It was great to be asked to speak at the British Franchise Association forum in London on Wednesday 13th September about how The Creation Station crew have developed our brand and teams.
I’d planned what to wear the night before as I didn’t think wardrobe planning at 4.45am would produce the kind of look I was after! I was thrilled to get into a silk dress I bought about 2 years ago that I’d never managed to get into before., my early morning runs have paid off!
So, with an evening of high winds and ‘slanted’ rain I dusted down my trusty black boots, grabbed my laptop bag and waterproof coat and set off. My early morning walk in the pouring rain to the train station in Exmouth gave me a few surprises. It’s one of the routes I run 🏃 so I know it well…
But I’d never walked it in this dress before!
What I mean is, this new posh looking dress is pencil shaped, which means it’s quite narrow, which means it can only really accommodate tiny ladylike steps, which to be honest, really isn’t my style of walking – especially not in the rain when I’m catching a train!
I was left with no option but to hitch my dress up, pretend it was a mini and stride down to the station, whilst listening and laughing to Eddie Izzard on my audible app.
I do love train journeys and the benefit of an early morning journey is seeing a breath-taking sunrise amid the early morning mist.
I arrived at High St Kensington and decided to make the most of the sunshine, and with my new dress adjustment walking technique, I enjoyed a good fast stroll to the Crowne Plaza hotel near Gloucester Road tube.
The BFA forum is for Franchisors, and there is a great one for franchisees too. It’s a fantastic way to find out more about industry standards, share best practice and hear from a range of speakers and to listen and chat too.
My presentation was about how listening and a proactive approach can create positive outcomes in the face of change. The examples I provided were around how we maintained our simple and effective systems and adapted our service range to support new markets. These include entering into the experience market as well as the new mum and education markets.
This has enabled us to provide creative art and craft classes, parties events, after-school clubs and adult craft events to a much wider audience.
The key, I believe, is developing new products and services that are aligned with your brand values. Our common purpose is to inspire imaginations and nurture creativity. By having defined and clear values, this has enabled us to have a clear framework to know what to consider and what to say yes and no to.
We all know things change, in a social, political, technological or economic context. So, as well as working with new ideas and blue sky thinking, we also work on small everyday developments across all areas of our business.
With our culture of listening, creativity and one percent improvements, we have been very fortunate to have a wealth of ideas from customers, franchise owners and our creative hub team. The ideas 💡 that are right for our business are reviewed with our franchise advisory council, then with franchise owners, where appropriate they are piloted, reviewed again then rolled out. This process helps to gain involvement, honest feedback and provides recognition to those who have been integral to the development and launching of new initiatives, both big and small.
The results from our initial one-year pilot of the additional services resulted in over 50 percent increase in turnover and 46 percent increase in profit.
Due to these extra services, we have now engaged over 650,000 people in creative activities across the UK.
The BFA event was interesting and I was fortunate to speak a lot of people after my talk. In fact, I spoke to so many people who are passionate about what they do and who kindly shared some great tips and ideas. It’s very fulfilling to be in an environment like that so I decided to get the later train! The train didn’t go quite to plan with a few delays and one train breaking down. I ended up having to call a cab. I offered anyone else going to Exmouth to join me in the cab. One of the people who shared the cab had a very interesting background and who now may well be joining our team at Creation Station creative hub.
The whole day made me think perhaps it’s not what you do but how you do it, that’s matters.
I still have one short ‘dress hitch walk’ home and then I’ve been invited to a friends for dinner. I wonder if she’ll mind if I turn up in jeans and my slippers?
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