Is it OK if your manual is out of date?

“What’s wrong with having a Franchise Operations Manual that is a little out of date? We haven’t changed that much in the past 5 years. Nobody looks at it anyway, right?”

If you have ever thought or said those words, then I encourage you to keep reading because you might walk away from this with a new perspective on your Franchise Operations Manual.

So, what is wrong with having a manual that is a little out of date? There could be a lot wrong with it. Let’s start with the phrase, “a little out of date.” That phrase is relative. To some people, a little out of date might mean 3-6 months. Believe it or not, some franchise systems make it a point to update their manuals every month, and even every week. With the Online Manual by FranMan www.franman.net/onlinemanual.html , you can update your manual multiple times per day if you wanted to. However, the managers that stay on top of the operations manual that way are very few and far between. Usually the manual gets pushed to the back burner because there are always other pressing issues to deal with. This is because most people don’t see a direct correlation between the operations manual and the bottom line. But I digress. We’ll save that topic for another blog entry. Usually, the phrase, “a little out of date” means 5-10 years. I know, it sounds horrible, but I see it all the time.

Here is where the disconnect is. Most people see the operations manual as an event instead of a process. Somehow, somewhere, from somebody, most people are taught that the EVENT of producing an operations manual is completed once the manual goes to print. That is usually followed with a big sigh of relief, “Whew, man am I glad that’s done!” This, in turn, is followed with 5-10 years of silence – nothing but the crickets chirping.

On the surface, everything is fine until one day somebody in the home office decides to crack open the manual and learns that the procedures that are supposed to be the official System Standards are so outdated that they still refer to floppy disks and the up-and-coming World Wide Web. Laugh all you want, but I have seen it, and I have seen it in big systems as well as small ones.

Underneath the surface, however, everything is not fine. A great deal of damage is being done. Here is what’s happening. Existing franchisees have been conditioned to NOT use the manual, and new franchisees learn quickly to NOT use the manual. You might respond, “What? Nobody here teaches our franchisees to NOT use the manual.” Indirectly, you do. By not providing an up-to-date operations manual for your franchisees, you are teaching them that they will not likely find what they need when they reference it. Experience is the best teacher. If experience tells them that the document is useless, then they will conclude that in fact, the document is useless.

Additional damage is being done by the out-of-date manual when it causes franchisees to rely solely on the home office staff to answer all questions. That puts a burden on staff that keeps them from performing other necessary duties. They can’t get anything else done if they spend all day fielding questions from franchisees.

Finally, out-of-date franchise operations manuals can be a nightmare if you ever have to go to court, and the lawsuit involves one of your out-of-date System Standards. That can be very costly.

You can avoid all of this mess by resetting your perception of “manual=event” to “manual=process.” Your Franchise Operations Manual is a process that begins with the production of the manual, but never ends until the company does.

It really does matter if your manual is a little out of date. That’s why nobody looks at it anyway.