{"id":1124,"date":"2018-08-14T22:31:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T22:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/?p=1124"},"modified":"2018-08-14T22:31:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T22:31:00","slug":"attendance-at-conferences-by-franchisees-is-important-dont-stand-for-wild-excuses-for-non-attendance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/rwc-blog\/attendance-at-conferences-by-franchisees-is-important-dont-stand-for-wild-excuses-for-non-attendance\/","title":{"rendered":"Attendance at Conferences by Franchisees IS Important – Don’t Stand for Wild Excuses for Non-Attendance"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a CEO one of my functions\/ responsibilities was to design and deliver national conferences in New Zealand. The underlying purpose of these conferences was to:<\/span><\/p>\n

a) Bring all internal stakeholders (i.e. franchisees) together, for them to receive a diverse range of presentations (from updates on projects, to the launch of new initiatives, to previews and reviews of planned and delivered marketing activity, etc).<\/span><\/p>\n

b) Enable franchisees to “rub shoulders” with Preferred Suppliers, for face-to-face catch-ups to occur between franchisees and the principals of the Preferred Supplier companies, and thereby create the commercial opportunity for franchisees to purchase stock\/ inventory from the attending Preferred Suppliers.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a nutshell, the most pivotal reason for holding – sometimes up to 3 x national conferences a year – was to bring people together face-to-face<\/span> to enable relationships to flourish. Conferences are a particularly useful event to provide where stakeholders are scattered across a country (or countries) – geographical isolation can make some people feel considerably separated from their peers and feel that they’re “going it alone”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Typically we would achieve an attendance level of 90 % and better. Those who made the choice not to attend missed-out on a tremendous array of experiences – including social events which brought franchisees and Preferred Suppliers together, out of the business realm. But in my view the greatest experiences these absent people missed-out on were:<\/span><\/p>\n

i. Seeing presentations “in the flesh” – which are always more impressive than even videos, due to the rich emotions that are projected by the presenter and audience alike.<\/span><\/p>\n

ii. Being able to contribute viewpoints to the presentation discussions – i.e. have a voice and be heard as the action was unfolding.<\/span><\/p>\n

iii. The opportunity to reunite with peers – to network, to share friendship and to learn\/ grow.<\/span><\/p>\n

iv. Being able to keep-up with the evolution of the company – through keeping up-to-date with advancements being made\/ new resources\/ initiatives being introduced and sometimes some significant decisions being made.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the case of one company that I acted as the CEO for, that company operated with a “Travel Equalisation Account” that each franchisee paid into on a monthly basis. This fund was used to reimburse franchisees’ travel costs to whatever extent the level of funds available at the time enabled; and it also meant that we could design conferences to take place pretty much anywhere in New Zealand – with those franchisees living far away from the given conference venue receiving a proportionately greater amount of travel cost reimbursement from this account versus those who lived closer to the venue. I believed that this Travel Equalisation Account played a considerable role in achieving having franchisees attend conferences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What I strongly suggest to CEO’s\/ GM’s of companies which consist of stakeholders who are located across a country – or across countries – is post all presentation material as electronic files in the company intranet as soon as possible following a conference; to allow those who didn’t attend a given conference to be able to at least become somewhat familiar with what information was imparted to those who did attend. I used to practice this discipline following each conference, and it helped to keep those franchisees who didn’t attend one or more conference over the course of a year semi up-to-speed with the changes that were occurring in the company.<\/span><\/p>\n

My best advice is do whatever you can as an organisation leader to ensure the attendance of 100 % of your constituents at conferences. Achieving this will influence your speed of progression\/ evolution as an organisation greatly.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a CEO one of my functions\/ responsibilities was to design and deliver national conferences in New Zealand. The underlying purpose of these conferences was to: a) Bring all internal stakeholders (i.e. franchisees) together, for them to receive a diverse range of presentations (from updates on projects, to the launch of new initiatives, to previews and reviews of planned and delivered marketing activity, etc). b) Enable franchisees to “rub shoulders” with Preferred Suppliers, for face-to-face catch-ups to occur between franchisees…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1125,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions\/1125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}