Health & Medical
Sharing the vision
How to effectively distribute knowledge through the ranks
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Atlanta | February 2008
Maureen Herrmann
co-founder and co-owner, Ageless Remedies Franchising Co. LLC
Maureen Herrmann
believes that knowledge is power, and she wants all her franchisees to
believe that, too. Herrmann is
co-founder and co-president of
Ageless Remedies Franchising
Co. LLC, which combines a
medical skin care treatment
center and a retail apothecary
into each of its stores.
Herrmann and Jennifer
Curtin, also co-founder and co-president, have developed a
comprehensive training program that prospective franchisees must take to receive
certification. Then it’s their job
to pass that training down to
employees.
Since founding the company
in 1999, Herrmann and Curtin
have grown it to 11 locations in
five states with more than 100
employees, all of whom have a
voice in the company.
Smart Business spoke with
Herrmann about how to ensure
your employees have a voice at
your next management meeting.
Q. How do you train your
leaders?
Jen and I started the original
store; we learned a lot from having that business. We worked
internally to where we felt we
could create management by
inspiring our workers to work
as a team. One of the important
things within that was to support ongoing learning and study
for them in almost a mentor
environment.
So if we brought someone on,
we’d really want to mentor
them and really create that
teamwork and that learning
environment. Everyone learns
from everyone.
We also want our leaders to direct others in ways that
make the brand more cohesive. So it’s important our leaders all incorporate a certain
belief, value and knowledge of
the brand.
We also support a lot of communication. Our leaders need
to influence people by communicating and incorporating
them into the team.
Q. How do you make the
brand more cohesive?
They have to really understand the vision and
what we like our leaders
to share to understand
our vision. Not everyone
works together on a
daily basis, all the
employees from other
locations or other
regions. That’s why it’s
important for us to
come together through
workshops or conference calls, so we can
really keep to the core
of the vision.
That’s what I mean by
cohesion: The leaders at
the top like to communicate together so the
cohesion of the overall
brand stays consistent.
Q. How do you make sure
your message filters down
through the ranks?
We have trainings and workshops at the management level
on down. The leaders direct to
the managers, and the managers are the ones who hand
the information to the team.
They work together.
It’s important that our managers work for the team and
the employees — not the other
way around. This allows our
employees to excel and feel as if they are part of the company.
It is the managers in the individual stores who actually take
the information, take our
vision and incorporate it into
each individual center.
We encourage them to motivate and empower the individual employees by mentoring
them and [through] effective
ongoing training to help them
gain the new skills and keep
the promises we put in place.
Q. How do you empower your
employees?
Allowing them to have a voice
within the system has empowered them. We include them in
the decision-making process.
That allows them to make a difference, and we really encourage feedback from them.
If they have concerns or
ideas, we are very open to that.
If there is a consensus from a
lot of the different centers, we
do make changes. If it’s an
effective change, we will
strongly consider it.
Q. How do you attract and
retain quality employees?
We’ve put together an employee manual that creates a very
positive working environment,
and we expect our franchisees
to follow that. The intense training and professionalism that our
concept and vision incorporate
really helps us to retain employees.
We definitely look at talented,
empowered human capital as a
prime ingredient of any organization, as far as success, and it
is very costly. We understand
that cost when we bring on
employees and lose them.
So what we try to do from the
front is create incentive, a very
fair, aggressive pay scale and
growth system for them to do
really well in. Then we provide
a good amount of training and
skill to employees.
We’ve created this environment in such a positive way,
that it would not behoove them
to leave unless they want to
relocate because the location
was too far away. We have a
strong retention rate for
employees because we listen
and we support them. We try to
make it a win-win for both
Ageless Remedies and our
employees.
HOW TO REACH: Ageless Remedies Franchising Co. LLC, (404) 816-7550 or www.agelessremedies.com
