Your Best Franchisee Might Be Your Worst Pilot Location

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 meeting.

I understand the choice. You want somebody who will give the thing a fair shot.

But that operator may be so good at making things work that you never find out whether the rest of the network can use it.

What went into that successful pilot?

Imagine you’re testing a new lead follow-up tool.

Your pilot owner gets involved personally. The manager makes sure everybody completes the training. When a lead lands in the wrong place, somebody catches it. When an employee misses a step, the manager walks them through it again.

By the end of the pilot, follow-up is faster. The team is using the system. The owner says it’s working.

That’s useful evidence. I’d want to know something else before taking it to the rest of the network, though.

How much work did that owner and manager put in to get there?

Maybe the manager checks two screens every morning because the new tool doesn’t show everything the team needs. Maybe the owner has the vendor’s implementation lead on speed dial. Maybe the employee who really understands the system has quietly become the person everybody else asks.

None of that makes the pilot dishonest. The location really did get a result.

But if those things made the result possible, they belong in the rollout plan and the cost estimate. Otherwise, you’re asking the next group of locations to reproduce an outcome without giving them the conditions that produced it.

Keep the strong operator. Add somebody else.

I wouldn’t take your best franchisee out of the pilot. A capable operator can help you figure out what the tool should do, where the workflow is awkward, and whether the benefit is worth pursuing.

I would be careful about letting that location carry the whole buying decision.

Include a location with a reasonably new manager. Include an owner who supports the project but can’t be in the building all day. Find a team that will participate honestly while still dealing with the normal interruptions of running a business.

You don’t need to find the most troubled unit in the system. A location with serious staffing or management problems may tell you very little about the software because everything else is getting in the way.

You need operating conditions that resemble the places you intend to roll it out.

And I’d include a constructive skeptic. Somebody willing to say, “I understand what you want us to do, but show me where I’m supposed to find the time.”

That’s a useful person to hear from while you can still change the plan.

Watch the work around the tool

I’ve learned a lot by sitting with people and watching them work. You see things that never make it into a status call because the person doing them doesn’t think they’re worth mentioning.

They copy a name into a spreadsheet. They text the owner for an answer. They keep a handwritten list beside the keyboard so the next shift knows what still needs doing.

For a pilot, I’d want to watch a normal shift and ask about those steps.

What did the employee do before opening the tool? What did they have to do afterward? Where did they stop and ask for help? Did somebody come back at the end of the day to clean things up?

A completion rate won’t tell you all of that. Neither will a login report.

Then there’s the support coming from HQ and the vendor. During a pilot, it makes sense to have people paying close attention. You want problems found and fixed quickly. But somebody needs to record that effort.

If a location needs repeated individual coaching, you need to know who will provide it during rollout. If a vendor is fixing records manually behind the scenes, you need to know whether that work will continue, be automated, or fall to the franchisee.

Those are buying questions.

Try the support model you can actually sustain

Before calling the pilot complete, I’d run part of it with the training and support the next group of locations will receive.

Keep help available. Use the normal support channel. Have another employee learn the workflow from the materials you plan to distribute. See what happens on a shift when the manager who led the pilot isn’t there.

That gives you a chance to find the missing instructions while the project is still small.

It also lets you separate problems that need different fixes. An unclear screen may need a product change. A confusing handoff between shifts may need a process change. A task that adds work without giving the location anything useful back may need to be reconsidered altogether.

Another training webinar won’t solve all three.

Your strongest operator’s feedback still matters. So does the result they achieved. Just make sure you understand what they contributed to it.

Before approving the wider rollout, ask the pilot manager to walk you through everything they did to make it work, including the things nobody asked them to do.

Then put those steps in front of the manager at the next location.