Accelerating Franchise Engagement with Christian Brothers Automotive
Jamie Kenison | 4 min read
It is simply impressive to watch – in four short months, Christian Brothers Automotive has changed the way both franchises and the auto repair industry do L&D.
We feel extremely fortunate to have Christian Brothers in the Wisetail family and to have had the opportunity to speak with them about their program initiatives during our learning leader community event.
Lauren Strang, Manager of Learning & Development at Christian Brothers Automotive Corporation, has made it effortless for her teams to access content on their Wisetail platform, The Flywheel. And when we say teams, we’re talking large teams. Christian Brothers Automotive has grown to 250 franchise locations in 26 states. The Flywheel houses communications for all of those teams across every location. Talk about mass communication! Lauren talks about how she structures content for accessibility, and uses The Flywheel to increase engagement rates with everyone from franchise owners down to shop service techs.
It’s All in a Name: The Flywheel
Not everyone knows detailed car terminology – we certainly don’t – but for Christian Brothers Automotive, it’s their first language. That’s why the name of their platform, The Flywheel, is so creative and on-brand. A flywheel is a part of a car that you need to power forward. It provides mass for rotational inertia to keep your car’s engine running – otherwise, the engine would stall out when you released your foot from the accelerator. It balances the engine and is specifically weighted to the car’s crankshaft to smooth out the rough feeling caused by even a slight imbalance.
Having a centralized learning hub is as vital to Christian Brothers Automotive as a flywheel is to a car. Without a flywheel on a car, you cannot move or progress. And without The Flywheel within Christian Brothers Automotive’s culture and structure, their team could not move or progress. Or perhaps they’d feel that slight imbalance.
Franchise Support and a Go-To Resource
When asked how Christian Brothers’ team made The Flywheel a go-to resource for her massive, widespread team, Lauren answers simply: “We made it a habit to go to the platform for any and all information.”
Lauren’s goal in creating The Flywheel was to create an inclusive, easily accessible, and friendly platform which would house all of Christian Brothers’ resources – from franchise ownership to service tech FAQs. As a result, their L&D team is seeing adoption of company culture across the board. Lauren feels that they planted a seed of learning and encouragement within the platform.
“We weren’t exactly looking for a platform that was structured to the automotive industry, but more-so catered to providing learning content to every department within every level of the organization,” Lauren explains.
Popular Content Topics – Updated Often
One fun content strategy Lauren and her team find helpful is changing popular learning topics weekly. As a result, the team puts a spotlight on the content that attracts the most attention from their audience, and creates more room for those popular topics throughout the site.
Repetition increases retention. Learning is doing. To increase retention and the number of times her team sees engaging yet repetitive information, Lauren places content in various spots within The Flywheel in coordination with the highest traffic areas on the platform, mixed with where their home office wants to steer attention spans.
Color Coding Branding
Color coding is deemed to be one of the most effective learning (and studying!) techniques used in education development. The benefits of using color association are endless. Colors correlate to forming connections because every color has a cognitive association – and usually, this color association is crafted by both the creator (such as an instructional designer) and the viewer. Repetition also comes into play in color coding. Lauren and her team strategically use a mixture of consistent word categorization, color schemes, and color application to determine how the learning content and archives of educational information is organized.
