How to Write a Franchising Proposal - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show how to create franchise related proposals using Proposal Kit. These types of proposals could be selling a franchise or purchasing a franchise. There's also a similar video for vending related proposals so you might want to look at that if you're looking at a vending situation.

On our website we actually have an article How to Write a Franchise Business Proposal that this video will help illustrate. If you look at that article it'll have links to some more samples. These are some of the filled in samples that are included in every Proposal Pack.

There's actually one for selling a franchise, purchasing a franchise and a vending related one. We're going to illustrate this video creating those samples. Also on our website are our visual design themes for the Proposal Packs.

What you'll do is you'll purchase one or more, usually just one, Proposal Pack in a specific design theme and that is what the visual look of all of your documents will look like when they're created through the software. There's hundreds and hundreds of design themes. Some are line art, some are photo based, we have some plain designs that have no graphics plus using the software the basic version you can brand it with your own logo on the front cover and the Professional edition you can actually create your own design theme and customize the graphics in our design theme.

If you want to swap out the background graphics, the header graphics and so on, watermarks. We're going to illustrate this first franchise proposal with our Janitorial #4 design theme. You can see we actually have a few janitorial designs.

Line art ones and a couple photo based ones and if you're actually on the website looking at the product pages for each design theme you can scroll down and see a larger blow–up of what the actual Word documents will look like. You're seeing some screenshots here on the website and these will be the actual look of the Word documents created by the software for your proposal. Once you've got the Proposal Pack and the Wizard software downloaded and installed and set up you'll be ready to start creating your proposals.

You'll see we've got the Janitorial #4 design theme as our current style. Whichever one or more design themes you've purchased will be your current style. If you have more than one design theme you can swap between them using this button up here Document Styles.

Whenever your going to create a document, say a proposal, business plan, contract, bid whatever you'll click the Document Projects button. Then we'll click the Add New Project and this is the screen where you're going to set up the contents and data that's going to get all assembled into a document. We'll click the Pick Documents button first because this is where you're going to select all the pages all the chapters that are going to make up your proposal.

You'll see this first screen with all the check boxes here. These are the 40 most common pages used across all types of proposals. Your Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents, Back Page, Executive Summary, a cost page and so on.

There's a Products page, Services, things like that. You've actually got a couple thousand chapter templates to pick from and these tabs up here will help you get to all of those individual chapters. You can click this drop down here and you can pick chapters based on specific types of businesses or if you just want service related pages, product related pages, if you need to talk about your company, you can go down here and find pages about your company.

We can add our credentials or a page for our staff or officers and board or bylaws, policies and so on. This is how you can get to all the thousands of chapters using the Add Templates and this drop down. You can also use the Search by Name.

If we want to add our company mission statement so just type a single word that's related to the topic you're looking for and click search and it will look for any matches in the library of 2000 plus chapters. You can see here's the Mission Statement. If you need any type of template where you might only know a word for a chapter header like i need a budget or i need a capabilities or any type of chapter.

We can also click the Samples tab and there's 200 filled in samples and if you remember there were three that were on that franchise article and those three will be in this list of 200 samples that are included. We can also find those lists over here in the Quick Start tab. This Quick Start tab has many more layouts than just the 200 samples and these are just basically recipes of lists of chapters for specific kinds of situations.

We can do a search here for a franchise and you'll see it found some franchise related layouts and any of the 200 that are in Samples tab will also be in this Quick Start tab. We're going to select the selling a franchise and you can see there's a list of chapters here. Now, the Quick Start lists will usually be expanded on with additional chapters that were not part of the original sample so say the selling franchise over the samples might have a slightly smaller set of pages in it than on the Quick Start tab.

We're going to use the Quick Start tab just so we can get a little broader range of templates and we'll import the topics. It's also telling us this Quick Start layout has pre–written sample content so we're going to say yes we're going to import that as well. What that will do is that will import the text that was written into any of the actual completed samples it will pull that into the document it's going to assemble from the fill in the blank chapters.

That will get your writing started a little faster where you might be able to reuse the actual sample content. We can click this view button and you'll see the 17 chapters that were selected. This is 17 out of the 2000 plus chapters.

Click the OK, Use Selected Templates button and that will take us back to the project page. Note that I turned off the Excel dynamic link checkbox here. In the Expert edition of the software there is a feature where cost related pages can be directly linked to Excel spreadsheets for doing the calculations.

As you update the Excel spreadsheets it will auto update right into the Word document whereas in the basic Proposal Packs you still have the spreadsheets but they won't be linked directly to the Word documents. We've got these company and client data screens. Company Data, that is going to be your information, your name, address, phone number, email address, website and so on of the person writing the proposal.

Client Data, this is going to be your client's name, address, phone number and so on. If we put in the title here, this is just going to get imported into the title of the document on the title page. So we have our templates selected, we have our company data and client data, we have our settings.

When you're ready to actually generate the document you click your OK, Save Project button and just sit back and wait for the Wizard to generate the documents. All right, this document has been generated. We'll open it up take a look at it.

You can see it pulled in the sample content, this is the sample cover letter versus stock fill in the blank cover letter and you'll see we have the sample content set up with tags. It merged our company name and information into the sample. Note this is the company and client information we put in those screens and you can see this is the Janitorial #4 graphic design theme.

All the colors, the logos, background graphics, watermarks, accents and so on. The URL here that's going to get pulled in from whatever you entered into the Company Data screen. This will be your URL or whatever you want.

This is all editable text now so any of these things you can edit after the fact that it's been generated as well. So now you'll see that the Executive Summary that's one of the additional pages that was added through using the Quick Start list of templates because the sample didn't actually have an Executive Summary so it's pulled in the fill in the blank version. The Franchising page, that's pulled in from the sample content.

Financial pages like Your Investment you're going to fill that in yourself. If we had the Professional version set up with the dynamic Excel spreadsheet linking you could actually link these cells of this cost page, this investment page, to an Excel spreadsheet and do all your calculations in the spreadsheet. You do actually have that calculator spreadsheet right here.

You can just open this up so in the Novice edition these are just two independent files and you can use these spreadsheets that have all these calculations already set up to do all your numbers and then you will type in the totals and line items. Just manually type them into the page whereas in the Expert edition if you have that linking feature you could do the calculations in the spreadsheet and they will just auto update right into the Word document. You'll see the rest of the pages where it pulled in the sample content and you can just start editing this document to finish it.

So that is the first franchising sample we're going to show. Now we're going to change the design theme to illustrate a different kind of company. We have all of our hundreds of design themes in the list here so you will be limited to just the one or more designs that you've specifically purchased.

You'll see the rest of them here as purchasable design themes. We're going to use the Food #4 that might be a good design theme for a coffee shop or deli type proposal or business because the next franchise proposal we're going to show is purchasing or buying a franchise and this will be a deli type franchise. So again we'll click the Document Projects button, Add New Project and we'll leave the Excel spreadsheet dynamic linking enabled for this demo.

Click the Pick Documents button and this time we'll go to the Samples tab and i'll just search the word franchise here. This will pick up the other sample we have in there for buying a franchise. Import the content and now you see these are the chapters in that sample.

If we went over to the Quick Start list again and picked that same layout we might get a layout that has a few additional fill in the blank chapters. Just because that sample has a certain set of chapters doesn't mean we're limited to that list of chapters. We have eight here but what if we want to add additional pages.

I could add an Introduction, so we can customize this list with any number of other chapters and it will add additional pages into the layout. You can remove chapters if you don't need one and so on. Now that we have our list of chapters selected we'll go back to the project screen and we'll fill out the Company Data.

This again will be your company information. Client Data, we'll just pick the same default client here and once we have everything selected we click the OK, Save Project button and let the Wizard build the document again. All right, now this document's been generated.

Take a look at it. I'm going to open the spreadsheet first actually to illustrate the dynamic linking feature. You'll see the sample content again pulled in, the company and client information merged in again, the company client information.

This is the Food #4 design theme you can see it's kind of a coffee shop deli type theme to it and it's pulled in the sample content. You'll notice here in the Financial Information page and also the Income Projection page just clicking these highlights the entire number and that is an indication that this is a linked cell. These are not just typed in numbers, these are all coming directly from the Excel spreadsheet.

You can see the numbers here 385, 525, 675 and then all the calculations. This is how Proposal Kit is set up so you can have a nice presentation style in your final proposal instead of showing people your complete spreadsheet and set it up so you have a nice display with only the numbers and line items and information you want shown but you can keep all your calculations off in an Excel spreadsheet. For example, if I go update this 2021 number.

Make this 485 and save the spreadsheet. There's a few ways to get these numbers updated into the Word document. If you do your Excel calculations with the Word document closed, each time you open the Word document Word will ask you if you want to update the links.

You just click Yes and it will auto update. If you just sit and wait sometimes Word will just automatically do it within a few seconds or a couple minutes or we can right click and click the Update Link button and that will update the total. If we just want to ensure all of the links get updated at once, let's just change another one here make this 725 and 875 and save that.

Now we'll go open the Word document and now Word will ask if I want to update the document from the link. I'm going to say Yes and you'll see it doing a little progress bar down here. Now we scroll down to that financial page and you can see our numbers are all updated in the Word document without us having to actually manually update the Word document ourselves.

This will keep your calculations straight and reduces the risk of you making mistakes. Retyping calculations if your calculations are going to change frequently while you're developing you can keep everything a little straighter and reduce your risk of having mistakes in the final Word document. And that is the rest of the Food #4 design theme and the sample.

So that is how you can create franchise related proposals for any type of business selling or buying franchises or anything else related. Partnerships, business plans and so on using Proposal Pack and the Wizard software.