Trust your people
Back when the business was first starting, Muzzillo asked his franchise owners if they thought it would be a good idea to have some sort of franchise advisory counsel. They all liked the idea, and the first official thing that they did was kick Muzzillo out.
“They say, ‘Now, Greg, this is going to be our advisory council; we’re going to do it our way,’ and they kicked me out,” he says.
This was frightening and very hard for Muzzillo, who says that he was scared to even let them vote on what color the business cards would be.
While it may seem scary to let your people take over, it can also make life simpler for you, because they can handle things and make decisions that you otherwise would have spent time doing.
The key is getting the right people on the advisory council. He notes that sometimes you may have good intentions of setting a group for your employees, customers, vendors or, in this case, franchisors, but sometimes those good intentions are sidestepped by people who talk too much but don’t have anything to really say.
“Set up a formal network to listen to as opposed to random people,” he says. “Sometimes if you just want to listen to random people, the wrong people make the most noise, and it’s not necessarily the noise you want to hear. But if you set up a network of peers that elect and govern themselves, my experience has been that the cream always rises to the top.”
For Proforma’s council, it consists of eight elected regional representatives and then four elected officers, for a total of 12 people.
“When we hear from people that have been elected by their own peers and respected by their own peers, we’re not hearing the noise of people who would rather hear themselves talk as opposed to accomplish things,” Muzzillo says. “We’re hearing significant, meaningful talk from our top producers, who themselves know how to filter the good from the useless from the people that they represent.”
Council members are elected for two-year terms, but the elections are held each year, so that half of the council changes out annually. This helps ensure that it keeps running smoothly while still getting fresh blood involved.
Having a council of people that doesn’t include you also helps people buy in to your mission, vision, values and goals.
“The franchise owners proved to be loyal to the vision,” he says. “Not necessarily to my ideas but loyal to the vision, and at the end of the day, they’ve helped people become like-minded. They helped people who were rowing in the wrong direction start rowing in the right direction in a way that not even I, as CEO of the company, could get them to row. … Sometimes your peers can get you to see something in a different way that other leadership can’t get you to.”
For example, a while back, Proforma needed to find a new bank. While negotiating with one, the bank told Muzzillo that it thought it could make it work, but there was a certain wording in the franchise agreements that it wasn’t comfortable with, so the bank needed nearly all of the 120 franchise owners to change it.
“I remember thinking, ‘If we don’t get this done, I don’t know how we’re going to survive as a company,’” Muzzillo says.
Instead of trying to convince 120 people that they should do this, he instead went to the president of the advisory counsel and explained the situation. That person understood and convinced 118 of those people to change their agreements, which was more than enough to make the bank feel comfortable giving them money.
“To this day, that’s the franchise agreement that we have,” he says. “Those were the terms that helped us grow like a weed, and I know I never would have gotten it done without their peers telling them to.”
