that. That's a sale I would have lost. That's a sale where the person would have gone away. But since I had AfterPay on there, I got that sale. It's an easy fix. If you're an e-commerce store, support a whole bunch of different options, okay? Have PayPal on there. Have all of these things on there that you possibly can because you don't wanna run across that one customer that has something they wanna pay with whether it be PayPal or whether it be AfterPay or something like that. And you don't have that option, okay? And the last thing I wanna tell you is lack of shipping options, okay? Put yourself in the customer's shoes for a second. What do they want? Three things. They want the item, they wanna pay a fair price and they wouldn't have reliable and fast shipping, okay? Fast shipping is no longer considered a perk. 79% of customers putting in a top factor is shipping, okay? And with 15% of customers feeling their shipping expectations are met, there is a big opportunity for your e-commerce store. And guys, there's a lot of information in today's training but I think it's so very important that you go through all of it. If you do these things, you're gonna be avoiding the majority of the mistakes that most people make out there. And that's the whole goal of this channel, guys, is I wanna help you start running and grow online businesses and avoid mistakes. I want you to do that, okay? Now, this week, well, this week's over with it this Friday, 4th of July is Monday.  I literally will be here, okay? In my office, in my yard, in my house because that's where I broadcast from. But I will not be live on YouTube. However, however, Wednesday I will be live, Friday I will be alive. So I wanna see you those days. I have some great subject matter. I'll be posted this weekend. You can see what we're gonna be talking about. I hope this has helped you out. If it has, do me a favor. Put something in that chat box. Put something in the comment section below. Please do that. And give me a thumbs up, guys. A thumbs up matter so much to YouTube. I have no idea why, but it does. So if you give me a thumbs up, I would really appreciate it. Subscribe, hit that subscribe button there. Maybe it came in late. You didn't see that I asked you to do that in the beginning. That helps my channel. Turn that red button to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. It's very important that you do that. And like I said, even if you're not watching this live, guys, you can put comments in there. I will come back and answer them. I think I just did that yesterday. I answered a bunch of comments that were in there. I love getting your comments, okay?  It's not. I wanna hear everything you've got because understand when I started going on, gosh, 13 years ago. It's almost 13 years now. I didn't know anything. I didn't know how to type. Here's the interesting thing. After 13 years, I still can't type. But I have learned other things, okay? There's other things that have helped me out. So guys, make sure that you're part of the game. Make sure you participate. Make sure you use the chat. Make sure you use the comment. That's where I really learn things is I participated in all these things. I learned things and that's the same thing you can do. Thank you so much for watching today. I really appreciate it. Don't forget thumbs up, subscribe, bell. All those things have really helped me out. I will see you guys next Wednesday live at 10 a.m. Central Daylight Time. You guys have a great 4th of July if you're in the U.S. And those of you who are not in the U.S., you could still have a great 4th of July too, right? I'll talk to you guys later. Thanks so much.


Hi, my name is Jesper and I'm part of the ST TouchGFX team. In this video I will give you an introduction to the Gauge widget, which has been added to the TouchGFX version 4.16. I have a new TouchGFX application in the designer. I'll add a box just as a background like this. And then I'll add the Gauge. You can find it here. I'll put it in the center. You can see the Gauge already has a background image and a needle. It has a style called the Standard Gauge 1. Here we also have a Standard Gauge 2. So as all other widgets, when you have selected a style, it will preset some of the properties for that widget. So in this case the background image, the rotation center, the angles and so on. As for all other widgets, you can press the question mark on the top here and you'll see a link to the TouchGFX documentation page describing this particular widget. Here you'll find all the key properties in the description of those. You will also find a link in the button to the API reference for that particular widget. Okay, so let's have a look at the properties set for this Standard Gauge 1. The background image, where it is the background here, of course. The rotation center, well that is where the rotation center of the Gauge is, in this case where the image of the needle will be persistent. So you can see I can change it here if I want to. The angle is the angle in which the minimum and the maximum values of the gauge will be represented at. So you can see we have a value range here, so the minimum is 0 and the maximum is 100. If I put this to 0, you can see we are hitting the minus 90 degree angle here and similarly if I write 100 it will go like this. So we can try and run the simulator and see that we get this behavior that we see on the canvas in the designer. So we have the needle positioned a bit out here. Type in 125 again and we see that it will be positioned in the center. For the needle itself, we see we have these properties down here. So we have, of course, the image of the needle. We have the rotation center of the needle, so that is the point in the needle which will be put on top of the rotation center of the gauge itself. Then we have two properties here, so that is the rendering algorithm when the needle is moving and the rendering algorithm when the needle is steady, so not moving. The needle itself is drawn by a texture mapper widget, which is the same texture mapper as you can add here, like this. So it's the same way of drawing it. It has two options, so nearest neighbor, which is pretty fast to render, but not completely perfect in image quality. And the binary linear interpolation is much better quality, but it is a bit harder on the microcontroller to draw. Okay, so that was the basic setup of the properties for this gauge widget. So let us try to make it update the value of the gauge. I'm now opening the project here. I'm opening it with your studio, but you can open it, of course, in whatever editor you would like to. So here I have the header file of the screen 1 view. So you can see if I open the screen 1 view base, this is where I have my box 1 and my gauge 1. Okay, so to update it during execution, well, normally you would have some sort of readout of some meter and that would enter into the model class. You would propagate it to the presenter and onto the view, but here I'm just going to simulate it by implementing the handle tick event. That is called each tick in TouchDFX. I implement it in the CPP file. So if I just do like this, so I can use update value. Let me just get the current value of the gauge plus 1. And it takes an argument called duration, which is the duration of the update. So how long would it take to reach this value? So in this case I'll just do an instant update, which is entering the value 0. Compiling and running. So we'll see it animate to the maximum and then just stay there because I'm just adding 1, 2, whatever value it has. As you might remember, we put in the value range 0 to 100. So if I go back to my code here and let's say add a modifier value here. So now I add 1 to it. But let's say so if the current value is either the maximum or the minimum. So equal 0 or if it is equal to 100, then I'll change the direction. So modifier multiplied by minus 1. So we go back and forth here. Okay, so but we put in the value range here in the designers from 0 to 100. Maybe it's not the best design to just have a magic number here, 0 and 100. So if I would like to change that, I could use the get range method in the gauge widget. So if I have a minimum value and a max value here. So I could say gauge 1, get range. So this one will get you the range and it takes as an argument a reference to an integer. So I can add my minimum value and my maximum value here and I will get those. And then I could put in minimum value and maximum value instead. So a little bit nicer. So this is just to show you that there is a range of methods here. You can pick and choose from to get the values from the gauge widget itself. And it still works. Okay, let's look at another feature of the gauge widget, which is the arc. So you are not limited to having a needle or a texture matter changing angle. You can also add an arc to your gauge. I'll demonstrate that by adding another gauge to my application. I'll put that one here. So if I select the style 2, it will show exactly that. So here, if I change this, you can see that it's not only the needle which is changing, but also this arc here. The behavior and properties of the arc is very similar to that of the needle. So down here you see it now says use arc. It is basically a circle known as like the circle widget itself. So here we can either choose an image or a column. In this case, it's an image. So we can go and have a look at the image. So we have this background with the gray background for the arc. And then we have this arc here, which is a circle which kind of changes thickness. So we use that now. We have a set arc position which places the arc inside of the gauge. So in this case it's because the image of this arc is not the size of the gauge itself. So we need to place it in the correct location. And then just as a circle we have a radius on a line width and a cap style also if you want that. You can position the arc on top of the needle, force it to be on top of the needle if you want to. Yes, and let's just make it animate just as gauge 1. We have the same value range and the same initial value. So we should be able to just go here and copy this line here. So the modifier will still work. If not we need it 1 for the gauge 2 as well. So let's compile here. Run. Yeah, you see it animate. So that is the basic settings for the arc. If you want to learn more about it, play around with it and see what will happen. So in this case we could try to add one in the gauge 1. So I have here, so let's say radius 50 and bind width. So 0 it will be a full arc. If it says 2 we'll do like this. We can make it a bit bigger like this. 6, the round ending. And it should be just to run the simulator and you'll see that it now has an arc as well. So this is just the color, so not an image like this one over here. So just one plain, simple color. Whereas this has a variant in the thickness but also in the color I believe. Okay, but yeah, play around with it and see what you can make of it. The last thing I would like to show you is how to use this duration when updating. So if we jump to the code once again, we'll need to have an integer tick counter here. So we can hold the update for one of the gauges. So let's have here, so we have a tick counter now that is increasing each tick. So here for number 2 we will say if tick counter models like what should we say 30 is equal to 0. Then we want to update, so only each 13th time. So we can see how that looks with the duration of 0 here. So that will be an instant update once in a while. You can see it moves. If we change the... Okay, so maybe this modifier thing is a little bit boring. We only see it move slightly. So if we say plus 30 times the modifier, then we'll see a bigger change like this. Okay, if we change the duration, so let's say we'll use 20 ticks for the update and then we'll have 10 ticks of pause and then run again. See, like this it'll move in a nice behavior. We can change the movement here. So if we say activate this one and then the easing, we put an easing back so we could have like a cubic with the ease in out. Generate the code back here, compile again. And now the movement of the needle will be slightly different following that particular easing equation. So this feature is useful if you are not receiving new values for your gauge all the time. If you get that each tick, well then of course you should just use instant updates or close to each tick. If you have like a second between your readings, well then an animation to the new value will probably look better. The last thing I would like to show you is the example for gauge. So if you create a new project, you will find gauge example. Try to have a look here at this. So here you have three examples of different gauges. So let me just compile it. You have three different screens with each gauge. So first of all we have this one. So here you see a needle and actually an arc but in this case just showing dots. Second one, you do a readout of the current value of the gauge and then you update and text and actually also changes color on this icon, changes the image of the icon. The last one is just one big arc underneath a big needle. Okay, that's all from me. Hope you enjoyed this video and want to have a look at the gauge which has been added.


How to find a video on YouTube? This video will show you how to find videos using YouTube. First, open your browser and type youtube.com into the address bar. Then press Enter. This will bring you to the YouTube site. To search for a video on YouTube, you type the topic that you are looking for in the search bar. YouTube is a really good place to look if you need how-to videos. For example, if you want to learn how to use PowerPoint, you would type how to use PowerPoint in the search bar and press Enter. You will get a list of results. You can scroll down and see a long list of results of videos showing you how to use PowerPoint. You can also filter the results by clicking the filters box on the left above your search results. For example, if you want short videos, you can select short. That way, all of your results will be under four minutes long. Or, if you want more recent videos, you can select this month. That way, all of your videos will have been posted within the last month. Once you find the video you want to watch, click on the link for the video. That will open the video for you to watch.