Excerpt: The Alternative Board Australia's Master Franchisor was ready to scale their operation with new franchisees waiting to come on board. However they realised they could only effectively onboard one new franchisee at a time because of the manual way they were doing things. But they didn't want to lose the personal touch.
Industry: Franchise / Advisory / Remote Workers. Challenge: Labour-intensive, messy, untrackable, unscalable. Solution: Digital onboarding platform. Outcome: Staged learning journey, embedded consistency, halving support time, 83% engagement, 481% ROI
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About The Alternative Board
The Alternative Board Australia supports business owners and leaders to take their lives and businesses to the next level through peer advisory boards, expert one-to-one coaching, and a suite of strategic business tools. Along with internationally recognised Franchise expert Doug Downer, Claire brought the global organisation (now 36 years old) to Australian businesses in 2014, becoming the sole Master Franchisor in 2019. It's a business built entirely on the quality of its people and the rigour of its systems. Which made onboarding all the more critical.
The Challenge
For Claire Wilson, Master Franchisor of The Alternative Board Australia, there came the uneasy realisation that their onboarding needed rethinking:
"We weren't sure who had done what, and things were getting missed. And that's not who we are."
For years, The Alternative Board's highly personalised onboarding approach worked beautifully - because it could. With one new franchisee at a time, Claire and her support team had the capacity to guide them through every step.
The process was built around a Word-based manual, multiple emails with hyperlinks to other resources (coming from the US training centre in Denver) and a support team spending significant time chasing franchisees for information so they could progress. New franchisees were bombarded with things they needed to do, without a clear journey to follow - hence the need for handholding.
"One new franchisee at a time was do-able," Claire explains, but:
"When growth ramped up, it was too hard doing two at the same time with that approach. Things started slipping through
the gaps."
For a business that prides itself on structure, rigour, and consistency, this wasn't acceptable. But the solution had to be smart.
As a self-described tech-first company, Claire wasn't looking to hire more people to solve a systems problem. She was looking for the right tool.
The Solution
The Alternative Board had already evaluated their options. And they'd made a tentative decision on a Learning Management System (LMS) portal, but the high upfront cost made them delay.
That hesitation proved fortuitous. At the Franchise Council of Australia's National Conference, Claire encountered The Induction App.
What struck her immediately was the combination of simplicity and flexibility. It was a platform that could be shaped around The Alternative Board's needs, rather than requiring them to reshape their systems to fit someone else's.
Claire says:
"We chose The Induction App because it offered simplicity, yet flexibility in how we deployed it and customised it for ourselves - with easy updatability,"
She adds that it's better than larger systems, where they would have had to change their way of doing things to fit in with the system.
The result is what Claire describes as:
"A hybrid of onboarding, training, tracking and information: everything a new franchisee needs to be successful - in one place."
She tells new franchisees to think of it as their “training buddy” - something that sits alongside them throughout their onboarding journey, and remains a permanent reference they can return to at any time.
The Results
The impact on The Alternative Board's support team was immediate. Now with the structured, staged journey, critical information arrives early - and everyone moves forward together, smoothly.
Where they might have struggled onboarding one new franchisee if they were already busy, now they can onboard three or more at the same time, and everything runs smoothly.
"My estimate is that it’s close to halved the support time it used to take us – outside of the in-person training.
As soon as a franchisee signs their agreement, they receive a company email and immediate access to the platform. A few days later, CEO Claire joins them for an online check-in. "It's a short call, because there are no questions and they're all happy. It didn't happen like that before — I was on a call with them several times a week. Now it’s a once-a-week check-in when I’m not with them in person."
That shift alone represents a dramatic reduction in CEO time.
But the results for new franchisees themselves have been equally compelling. Claire enthuses:
"I enjoy how impressed our new franchisees are when they start going through it."
Overall franchisee engagement of 83%confirms that, with feedback praising the quality and comprehensiveness of the training received, as well as appreciating their ongoing personal support.
"When they're not your employees, you have to influence them rather than tell them," Claire notes. “Having one source of truth, that you're in control over, gives you a much better chance of consistent delivery. Otherwise, they ask other people who got trained a long time ago, or who’ve made up their own versions, and you lose that consistency."
Franchisees now arrive at their five-day in-person training excited, confident, and ready to engage.
"They come in more confident and more open to what’s next. They're already impressed and ready to learn more because of the staged journey so far."
Claire also emphasises that franchisees who have been onboarded through the app have noticeably fewer struggles than those who went through the old process — suggesting that the structured journey prepares them better, and helps them build a stronger foundation for long-term success.
From calculations based on time saved, fewer issues throughout, and higher franchisee performance, Claire estimates their ROI to be 481%.
The team will continue to evolve and expand the platform within the network as franchisee numbers grow - where the structured onboarding journey has become a compelling part of the franchise offer.
Looking Ahead
Claire is now preparing to share what they've built with The Alternative Board's global headquarters in Denver - where the US team is still managing onboarding manually through multiple emails with hyperlinks to documents and resources.
Claire's message to other franchise or agent-based organisations still relying on manual processes, is direct:
"If you care about your brand, and you have people you don't have direct control over, you need to invest in their learning journey.
The Alternative Board built their business on helping other businesses grow smarter. Now, with The Induction App, they've applied that same philosophy to their own operations — and the results speak for themselves.
