Most people evaluating a franchise have already sat through more corporate training than they can count, and it’s made them skeptical of the word itself. Picture a prospective owner walking into an information session who has been through onboarding at three different companies, a leadership development program, and at least one weekend retreat with a facilitator who used the word “synergy” without irony. None of it stuck. Training, to that person, meant a binder that went into a drawer and a certificate that meant nothing six months later.
That skepticism is earned, not paranoid. Corporate training has a well-documented forgetting problem, and anyone who’s sat through twenty rounds of it has felt the forgetting happen in real time, whether or not they had a name for it.
This is what to look for in any training model: training that gets used the same week it’s delivered, on real client conversations, not training that gets filed away.
The Forgetting Curve Is Real, and Most Corporate Training Ignores It
Employees forget the overwhelming majority of what they’re taught within days, not months. Peak Revenue Learning’s 2025 analysis of the classic forgetting curve found that people forget roughly 50% of new content within an hour, 70% within a day, and up to 90% within a week – and separately reported that 74% of employee training content is forgotten entirely without reinforcement. That isn’t a knock on any individual trainee. It’s what happens when information gets delivered once, in a room, disconnected from the work someone has to do the next day.
Corporate learning budgets haven’t solved this on their own. The Association for Talent Development’s 2025 State of the Industry Report put average direct training expenditure at just over $1,000 per employee in 2024, with roughly 14 hours of formal learning delivered per person – a real investment that still runs into the same forgetting curve when the content isn’t reinforced through actual use.
Why “More Training” Was Never the Right Fix
Volume was never the problem with the twenty trainings someone’s already sat through – application was. Piling on more sessions, more binders, and more slide decks doesn’t fix a forgetting problem; it produces more forgotten material. What actually improves retention is using new information immediately, in a real scenario, with feedback close behind it.
The right training is built around that principle instead of around hours logged. A good training program doesn’t leave you waiting weeks to try what you learned. Ask any franchisor how soon after training you would be on a real discovery call.
What Good Franchise Training Should Cover
Good franchise training is built around what the job requires on day one, not a general leadership curriculum. Ask yourself whether a training program addresses:
- How to run a client discovery call and diagnose what a business actually needs
- How to present marketing services and match them to a client’s budget
- How to talk credibly about SEO, PPC, and web design without pretending to be the specialist who executes it
- How to price a service and close without over-promising
- How to hand a signed client off to RedKnight’s delivery team cleanly
Every one of those is a task you would perform early on as a franchisee, not a concept you might use someday.
No Trust Falls, No Binders That Die in a Drawer
Look for training that skips icebreakers and team-building exercises disconnected from selling. Look for direct, applied instruction: sales scripts, objection-handling practice and walkthroughs you can use on a real client call.
Whatever materials a franchisor provides, ask whether they are working tools you can open during a call or reference documents meant to sit in a binder.
Support Doesn’t End When the Training Does
Ongoing coaching matters more than a one-time onboarding event. Questions will come up well after launch, such as how to handle a client who wants to renegotiate scope or how to price a custom request, and a launch-week training session can’t anticipate them. Ask what advisory support and coaching continue past the initial launch period. That ongoing access is what separates a system from a seminar.
What This Means for Someone Skeptical of Training
Skepticism about training is a reasonable response to twenty rounds of forgettable content, not a reason to avoid this one. The real test of any training program isn’t how comprehensive the binder looks – it’s whether someone can walk out of a session and use what they learned on a real client the same week. That’s the bar to hold any franchise training to, including ours.
Ready to See the Training for Yourself?
Training should be built to be used immediately, not filed away after the fact. If you’ve sat through enough corporate programs to be skeptical of the word “training,” start a conversation with RedKnight Franchising and ask to see exactly what the first 30 days look like.
If this sounds like the kind of business you want to build, the next step is simple: inquire about RedKnight franchise ownership and we’ll walk you through what it actually takes.