At Manual Makers We. . .Make Manuals
Sounds obvious, and it is. We write, publish, and manage individual franchise manuals as well as libraries of documentation.
We’re also franchise advisors with long experience in the franchise industry. We can help with the contents and completeness of your brand standards and franchise documentation, offer real-life franchisee use cases to improve your processes, and put them together in a way that withstands both change and growth.
Your business plan expects you to grow, we make it so your documents don’t get in the way of that.
More Effective
Design and clear, concise writing matter. Professional writers consider their audiences and the outcomes they need to achieve. Scannable, digestible documents are easier to use and won’t sit on a shelf collecting dust.
More Useful
If users can’t find information it might as well not even exist. Modern manuals are published in a variety of ways – with modern search capability – so users can find the information they need, and not just keywords.
More Accurate
Documentation is like laundry – it’s never done. Manuals are a process, not a task, and they lose accuracy through time, growth, and change. Managing the entire lifecycle maintains credibility and usefulness.
It’s more than a legal requirement for serious franchise organizations. It’s the foundation for other volumes (training, train the trainer, store development guide), and it sets the brand standards for your franchisees to follow.
A good operations manual sets expectations, establishes process for finding answers, creates enforcement mechanisms, and attracts more experienced franchisees.
Franchisor Business Operations Playbook
Your franchise operations manual is the playbook for your franchisees, and the Business Operations Playbook provides the same blueprint for your corporate staff. It’s the basis for training new team members and provides more depth on selling and marketing a franchise organization.
You’re in two businesses now, and the more you apply process to your own side of the house, the more focused you are on growing your franchisee partnerships.
The bigger you are, the more experienced your franchisees are, the more audiences you have. With that comes different versions of the same information. Training manuals directed to area developers, development guides directed to ops/construction teams, marketing and opening manuals for marketing people.
They work together, they re-use information, and they can be tough to keep in synch. This is when franchise documentation can stop being an asset, start becoming a liability. We can help.
Learning & Training Systems Content
Ops manuals, training guides, and learning management systems all use the same basic information. Some may go into more detail than others, or be presented to a different audience, but if information changes in one it changes in each of them.
Re-creating material for training systems can be a chore. And because of this, some teams stop updating their manuals altogether and focus solely on the training system. But smart teams know they need both a way to train and a way to refer to information, to look it up post-training. We help find solutions.
Asset
- Fast, accurate: Change once, change everywhere
- Searchable: Online knowledge base, with full search capability
- Controlled: Governance and version control
- Specific: Localize by state, country, or unit type
- Efficient: Role-specific training guides and tools
- Flexible: Growth and change are expected
- On-brand: Don’t just show your brand, train it
- Drive profit: Yes. Really.
Liability
- Labor intensive: Repeated content, same update in multiple places
- Risk: Users have old versions
- Inaccurate: Unable to tailor to local laws/regulations
- Inefficient: One-size fits all for training, a three-ring binder lost on a shelf
- Inflexible: Company growing faster than you can keep up
Who We Help
We work with franchise systems of every stage. From brand new concepts who need a franchise operations manual for their FDD, to mature companies needing to refresh aging documents.
But creating is – believe it or not – the easy part. Publishing for ease of use, making information ‘findable’, and keeping it in useful order is how you protect your investment and mitigate liability.
You can’t grow and perfect your business if your franchise documentation never changes. You can’t scale if your training and reference materials can’t keep up.
Who We Are
The Manual Makers is the franchise services arm of the White Deer Group, a collection of professionals in content strategy, technical writing, business resiliency, publishing, and training.
Our advisors work with clients to fully develop their operations, training, human resources, financial, and marketing processes in a way that sets them up for success. The result is a more mature version of your final product, one that anticipates the needs of your first franchisees and builds growth into the plan.
Write
We are writers. We translate technical to analog and back again. We create process and procedure in a way that is both helpful and beautiful.
Publish
How you publish your tools determines how people will use them. Publish in a way they can’t use, and you’ve wasted the resources to write it. Make it easy to use and find so your teams can help themselves.
Manage
Each manual, guide, or playbook requires an author. But once there’s more than one of them, or multiple audiences, you have a different challenge: managing the library
Business documentation – or knowledge-content – is a core asset of your business. Helping you measure, manage, and improve your content is our business.
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Let Us Know How We Can Help
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