Franchisee Friday - Screenmobile

Our #FranchiseFriday, David Winters, owns Screenmobile in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. David uses his business to give back to his local community by going the extra mile to take care of his employees, in and out of the office. Find out more about David and his franchise below in our Q&A: 

Q: How does your franchise participate in community outreach efforts and give back to the local community?

A: We employ 20 people of which 17 are the primary bread winners for their family. We have single working mothers, single working fathers, folks with four and five children. As such, our current version of giving back to the local community is spent helping these associates with personal obstacles, as well as funding emergencies that happen in their lives. We make it very clear to our associates that we are there for them. These are things like filing taxes, obtaining child support, assistance with advances or gifts to cover unexpected expenses, use of company vehicles where their cars are out of service as well as covering the expense of repairing their vehicles from time to time.
 
Q: What steps does your franchise system and your locations personally take to promote diversity in the workplace?

A: We promote diversity by not taking race, religion or other orientations into our hiring practices. We have a multi-cultural team which includes men, women, African American and Hispanic associates as well as an associate from Europe.
 
Q: What methods do you use to improve the franchisee-franchiser relationship?

A: We have always had an exceptionally good relationship with our franchisor, Screenmobile. We communicate regularly by telephone, we send quarterly updates of how we are doing, we participate in all franchise-wide events and have always stood ready to assist other franchisees either directly or at the request of Screenmobile. Most importantly, we have never asked them for anything unreasonable and they in turn have always be very reasonable with granting our requests.
 
Q: What traits do you look for when evaluating potential managers to help run one of your franchise locations?

A: The ideal managers for a Screenmobile Franchise roughly include the following: organized, self-motivated, sales oriented and above all else, understanding that an exceptional customer experience is the only way to long term success. There is actually way more to this, but this is a good start. 
 
Q: How have you used technology at your franchise to increase efficiency in your operations, and what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve solved with a technological improvement?   

A: Since the day we started, technology has been one of our main focuses in an attempt to reduce cost, reduce errors and to make processes consistent for all associates. For us this currently includes a CRM, Service Scheduling, Task Tracking, Customer Survey and Project Management as well as online customer file retrieval which is all built into one unified system. We would need many more associates if we were not this automated, and the automation costs us less than 1/2 of a full-time person per year. We also utilize web based IP telephony.  

Learn more about Screenmobile by clicking here.