FranConnect, the leading provider of franchise management solutions for driving success in franchise sales, operations, and marketing, announced today it has acquired World Manager, a global provider of learning management and front-line employee engagement solutions to multi-location businesses. This acquisition marks a significant milestone for FranConnect in creating the industry’s only platform that helps franchise brands and multi-location businesses manage growth and operational success, end-to-end, from the brand to ownership groups and front-line employees. With this acquisition, FranConnect’s customer base is approaching close to 1500 brands and multi-locations businesses worldwide and reaches over 350,000 locations and franchise units.
The addition of World Manager to the FranConnect platform brings complementary, enterprise learning management and content creation capabilities to FranConnect’s best-in-class franchise management solution. World Manager provides a way for multi-location businesses to develop and deploy highly customized branded content to support front-line employee training for improved onboarding and engagement and enables brands to monitor engagement success at the unit-level. Operations teams are empowered to deliver and monitor best practice training, access up-to-the-minute data, staff training results, performance appraisals and satisfaction surveys with benchmark reporting. World Manager’s customers include some of the largest multi-location retail, restaurant, and hospitality brands, including Forever 21, Nike, Billabong, Domino’s, Long John Silver’s, Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux, Nando’s, Gloria Jean’s Coffees, and Ben & Jerry’s.
“We are thrilled to welcome the World Manager’s world-class family of brands and employees to the FranConnect community,” says Gabby Wong, CEO of FranConnect. “World Manager’s learning management and engagement platform adds a highly strategic capability to FranConnect’s operations solutions, extending our reach from managing the relationship between the brand and franchisee to supporting the needs of multi-location ownership groups and their employees. We can now provide end-to-end visibility of drivers of growth and performance across all types of multi-locations businesses.”
Founded in 2005 with offices in Australia, Canada, Colombia, and United States, World Manager’s solutions are used by over 500 brands and multi-location businesses across 60 countries. Their customers span the technology, restaurant, retail, finance, and service sectors and include over 50 employees worldwide. All employees and offices will now be a part of FranConnect’s global footprint.
“I founded World Manager 17 years ago with the idea that businesses of all sizes should have the best tools and software available when enabling and engaging with front-line employees. Early in my career, as a corporate trainer in the restaurant industry, I saw firsthand the impact of successful training on the engagement of front-line employees and growth of the business. It has been an honor to work alongside World Manager’s global leadership team to create one of the best employee training and communications platforms for multi-location businesses in the world. The power of this acquisition will enable our combined entities to provide the most robust tools to the market and drive more rapid scale and growth for our customers,” says Gary Valkenburg, Founder and CEO of World Manager.
