From Crude Oil to Rocket Fuel: How to Refine Know-How So It Powers Your Whole Franchise Network

jantimms3
Aug 4, 2025
9 min read

In every franchise network, there’s a steady stream of valuable insights being uncovered by franchisees solving everyday problems, by support teams learning from the field, by mentors showing someone how things really work. These moments contain gold… or as I prefer to describe it, crude oil.

But raw crude oil can’t power anything on its own.

That know-how the stuff people do instinctively or explain offhand in a meeting is only useful if it’s captured, clarified, and turned into something others can learn from. Without that, even the most brilliant insight risks staying locked in one person’s head, helping one location, for one brief moment.

Refinement is what makes the difference. It’s the process that transforms unstructured, experience-based knowledge into organised, transferable insight into the kind of premium-grade fuel that drives growth across your whole network.

In this article, we’ll explore practical strategies to refine the knowledge you gather so that it doesn’t go to waste. You’ll learn how to convert raw know-how into actionable tools, documented processes, and structured support that everyone in your system can benefit from not just those lucky enough to hear it live.

Let’s take a look at what effective knowledge refinement actually involves.

What Does It Mean to Refine Knowledge?

Refining knowledge isn’t about polishing language or making things sound clever. It’s about making know-how usable by others, at scale, and over time.

In practice, this means moving through three stages:

Tacit knowledge

what people know through experience but may struggle to explain clearly

Implicit knowledge

what becomes clearer through conversation, questions, and feedback

Explicit knowledge

what’s documented in a structured format so it can be taught, learned, and applied

Here’s the catch: most franchising networks stay stuck at the tacit or implicit stage. People “talk things through,” “share in meetings,” or “pick things up on the job” but little of that insight makes it into a format that others can access when they need it.

That’s a missed opportunity.

Take the example of Sam, a product expert who’d been trying for years to share his know-how with others in the network. He’d presented at meetings, answered questions, and written updates but nothing stuck. It wasn’t until we sat down together to unpack his knowledge slowly, asking probing questions, listening deeply, and documenting as we went, that we managed to surface the gold. The result? Structured eLearning modules that captured his insight once and for all and could be reused without him having to start from scratch every time.

That’s the power of refinement. Done well, it protects your high-value knowledge from walking out the door and transforms one person’s experience into a repeatable advantage for everyone.

Let’s take a look at where this refinement process should be happening inside your franchise network starting with everyday meetings.

Turn Knowledge Sharing Moments into Fuel

Franchise meetings are one of the richest sources of know-how sharing but without a process for refinement, most of that knowledge is lost before it can power anything.

Many networks encourage knowledge shares quick updates, ideas, or success stories shared informally during meetings. On the surface, this seems like a good way to spread insights. But if all you’re doing is listening and nodding, you’re still operating at the tacit level. That’s not fuel its unprocessed raw material.

To refine a knowledge share, you need to go a step further. That’s where the knowledge sharing moment comes in.

A knowledge sharing moment is a short discussion usually 2–5 minutes where the original insight is unpacked, clarified, and understood by others in the room. The key is in the questioning. What exactly was done? Why did it work? Could it be applied elsewhere? That dialogue is what transforms the insight from tacit to implicit.

From there, the next step is to document it clearly, simply, and in a way that others can use.

Let’s say someone shares that they’ve introduced monthly “lunch and learn” webinars in their franchise to spotlight key topics. On its own, that’s a throwaway comment. But if others ask how it works, what topics are chosen, how participation is encouraged, and what results have been seen that insight becomes meaningful. Once captured and recorded (for example, in your knowledge base, shared on your intranet, or added to your field coaching toolkit), it becomes a reusable asset.

To make this sustainable, you need a simple system to store and categorise what’s been shared. For example:

Know My Products & Services
Run My Business
Create and Develop My Team
Grow My Business
Make Money

That way, your team can locate the right piece of knowledge at the right time whether they’re onboarding a new franchisee, preparing for a marketing push, or solving a support challenge.

You don’t need to act on everything straight away. The key is to store refined knowledge in a place where it can be found and used when needed. That’s how your “what should we work on next?” conversations become sharper, faster, and more focused because you’ve already captured the groundwork.

Refine Forum Insights Before Enthusiasm Fades

Workshops, roundtables, and conferences are fantastic opportunities to unearth know-how especially when you bring people together to discuss real-world issues. But unless you have a deliberate refinement process in place, those insights vanish as soon as the event ends.

The pattern is all too familiar. A packed agenda, enthusiastic contributions, high energy… followed by no follow-up, no documentation, and no change. Ideas are talked about but never captured, clarified, or actioned.

Sound familiar?

That’s exactly what happened in one franchise group that launched a series of leadership forums. They were designed to share best practices and drive collaboration. And they did at first. But without a way to capture and refine the ideas generated, the forums became overwhelming. The group left with pages of notes, a long list of potential projects, and no clear priorities. Eventually, the energy drained away, and participation dropped.

The turning point came when they implemented a structured Group Scooping technique. This technique developed by Greg Nathan from the Franchise Relationship Institute, is a method for directing the flow of crude oil and converting it into actionable, prioritised fuel. Here’s how it works:

1. Frame the topic clearly. Keep the conversation focused on a specific theme.

2. Break into small discussion groups. Each with a facilitator or ‘table captain. The table captains are briefed beforehand about facilitating group discussions and ensuring that everyone gets the opportunity to share their thoughts and knowledge.

3. Start with solo reflection. Give participants a few minutes to jot down their thoughts.

4. Facilitate a structured discussion. Table captains draw out ideas, encourage contributions, and record key points visibly e.g. on flip charts or butcher’s paper.

5. Share and validate. Each group presents their key takeaways. Others listen, question, and clarify turning tacit knowledge into implicit understanding.

6. Organise and vote. Summarise key action points and let participants vote on what matters most allocating scores from 5 (highest priority) to 1 (lower priority).

After the event, the outputs are reviewed and documented. The most actionable, high-priority insights are added to your knowledge base or project planning process creating a pipeline of ideas that are realistic, relevant, and ready to be implemented.

The final step? Debrief. Every forum should end with two types of feedback:

From participants collected via surveys or feedback forms to assess session quality and impact
From the organising team captured in a lessons learned discussion: what worked, what didn’t, what to change next time

Too often, that last step is skipped. In the case of the leadership forums mentioned earlier, if the team had taken time to reflect, they might have identified their mistake sooner trying to do too much, too fast, without the refinery capacity to handle the volume of ideas. The crude oil kept flowing, but the system got jammed. Eventually, the trust eroded, and the knowledge-sharing culture stalled.

Lesson learned? Don’t just create space for ideas create systems to process, prioritise, and preserve them.

Document the Learning from Buddy-Up and Shadowing

There’s no better way to uncover practical, experience-based knowledge than through shadowing and mentoring. When someone works side by side with an experienced franchisee, support manager, or team member, they get to see how things really work not just the theory, but the small decisions, patterns, and actions that drive results.

This is some of the richest crude oil you’ll ever find.

But again, it’s not enough to simply observe or talk things through. Unless the insights are refined by structuring the learning and capturing what was gained the opportunity is wasted. The knowledge may benefit the person who shadowed… but it won’t benefit the next person, or the one after that.

To avoid that, every buddy-up or shadowing program needs a knowledge refinery built in. Here’s how:

✅ Use a mentoring diary or exploration log

Encourage the learner to jot down what they observed each day key tasks, decisions made, why things were done a certain way. This reflection process starts to make the tacit knowledge implicit.

✅ Schedule structured debriefs

Ask the learner to explain what they’ve learned. Get them to describe the “how” and “why” not just the “what.” A skilled facilitator or mentor should ask probing questions to tease out deeper understanding and check for clarity.

✅ Cross-check against existing knowledge resources

Where possible, point the learner back to your documented processes and tools. Can they find the same insights there? If not, you’ve just found a gap in your explicit knowledge. Fill it.

✅ Document insights in a format that’s ready to teach

A great way to test whether knowledge has been truly refined is to ask: Could someone else learn from this? Encourage learners to write down their insights as if they had to train a new franchisee or support team member using it.

This is exactly what happened in my collaboration with Sam. He had been trying for years to share his product expertise with others answering questions, presenting in meetings, writing updates. But the knowledge never really transferred. Why? Because the crude oil stayed in his head. It wasn’t structured, clarified, or documented in a way others could absorb and apply.

It wasn’t until I spent time asking deliberate questions, capturing his answers, and organising the content into structured learning materials that we finally made progress. That work took around 40 hours but it replaced hundreds of hours of failed attempts to “tell” people how to use the product.

The lesson? If you’re asking someone to shadow or mentor, build in the process that turns the experience into reusable fuel. Make reflection and documentation a requirement not an afterthought.

Document Insights from Outside and from Best Practice Reviews

Some of the most valuable knowledge your network can access doesn’t come from inside your own four walls it comes from looking outward. Whether it’s benchmarking against industry peers, learning from suppliers, or analysing high-performing franchisees, there’s often a wealth of know-how waiting to be discovered.

But just like with internal insights, outside knowledge is only useful if it’s refined.

Too often, these insights are shared verbally in passing, jotted down in someone’s notebook, or buried in a post-event report that no one reads again. That’s tacit or, at best, implicit knowledge and it can’t power your network until it’s organised, clarified, and stored in a way others can access and use.

Let’s break this down into two distinct knowledge sources:

External Learning (from other businesses, industries, or networks)

When your team attends a conference, meets with a supplier, or connects with counterparts in another network, there are often valuable insights exchanged new practices, different tools, clever strategies.

To refine this knowledge:

Debrief as soon as possible. What did we hear? Why was it valuable? How might it apply in our context?
Document the takeaways clearly. Avoid vague summaries like “great ideas from supplier workshop.”
Store the insight in your knowledge library, tagged by topic, so others can find it when facing similar challenges.

Caution: Some knowledge shared across networks or from commercial partners may be sensitive or confidential. It’s important to apply judgement before making this knowledge explicit only document what’s appropriate to share internally.

Best Practice Reviews (within your own network)

When you conduct structured reviews of what’s working well in high-performing franchise units or departments, you’re sitting on premium-grade crude oil. But the value only emerges when:

The findings are analysed and summarised
The “why” behind the success is clearly articulated
The resulting guidance is made accessible to others in the network

Too many “best practice” reports fail to cross the finish line. They highlight what’s happening but not how others can replicate it. If the review doesn’t produce materials that others can use to apply the learning, then the knowledge stays stuck.

Think of best practice reviews as your internal R&D. You’re not just gathering intelligence you’re converting it into tools that drive performance.

The takeaway? Crude oil exists both inside and outside your network. But regardless of the source, the same principle applies: if it’s not refined, organised, and shared, it won’t deliver results.

Conclusion: Power the Network, Not Just the Moment

In franchising, you’re only as strong as your ability to share what works clearly, quickly, and consistently. The crude oil of operational know-how is there. You’ve already started exploring it. But if you don’t refine it, it won’t drive performance.

When you build a strong refinement process, you transform everyday insights into repeatable assets. You reduce dependency on a few knowledgeable people. You speed up learning across the network. And you protect your intellectual capital from disappearing when people move on.

The bottom line? Don’t let valuable knowledge slip through the cracks. Capture it. Clarify it. Refine it.

That’s how you stop the franchise brain drain and start building a high-performing, knowledge-powered franchise network.

Up next in the GRASP Know How series: we’ll explore how to Add to your refined knowledge enriching what you already have and keeping it relevant as your franchise network evolves.

Want Help Putting It into Practice?

If you’re ready to start refining the knowledge in your network but unsure where to begin, the Franchise Growth Bundle will help you to get started.

It includes:

A hardcopy of the bestselling book The Ultimate Franchising Success Formula
Full access to the audiobook version so you can reflect on the go
Two months of membership to the Get Smart Learning Academy, with tools, strategies, and real-world examples to apply across your network
Two live 1:1 Coaching Sessions
Plus access to the Five Magic F’s Success Diagnostic, a powerful tool to uncover and prioritise your franchise network’s development and growth opportunities.