Famous Canadian author Pierre Berton once observed: "In so many ways the story of Tim Hortons is the essential Canadian story. It is a story of success and tragedy, of big dreams and small towns, of old-fashioned values and tough-fisted business, of hard work and of hockey."

The Toronto Sun tells some of the story of Tim Hortons and how its founder Ron Joyce, a poor boy from Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia built the donut franchise chain around a silent partner, Toronto Maple-Leaf hockey star, Tim Horton.

Franchisors often ask, “Why do franchisees invest in a franchise and then fail to follow the system”.  I think it comes down to the culture which the franchisor develops within the franchise system itself.  We teach people how to treat us.  Franchisors teach franchisees how to treat them.

Some franchisors, try to establish a culture of “family”, they have “re-unions” instead of conventions.  Other franchisors try to maintain a strong dictatorial relationship with their franchisees, trying to maintain control over every aspect of the relationship.  I believe that the most successful franchise organizations have a culture which falls somewhere in between these two extremes.

No Spam Served Here, Thanks To Our Tech Team

The Monty Python troopers once sang, "Spam, spam, spam, spam.. spam, WONDERFUL spam." But spam really isn't such a wonderful thing, especially when it finds its way into our site's 'recent comments' area. As our Blue MauMau site continues to grow in popularity, the spammers seem to have ratcheted up their attempts to find the chink in our already protected armor. Found it big time. The good news is that our technology finally beat them. But as the program learns what is spam, there may be some spam that gets through our defenses from time to time before we can tell the software that it is spam. But anyhow, we won this battle - those dirty rotten spammers.  Photo by [CK]

“Everything looks like a nail.” I’m not sure where this quote is from, but it sure applies to a lot of what we see in business and particularly, in franchising. I am referring, of course, to the folks that only have one tool in their toolbox and no matter what the issue, that “tool” is the solution. 

The Problem of Franchisee Profiling. The Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Science, Herbert Simon, predicted that a lot of problems would be solved with sub-optimal solutions because of the way that decisions get made in organizations. In an influential article he called the “Garbage Can Model” of decision-making, Simon asserted that in any organization there are problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems and they get thrown together in the Garbage Can. What comes out is anyone’s guess and often the matching of problems and solutions is not ideal, logical, or profitable.