Ziebart Chief Growth Officer Larisa Walega proudly refers to herself as a franchise advocate — and she has the receipts to back it up.
First, there’s her 15-year career at international automotive appearance protection brand Ziebart, where she helps oversee brand positioning and marketing for 400 locations in 37 countries. She started as a field marketing manager — an experience that she says was wildly valuable in helping her understand the daily needs of different franchise operators — and then steadily climbed the ladder to become the chief growth officer and first female in the C-suite of Ziebart.
She’s an active voice in the franchising community, notably as the Chair of the International Franchise Association (IFA) Women's Franchise Committee, where she’s working to improve work-life balance, mentorship, and get more women in franchising. She has been recognized as a top influencer in franchising and a top CMO gamechanger by Entrepreneur Magazine.
Clearly, she’s someone to listen to if you care about franchise marketing. In our interview, Larisa shares how she collaborates with franchise owners, how she markets to all three (yes, three) of Ziebart’s customer profiles, and how she’s built out an impressive in-house team to ensure everyone feels supported.
You had dipped your toes in working with franchises in your agency days, but how did you need to change your skills or approach when you stepped into a full-time franchise marketing role?
One of the complexities of franchising is adoption and making sure that everybody’s voices are heard. Businesses that are not franchises have a boss and probably a board of directors to report to. But in franchising, you have to get to know your franchise owners and realize just how important their point of view is to new program creation, whether it's marketing operations, product development, etc.
If you do not have their feedback in the process of new program creation, adoption becomes very difficult because you're really not taking into account the day-to-day leader of your brand right in their store. Whether or not you implement all of those voices is one thing, but it makes every program much stronger, and you can get it out to market quicker, which increases their revenue faster, too.
"If you do not include feedback from franchise owners in the process of new program creation, adoption becomes very difficult."
Can you share a time when feedback from your franchisees shifted your marketing approach?
One thing that stood out to me from our last annual franchisee satisfaction survey was that there was some disconnect on local store marketing support. So we took a step back as a team and audited our franchise owners to understand a little bit more of why there was a disconnect with local store marketing. We found it was just simply the quantity of support that they were receiving, so we got to work adding another field marketing specialist—in fact, she started this week! But it takes a minute to hire someone, right? As soon as we realized the support we were offering was a major issue for our franchise owners, our director of marketing, our digital marketing specialist, and I split up our franchise owners and became their field marketing support until this person onboarded and was ready to go.
You do what you have to do, you roll up your sleeves, you figure it out. But the most important piece of any franchise is our franchisee. Anything that we can do to make sure that they feel supported, that they understand what the support is for them, is very important.
Can you talk us through what franchisee support looks like day-to-day and how you communicate and collaborate with your franchisees?
Our franchise owners pay a marketing fee of 2% of their total revenue, and we want to make sure that they're getting the best return for that investment. Our responsibility is to grow the brand nationally — the franchise owner's responsibility is to then grow that brand locally. But we also support them in providing recommended partners to use for local marketing tactics, managing their local business listings, doing SEO for their local store pages, and providing them with a social media partner.
Social is really our focus [at Ziebart] over the next eight months, and really strengthening that, providing our franchise owners playbooks and content calendars so they can literally just cut and paste.
We also have an in-house creative department, a creative director, a graphic designer and a video production specialist, and our franchise owners get access to that as part of their fee. So, everything that they want to do, we create the assets and then personalize them based on their local market.
Then the field marketing specialists help the franchise owners identify, okay, this is what Ziebart is doing for you, how can you complement it in your local market? We also have a resource center they can log into anytime that has all of our assets, and send a “Marketing Minute” newsletter roughly every other week sharing seasonal efforts or PR campaigns that are going on.
"Our responsibility is to grow the brand nationally — the franchise owner's responsibility is to then grow that brand locally."
It sounds like you have a pretty sizable marketing team. Can you share a bit about how you built that out?
I'm glad you asked about the approach for building a franchise marketing team, because oftentimes when I share the size of our team with other franchise marketing leads, they're like, “Oh, I'm so jealous.” And I say, “Okay, but that didn't happen overnight.”
When I started 15 years ago, it was just me as a field marketing manager and then a director of marketing. So we scaled from that to eight team members today.
Hiring decisions all tie back to Ziebart’s strategic business plan. We don't make hiring decisions based on tactics — we make decisions based on goals that inform strategies that inform tactics that are built to create and refine and achieve those strategies. Then we look at: What is the team makeup that we need? What are the tools and technologies that we need to then make sure that that strategy and ultimately those goals are achieved?
For example, some of the first positions we added were the creative positions. Looking at the cost analysis of bringing in a graphic designer and a video production manager outweighed the cost of working with agencies.
The best marketers that I've seen have little to no pushback in asking for more funding or asking for more budget because they connect it back to the strategic plan and company revenue.
I’ve heard you mention that you see both car owners and potential franchise owners as your customers. How do you think about marketing to each audience?
We actually have three customers. We have millions of drivers around the world. From a consumer standpoint, developing our brand book was so important. If we didn't have that, we would not have a road map to where we are going: our vision, our mission, our values, our brand promise, our brand positioning, tone of voice. We authored that entire brand book from scratch during my years as vice president of marketing, and it has been one of the big catalysts of the success that we've seen as a brand. You need to have all of those fundamental pieces to then drive your brand forward.
We have our potential franchise owners, and marketing to them is all about understanding their why: They want to change their career, they want to build a legacy for their family, they want to be their own boss. There are multiple reasons, but that messaging and each persona has to be clearly defined.
Our third customer, though, is the employees at our franchises. I often try to remind everybody that if you're not thinking about them first, the other two aren't going to matter. If they're not excited about your brand and they're not excited about what they're doing, and they're not connected to that strategic plan, the rest of it's not going to work, so employer branding is so important.
"Developing our brand book was so important. If we didn't have that, we would not have a road map to where we are going"
You recently finished your first year as the chair of the Women’s Franchising Committee. What advice would you give to women who are looking to grow their careers in the field?
Franchising is the most giving community I have ever been in. Everybody is willing to help everyone. Yes, we all have competitive brands, but we all like each other and we're all willing to share what's working or give advice.
