If you needed a franchisee to try a new piece of software next month, you probably already know who you’d call. They answer the phone. Their manager has been there a while. They’ll attend the training, give useful feedback, and work through a problem without turning it into a discussion at the next advisory council…
There is a check I run on franchise brands where I fetch their location pages the way a machine does. No browser, nothing rendered, just the file the server hands over. Then I read what is actually in there: does each location have a name, an address, a phone number, hours, some way to act….
An operator opens the monthly report from the brand and goes to one number first. Not to read it. To check it against the number sitting in their own system. If the two match, the rest of the report gets read. If they don’t, the report gets closed, and every report after that one gets…
“Your Item 20 says you opened forty-one units last year and closed nine. Six of the nine were transfers. What happened to the other three?” Numbers invented for the example. The question is not. That is a validation-call question now, and it is not coming from the broker or the attorney. It is coming from…
A credible full-time CTO costs $300,000 a year or more once you load in salary, bonus, benefits, and the recruiter’s cut. Most franchisors in the 50-to-300-unit range look at that number and stop. They’re right to stop. The math doesn’t work at that size, and hiring one anyway usually means paying an executive salary for…
Seven on a Saturday night. A shift lead is at the front desk and a member wants to freeze her membership mid-term. There’s a fee attached, maybe. The member is standing right there, waiting. The answer exists somewhere. It’s in the operations manual, or it’s in a training video from the last convention, or it’s…
Every week I see three to five posts telling franchise candidates which parts of the FDD to read before they sign. Item 6 for the fees. Item 7 for the total investment. Item 19 for the earnings claim. Item 20 for the closures. All good advice. And almost none of it says a word about…
So here's a scene that's playing out a few thousand times a day right now. A 45-year-old is sitting in a hospital parking lot. Mom fell. She's okay, but she can't be home alone anymore, and the discharge planner just said the words "in-home care" for the first time. Ten years ago that person would…
Most franchisors are using AI the wrong way. Here’s the mental model that actually scales. Most franchisors who’ve “adopted AI” have done one of two things: they’ve given their marketing team a ChatGPT subscription, or they’ve bolted a chatbot onto their website. Both are fine. Neither is a strategy. The problem isn’t the tools. It’s…
Discover how to move from a fragmented collection of tools to a cohesive technology operating system for your franchise.
