Job Title:  Franchise Business Manager

The Body Shop

When Anita Roddick founded The Body Shop in 1976, she had a vision. Business as a force for good – that’s us. Over 40 years later, we’re proud to be pioneering cruelty-free beauty every step of the way. We’re the original ethical beauty brand. We’ve got a thing for empowering people and enriching our planet. We’re all about keeping it real, in every way possible. 

The Body Shop is a multichannel business, selling amazing products (with a great story) to millions of customers around the world through a combination of channels – e-commerce (on-line sales through our websites), owned retail stores in our markets across the world and finally through a network of franchisees, also across the world.

Any franchise channel needs really strong and commercially astute relationship management to deliver the very best results and to maximise profit. In our world, that is profit that we use to help fund our campaigning activities and to drive our ‘force for good’ agenda globally.

Your role in a nutshell

As the (International) Franchise Business Manager you will own and manage the relationship between The Body Shop International and (International) Head Franchisees with the ultimate aim to drive sustainable, profitable and strategic growth across our Franchise model. Growth that will deliver increasing revenue in the long-term. As the primary point of contact for all markets you will collaborate with the Franchise commercial team and regions to develop best-practice management approaches for our Franchises and make sure the Franchisee’s needs are considered when making critical business decisions. Across all of this it will be your task to ensure The Body Shop brand is protected whilst collaborating with the Franchisees to identify and implement initiatives to drive retail and wholesale sales.

Market awareness: You’ll need to be mobile as there is no substitute for visiting the franchisees in market to capture and understand market and competitor insight. You will be in market, questioning and listening, getting to understand the market’s local nuances.Your market awareness will extend to performance around key business metrics, alignment to TBSI Brand strategy, execution and plans, development of local Marketing Campaign calendars and commercial offers. It will be your role to gather market analysis on campaigns, categories and seasonal sales – in collaboration with Commercial and Brand & Activism of course.

Engagement: It’s really another word for collaboration. You’ll work with markets on their annual business planning and drive engagement with functions such as marketing, digital, store development and learning academy.You’ll also use your negotiation and relationship skills to arbitrate where required. Sometimes it just needs a fresh perspective and a different view.

Vision: We don’t have all the answers so your contribution to new initiatives and best practice on business management will be welcomed and incorporated, as will ideas on market specific campaign opportunities – all designed to drive more customer spend and profit to power our wider vision as a business.

Coaching & Reporting: This role draws upon a well-developed ability to coach and mentor – in this case it will be to support the Franchise team on all matters retail, particularly in store. To ensure visibility at the right levels the task of monthly performance narratives and ad hoc reporting for the wider community land firmly within this remit. It’s also a great mechanism to demonstrate achievement and to shout about successes.

More about the role

The watchword here is COLLABORATION. We use it a lot here at The Body Shop because it is so important in driving our behaviours and ultimately our results. It is a way of working that runs through every project, campaign and initiative – we know from experience that one person on their own is never as effective or diverse in their thinking as a team collaborating.

But in this role, more than possibly any, we need an expert collaborator. A grade ’A’ facilitator and relationship builder that brings genuine cooperation and partnership behaviours to deliver great results with and through others.

What we look for

Other than the need to be a super-collaborator and all-round business (general) management expert we seek genuine alignment with our purpose and activism campaigns. With that we need a focus on maintaining the ethical standards of The Body Shop around environment, health and safety as you would expect.

• Of course, you MUST have retail operations experience – you’ll need to truly appreciate the challenges and nuances of retail, ideally in multi-store environments.
• Multi-channel will have featured in your career somewhere along the way and ideally you will have previous experience of managing franchisees in varied markets, regions and cultures.
• Experience of coordinating consistent execution and of increasing sales and managing performance would be advantageous
• And if you read all the above you’ll know it will need drive, determination and high energy. 

Talent Drivers