Reinventing onboarding for a fast-growing franchise

velofix has revolutionized the cycling industry with its premium mobile bike service – a unique franchise that offers both unparalleled convenience for its customers and the opportunity for those with a passion for cycling to turn that passion into a career.

velofix is growing at an amazing rate – 300 percent every year, year over year, since it was founded in 2014. And, it’s still growing, now at an even faster pace. Adam Kourakis, Manager of Franchise Support and Operations for velofix, attributes much of this growth to the passion that people have for cycling. “Cycling is a passionate hobby. We attract lots of people who are passionate but who don’t all have a strong business sense.”

High-quality training is key to getting a franchisee set up and on the road to operational success and profitability. With the unique kind of people drawn to the velofix franchise, its training needed to be both comprehensive and easily accessible. The company’s founders had already developed an extensive library of materials to support the onboarding and training of its new franchisees. With such massive growth in such a short time, they knew they would quickly need a way to streamline the delivery of training and provide ongoing learning opportunities.

The Challenge

For franchises that start small but dream big, it’s important to think about scalability early on. velofix did and as a result, was better prepared for its rapid success. “Time is our biggest challenge,” Kourakis said. “Our approach has always been to build things once and build them to scale. So, we built a really robust training program from the start. But, we also knew that at some point, we would have to move our existing training materials into an online platform that would save us time.”

Kourakis said they explored hundreds of options. After narrowing it down to about half a dozen, he said Rallyware was the only one that “ticked all the boxes.” He said a lot of the platforms couldn’t support video and other functions velofix needed to fully implement its training program. “We also wanted something that gave us good back end control,” he said, noting that with Rallyware, he can easily make any changes he needs to the training program. “Being able to add new material and edit existing material was very important to us,” he said.

The Solution

velofix’ training program was indeed robust, consisting of more than 800 files containing educational materials and numerous standard operating procedures that together provided their new franchisees and bike mechanics the training they needed to succeed.

Prior to working with Rallyware to build velofix University, the company used a spreadsheet to track the training of each franchisee and mechanic.  Now, all of these materials are offered exclusively online through velofix University.

With the help of Rallyware platform velofix was able to distill all the training content they had developed into four different modules that consist of 130 active tasks at this point. While new franchisees go through the same training materials as those that came before them, now with all those materials organized into an online digital library, they can do it in their own time. Kourakis said the transition was seamless, “Now they can access part of the training and easily go back to where they left off.”

Kourakis said Rallyware provides a good reference point, saving him a lot of time when responding to questions.  “If someone has a question, now I can tell them to go see document ‘X’ on Rallyware instead of having to answer the question manually,” he said, adding that the online communication channels Rallyware built into the program makes his franchisees more comfortable about asking those questions. “Sometimes they’re afraid to ask because they think they’re being bothersome. Being able to ask their questions through the Rallyware system eliminates that problem.”

With only 13 employees at the company’s head office, Kourakis said Rallyware’s automation of the company’s training process has saved the velofix team a lot of time. “At our head office, we’re all still working 20 hours a day, seven days a week. But, every minute we save on training is time we can spend finding new franchises,” he said, adding that “when we’re looking to acquire a new franchise, being able to tell them we have a fully integrated online training system is a real benefit.”

velofix is clearly winning the race and staying well ahead of the rest of the pack in the cycling industry with the company now poised to almost double the number of its current franchises by the end of 2017.

The Results

Of the 81 franchise locations who joined, Owners have completed an average of 36.6 tasks each from an Onboarding and Training program which shows a 73% completion rate across the entire company. At the same time for Mechanics, the completion rate has been 80% with 31.8 tasks completed. 

The Rallyware platform has helped velofix:

• Minimize the need for onsite training.

• Significantly reduce the time required to help new franchisees get up and running

• Make training materials more easily accessible and user-friendly

• Ensure that franchisees comply with the company’s brand standards and practices

• Support ongoing learning with the ability to add new material from the back end

• Become even more attractive to potential franchisees

• Spend more time focusing on growing the franchise