Unlocking Franchise Growth with Accessible How-To
Regardless of the industry, scaling a franchise presents unique challenges, from maintaining consistent quality across locations to ensuring effective knowledge transfer to new franchisees. Everline Coatings and Services, a leading provider of parking lot striping and pavement maintenance services, has navigated these challenges with the help of KnowHow, an easy-to-use mobile and desktop app that centralizes company-how to and empowers staff with AI-powered training and support.
If you're an entrepreneur, you're strapped. You're getting pulled in a million directions, especially if you're a solopreneur. You don't have a team yet. Just being able to send somebody a link that gives them access to a specific process or just training your team to just go to KnowHow first, before picking up the phone and calling the franchisee, just saves... I don't even know how much time, but a lot.
Nigel Baxter, Vice President of Field Operations at Everline, aptly describes the challenge of getting started in industries like theirs: "We always joke, but it's true at Everline: you're drinking from a fire hose." The abundance of information can be overwhelming, particularly during the onboarding process for new franchise owners. Without KnowHow, this caused a few critical barriers to growth:
- Onboarding new franchisees was time-consuming and resource-intensive,
- Management fielded repetitive inquiries from crews about various operational issues, and
- Maintaining consistent service quality and adherence to best practices was challenging.
Everline needed a solution that improved training quality and ensured that critical expertise was easily accessible to anyone who needed it. Even more critically, they needed to free up management time. Without an app like KnowHow, businesses often resort to cumbersome methods of knowledge management, such as printed manuals, creating shared digital documents, or restrictive Learning Management Systems (LMS) to deal with issues like these.
Build Better Onboarding with Ease
For a while, their crew tried to rely on subject-matter experts, but that quickly caused bottlenecks. Baxter said, "If things went sideways on a job, the crews would constantly have to contact me to ask, 'How do I fix a pole cable?' With KnowHow, they have the answer at their fingertips."
Evan Kostreva, Franchise Business Consultant at Everline, reflects on the traditional approach: "Traditionally, old-school business guys... we had to build out Standard Operating Procedures, 'SOPs,' and KnowHow allows you to make those quicker and transmit that information to your whole organization." With such a broad service offering - including pothole repair, sealcoating, crack filling, parking block and speed bump installation, and more - Everline Coatings and Services has a lot of expertise to share across their growing network.
With KnowHow, whether staff are on their smartphone, tablet, or computer, Jacob Naylor, General Manager at EverLine Coatings and Services of Boulder and North Denver, adds how easy it is to find answers based on company best practices:
There's no need to print a thousand page book that people aren't going to read. They can kind of pick and choose what's needed, and when you have General Manager or Operations Manager, you can send them to certain sections. It makes it a lot easier for training aspects, and not having to just spend hours upon hours upon hours just reading.
Equip Everyone with Expert How-To
Jason Brazen, another Franchisee with Everline Coatings and Services, echos the transformative impact of KnowHow on operations: "A lot of us started to run before we crawled... To have that repository where I know that's my first step: I can go to and I can search and it's probably going to be there." KnowHow serves as a comprehensive resource, offering step-by-step guidance across various aspects of the business, from technical procedures to marketing and operational how-to.
Experienced and rookie staff have access to KnowHow, ensuring when a question comes up on the job, they have the answers they need. As Baxter was saying about the amount of industry-specific knowledge his team needs:
The benefit is that we introduce KnowHow early on in the process, so that you know when things slip through the cracks - which they inevitably will - it's just a matter of pulling it up on your browser, finding the process again and it'll give you a step-by-step. We've got that across the board, so that's in Sales, Marketing, Operations, Support, all of those aspects have the KnowHow.
With KnowHow, whether your team is on their phone, tablet, or computer they have step-by-step guidance for whatever job is next.
Provide Excellent Service at Scale
Evan Kostreva, Franchise Business Consultant at Everline, underscores the significance of KnowHow in empowering franchise owners: "From upper-level executive to the guys right on the ground, there's something for everybody... You know, there's value in every sector for KnowHow." The app enables franchisees to access essential information and resources, ensuring they have the expertise they need to provide the service customers have come to expect of your brand.
"The really cool thing is we use KnowHow on the corporate side as well," added Baxter. "We've got processes in place - you know say I'm sick one day somebody needs to fill in something for me - we've got processes for that so it's very simple for somebody to take over my role and just make sure that we've got redundancy across the board."
With KnowHow, Everline was able to improve training quality and ensure that critical expertise was easily accessible for anyone who needed it, all while freeing up management time. KnowHow streamlined the onboarding process for new franchisees, significantly reducing the time and resources needed to bring them up to speed.
It's also changed the way knowledge is shared across the team, making expert-guidance easily accessible and reducing repetitive inquiries to management. As a result, Everline has been able to maintain consistency in service quality and best practices across all its franchises, while empowering staff at all levels with the information they need to perform their jobs more efficiently and confidently.
According to our numbers, Everline Coatings and Services saved over 76 hours of employee productivity per week in 2023, but we'll let Baxter have the final word on the impact KnowHow has had on their operations:
KnowHow has saved us so much time. It provides answers on everything: from mechanical know-hows to sales and marketing strategies.
