4 Practical Tips for Managing Multiple Branches

Your business is growing, and it is profitable enough that you are opening new branches in different locations every year, or even every month. That was the dream, and now you are finding out that running it is no piece of cake.

Owners and branch managers of multi-branch businesses around the world run into the same problems, so you are not alone. None of them are impossible to fix, and a few habits go a long way toward keeping a tight grip on every branch.

1. Use the same processes and systems everywhere

Staff at every branch should be onboarded on your standard operating procedures, from what they wear to how they handle customer complaints, so customers get the same good service whichever branch they walk into.

Write all of it down in a handbook or manual, and make it part of training before new hires start. You could also run a scoreboard program that rewards the branches scoring highest on these standards, so staff have a reason to go past good enough.

If you don't have this in place yet, build it before you open your next location.

2. Keep communication in one place

A survey by Manager Complete found that 70 percent of small and mid-sized businesses say poor communication is their biggest problem.

Your branches are most likely talking to you already, so the work is tidying up how they do it. An internal social channel helps because it keeps every conversation in one place with the whole team, and it makes staff responsible for answering the things that concern them.

Make yourself available to support your staff when they need you, too, so they can see you care whether every branch succeeds. That can be video meetings, email, chat or phone. Being available all the time is probably unrealistic, but be there as much as you can.

3. Don't micromanage

You do need to know your branches are performing as expected, but don't stretch yourself so thin that you end up micromanaging them. Your job is strategy, and depending on how your organization is set up you may also handle some of the implementation. Trying to stay on top of every single detail leads to stress, and you start forgetting your own core responsibilities.

Ask for regular progress reports instead. Weekly reports from each branch show you how they are improving and where you can help push.

We built Branchify, one of our products at Symph, to get business owners and branch managers out of micromanaging. It is a web app that shows a real-time overview of your branches' audits, maintenance and feedback in one system, so wherever you are and whatever the time of day, you can open it and see how each branch is doing. You can see how it works here.

Staff of The Abaca Group, who have used Branchify for a long time.

4. Hire good managers

Delegating gets easier once you trust your branch managers. At the start you have to put real effort into apprenticing them so you know they run your stores the way you would, and later you can leave the day-to-day operations to them and focus on the big picture.

Don't underestimate what your staff can do. The right people with the right training can take a lot off your plate, and handing them this work makes your team feel more involved in the business, which keeps them motivated.

Managing multiple branches is hard but doable, and it takes some experimenting and tweaking of the process to get it running. Let us know if these tips work for you, and send us any techniques of your own you would like to share.