For those of you thinking about franchising your business, I wanted to point out a "Franchising 101" tutorial on the CFA (Canadian Franchise Association) Web site.

http://www.cfa.ca/Publications_Research/Tutorials/

From an online training perspective, this tutorial would probably get a 1 out of 10 - at best! It's basically 20 mini-chapters of text. No images, multimedia, or even the ability to search through it. That being said, if you can manage to read through the entire CFA tutorial, you can find some very valuable information.

Two sections of this "Franchising 101" tutorial are related to training. Section 7 is related to initial franchisor training and section 8 deals with ongoing training. Section 9 additionally provides you with an introduction to Operations Manuals.

I'm a bit disappointed that the Canadian Franchise Association barely touches on the subject of online training. An online Corporate University is such a great tool, especially for small to medium size franchisors, that it probably deserves an entire section in this tutorial.

A company trying to franchise has enough things to worry about. The more you can automate, the better. Especially if you can find a good, reliable service provider to outsource the administration of your Corporate University (e.g. hardware maintenance, software upgrades, network administration, etc.)