Profit margins can be tight in fast food franchises, and that’s why efficiency is key.

And efficiency can be found in all areas of the business – helping to drive profitability and growth, while ensuring long-term business success.

With inflation tied to food prices and more fresh produce in fast food franchises than ever before, finding more efficiencies – and maximizing them – is crucial to ensuring your investment pays off to the full extent.

Here are 5 Ways to Maximize Franchise Margins:

1. Negotiate (or renegotiate) the best supplier deals. Ensure your franchise has the best possible deals from local suppliers, by utilizing its purchasing power. How to do this? By opening more franchises in the region, or with partnering with other franchisees to ensure the cost of goods sold is at a highly profitable margin.

2. Optimize all franchise food promotions. Optimize your franchise’s specials and promotions by marking down the lowest-cost options at the highest margins. Some examples of this? Ice cream/smoothies, soft drinks, and simple sandwiches.

3. Choose a franchise with more low-cost, healthy options. The fast food industry is shifting to healthier options, so it’s crucial to stay on board with this trend – and invest in franchises who are doing this in the lowest cost, highest return way. Broth-based soups are a great example of this.

4. Evaluate labor costs and drive greater operational efficiency. This may be the oldest method around, but it works. By ensuring your team is operating as efficiency as possible, you can potentially reduce the number of staff without reducing quality of service, helping to drive your margins higher.

5. Creating greater value through greater prices. Are more people willing to pay higher prices for better quality food? Apparently so. The industry shift is continuing, and fast food franchises are being forced to adapt. Ensure you’re a part of a franchise that charges more for healthier options that don’t just cost more, but also provide greater margins and profits.

To learn more about entrepreneurship through franchising, attend our free monthly webinar, Franchise Ownership as a More Stable Career Path. The webinar is free, but you need to pre-register, which you can do online by clicking on the linked seminar title.

You may also register by calling 866-246-2884.

A paycheck and a quarterly bonus only motivates employees so much. Anybody will clock in and clock out if you pay them regularly, but getting your employees to buy into your company vision and be above average performers takes continual and creative rewards.

No matter who your employees are and what rewards you have at your disposal, showing your appreciation to your employees is essential to your company’s success. And with only 16 percent of U.S. employees “fully engaged” in their jobs in 2014, according to Modern Survey, it’s imperative that employers change they way they look at rewards and recognition.

By making a concerted and consistent effort to give credit where credit is due, you help increase the productivity of every department touched by human hands.

Gifts With Purpose

Give your employees the gift of cutting-edge technology. Faster tech increases the efficiency of your workforce and their morale. If you have to invest in a computer or cellphone for employees, make sure it’s the latest and greatest. It may cost a little more now, but, in the long run, you want your employees working, not trying to get their tech to work. Look for companies like T-Mobile that offer payment plans and network package deals to keep monthly costs low and get your employees top-of-the-line technology like the Samsung Galaxy S 6.

Pesonalized tools can also be fun. A customized hard drive in their favorite color or a flash drive shaped like Yoda not only gets you cool points, but it often doesn’t cost much more than their boring black counterparts. The ongoing benefit is that employees use these items every day, so these personalized tools serve as a constant reminder that they are unique and appreciated.

Praise and Appreciation

No matter what you get your mom for her birthday, her favorite thing is the handwritten card, right? Employees are kind of like your mom — they appreciate your appreciation. And that doesn’t cost a dime. Below are three ideas that cost nothing to make your employees smile with pride:

1. Thank you notes and a day off: Hard workers really do appreciate the little things like a handwritten thank you note. Make it specific, memorable and unexpected. Also, consider giving out a free day off for completing a difficult task or going above and beyond the call of duty, suggests HR World. This not only rewards them for doing a great job, but also gives them a well-deserved break so they can come back refreshed and ready to go.
2. Coffee and guidance: One of the coolest ideas comes from The Cigna Group. Executives push coffee carts around the office, serving drinks to their employees during crunch times. As they serve, executives coach and encourage employees. At the same time, they’re in the trenches where they can connect first hand with real employee and consumer issues.
3. Employee recognition: Recognition is public and it’s simple. When your employees do well, tell them. You can do this privately or in front of clients, colleagues or at the next staff meeting. The important part is to make it known that you notice and appreciate success and your employees will strive for your praise.

It’s time to talk about a very sensitive topic most entrepreneurs would rather not even think about: Failure. In my last article, Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made? I mentioned that a perennial key skill (or trait according to some) of successful entrepreneurs is tolerance for failure. If you’re the type who would just as soon avoid the topic altogether or have a “failure is not an option” attitude, then it’s especially important that you read this article. I firmly believe that how you think about and cope with failure is one of the most important keys to your success in business.

If we’re honest, then we’d have to admit that the fear of failure is what prevents many would-be entrepreneurs from ever trying. For others it is a feeling in the pit of their stomach that causes them stress and anxiety when they do make the attempt. Why is that? I think the answer is relatively simple: Despite how enlightened we may or may not be, society and culture as a whole still denigrate the concept of failure. Whether it’s sports or business, we do not embrace or celebrate failure. In the midst of the Apollo 13 disaster when NASA was trying to figure out how to get the astronauts back to Earth safely, flight controller Jerry C. Bostick was credited with saying, “Failure is not an option.” This attitude is deeply embedded in our collective psyche, but it’s simply not realistic.

The plain fact of the matter is that most of the entrepreneurs we hold up as examples all chalked up major failures on their journey to success. Henry Ford went broke five times, including two company bankruptcies before he found success with his Ford Motor Company. Colonel Sanders suffered more than 1,000 rejections as he tried to sell his 11-herbs-and-spices recipe for fried chicken before finally cashing in for millions. Thomas Edison went through something like a thousand attempts before finally coming up with an electric light bulb that worked. When a reporter asked him how he felt about failing a thousand times, Edison’s response was brilliant: “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

Edison was showing a great attitude towards failure. If you think of success as a journey, then any given step of that journey might go in the wrong direction. Edison obviously thought of each failure as a mere bump on the road to success. The interesting thing about a bump, however, is that it’s slightly higher than the terrain around it. If you pause, you might just get a slightly new perspective that informs where you go from there. Iconic musician Johnny Cash built on this idea when he said, “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone.”

What’s your attitude regarding failure? Do you avoid it at all cost or do you embrace it is an essential aspect of the entrepreneurial process that has a valuable contribution to make on your journey? How you answer this question is the key that can unlock the door to success.

One of our previous articles highlighted 5 Things That You Need To Be An Entrepreneur. It could have listed dozens if not scores of other useful things entrepreneurs need to have in order to be successful. Today it’s time to tackle one many people would rather not deal with at all: Time management. If you’re cringing right now, it’s probably a sign you need to keep reading. There are only 24 hours in a day, so here are 5 time management hacks to get the most out them:

1. Don’t Shortchange Yourself

Don’t try to squeeze more out of your day by giving up sleep, nutrition, or exercise because you’ll end up doing more harm to your time management than good. Peak performance on a daily basis for the entrepreneur can’t happen if your body isn’t in tip-top shape, which means getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, keeping yourself hydrated, and exercising on a regular basis. Shortchanging your health will only serve to cancel out all the other time management hacks on this list. 

2. Know Your Baseline

If your time management skills aren’t what they need to be, it’s worth doing an assessment so you know what you’re dealing with. MindTools has a handy online survey you can use: How Good is Your Time Management? You’ll find out if you just need a few tweaks or a major overhaul.

3. Prioritization Counts

When you’re sitting there looking at the list of things you need to do, how choose where to start? Your project management software can’t do this for you – you have to decide. This can be a major hang-up for many entrepreneurs. There are many ways to do this, which means you might end up trying several methods before you find the one that’s going to work for you. You can try author Stephen Covey’s (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) Time Management Grid, which is actually a modified version of the Eisenhower Matrix. For several more ways to prioritize, check out this article on the process.st blog.

4. Distraction Elimination

To get serious amounts of work done, you have to first establish some “sacred” blocks of time devoted solely to that. Some people make it an entire day while others carve out chunks of time on a daily basis. But it’s only going to work if you eliminate distractions, which means fully “unplugging” from social media, phones, email, and the Internet as a whole. It may also mean finding the right physical place as well – probably not the office.

5. Manage Your Workflow

Once you have the time and space to focus in on plowing through your tasks, you still need to actively manage your working time to get optimal results. One way to do this is optimize short breaks that boost productivity and keep you focused. Try Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique, which has you working in 25-minute chunks punctuated with five-minute breaks.

Any entrepreneur can seriously up their game with these five time management hacks. You’ll turbo-boost your own productivity, and your business will reap the benefits.

Not every business needs millions of dollars of capital investment to get started. For most, you need enough money to cover your personal debts and a bit for advertising. Obviously, some business ideas are less overhead friendly than others. Finding the right company idea to match your expertise and cash flow will place you on solid footing for success. Here are a few to consider.

Consulting

There is a large sector of businesses that require nothing more than your brain, skill and expertise. There are a dozen different names that fall under this giant category, including consultant, contractor or simply entrepreneur. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a business consultant makes an average of $75,000 annually and a health consultant makes around $61,000. Depending on the field you want to work in, you may need to take a test and get a license. For instance, a psychologist, real estate salesperson and certified public accountant each require a state license to practice. After obtaining the license, the overhead is minimal. Office space and telephones are an expense that can be as large or as small you want. To better meet the needs of your clients and customers, consider investing in a cloud-based contact center so that you are always in communication with them. Make sure that all of your overhead costs are flexible so that you are not locked into a plan that you cannot afford.

Crafty Work

Making things and selling them falls under the umbrella of manufacturing. As an entrepreneurial business, manufacturing has some mixed blessings. Raw materials, equipment and storage are natural costs of any manufacturing business, whether you are making cookies or hair clips. On the upside, manufacturing costs are variable, changing with the amount that you make. Because of this, only the initial amount of raw material is required for start-up. After that, you purchase depending on the production need. As an example, if you make and sell cookies, the flour and chocolate chips are a cost only if you are going to make and sell the cookies. The sale of this batch funds the purchase of the next group of materials with the remainder being profit. When you launch this business, be sure to keep an eye on the fixed costs, the ones that need to be paid whether or not you make a sale, versus the variable costs.

Paid-For Caring

Home healthcare and childcare is one of the fastest growing entrepreneurial businesses to establish. You are not just getting a job as a caregiver, you are starting a company that supplies care for the elderly or very young. Eldercare is a huge market in the United States with nearly 16 percent of people providing unpaid care for parents and others in the home. Childcare has even better numbers. Whether on a consistent basis or simply to offer parents a night out, being there for them is both lucrative and good for the soul. This business has very low overhead, generally being set up as a network of qualified individuals. For your younger clients, you can also add a tutoring service to the mix. There are online tutoring systems like Study.com or Tutor.com that will help you supplement your income as you begin your business.