In this episode of the RevOps Champions Podcast, host Brendon Dennewill sits down with April Porter, attorney-turned-franchise-strategist and Founder of Secret Sauce and FranchiseVault.ai, to unpack why franchise growth so often stalls, not from lack of tools, but from a leadership and mindset gap that follows business owners from their first unit to their fifth.
April draws on her own journey from prosecuting attorney to multi-unit franchise owner to explain why 81% of franchisees never scale past a single location, how psychological "employee programming" keeps owners stuck, and why she believes franchising needs a formal ethics standard. She and Brendon also dig into AI adoption, arguing that technology amplifies whatever's already broken in a business rather than fixing it, and that leaders should ask themselves a simple test: could your business run, and grow, if you disappeared for three weeks with no Wi-Fi?
This episode is essential listening for franchise executives, RevOps and GTM leaders, and franchisors and franchisees alike who want to understand the real reasons growth stalls, and how to build the leadership foundation that makes technology and expansion actually work.
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April Porter | President & Chief Executive Officer at Secretsos™
April Porter is a Franchisee Performance Strategist, Business Intelligence Expert, and the Founder and CEO of Secretsos™ and Ask April Porter. A former prosecuting attorney and municipal judge, April took a leap of faith into business ownership and scaled her own fitness franchise to four locations in under three years. Today, she is the dedicated "voice for franchisees," empowering owners to build freedom, profitability, and fulfillment through her Infinite Franchisee® program. Recognized as a Top 30 Global Influencer in Franchising and a 3x winner of St. Louis’ Top 50 Fastest Growing Companies, April brings an unmatched blend of legal insight and operational strategy to help franchise brands and multi-unit owners scale successfully. |
Brendon Dennewill: Hello and welcome back. Today I'm joined by April Porter, entrepreneur, attorney, franchise strategist, and founder of SecretsosTM and FranchiseVault.ai, where she helps franchisees, franchisors, and business owners build more scalable businesses through stronger leadership, business intelligence, and intentional AI implementation.
April's journey to franchising has been anything but traditional. After serving as a prosecuting attorney and municipal judge, she became a multi-unit franchise owner, experiencing firsthand both the opportunities and the realities of growing a franchise business. That experience shaped her perspective that one of the biggest challenges in franchising isn't operational execution, it's preparing franchisees to think and lead like business owners.
Through her work, April has found that businesses rarely struggle because they lack technology. More often, growth exposes weaknesses in leadership, decision making, and operational systems that were already there. Her work focuses on helping franchise organizations close the gap by developing stronger leaders, building better business intelligence, and implementing AI in ways that strengthen healthy businesses rather than compensate for broken ones.
April, welcome to the RevOps Champions Podcast.
April Porter: Thank you so much, Brendon. I'm excited to be here.
Brendon Dennewill: Awesome, it's really good to have you. April, your career has taken you from practicing law to owning and operating franchise businesses, and now to advising franchise organizations across the US. Looking back, what experiences led you to focus on what you call the franchise intelligence gap?
April Porter: When I got into franchising, much like many first-time franchise owners, I really believed that the franchisor was going to provide everything you need to be successful, because that's kind of the tagline of franchising. Although I was an attorney and a judge, I was painfully aware that I knew nothing about business. At least that's how I felt at the time.
As someone who is constantly learning, I was really excited to dive in and learn how to be a business owner. When I started, we had a one-week training camp that we went to in person. We were practicing sales scripts, learning how to use the CRM to manage our customer base and check people out. At lunch we were kickboxing in the gym, and then we were going into other gyms teaching people how to kickbox. We did that for a week, then went back to our gyms and started running them.
I remember thinking, I don't know anything about financials in business. I don't know anything about inventory management or resource management. There was a lot I felt I still didn't have all the answers for, but I figured they would come. I told myself: this is just to get us off the ground, follow what they say, and that takes you to profitability.
So I dug in. I was the only employee we had for the first three months. I was working out in the gym with our clients from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, six days a week. We closed at noon on Saturdays. I was exhausted but loving it, loving being a business owner. And we hit cash flow positive. That's when we could hire employees, which drew my attention to something else: how do I interview an employee? What questions should I ask? As an attorney, I knew there was a lot of employment law about what you could and couldn't do, but I hadn't been educated on any of that. What HR policies did we need? How do you onboard employees? How do you get them to stay? How do you compensate and train them and make them happy?
I had bought three licenses, so at this point I'm thinking, how do I be in three places at once? The success we had from location one, I was the only person there the whole time. I've got to do all of this. I looked to my franchisor, and there was nothing more in the training manuals or in any kind of training. So I knew I was going to have to fill the gap on my own.
Luckily, as an attorney, I know how to research things and do a lot of self-study, so I got through the first part of that hump on my own until I reached a bottleneck about eighteen months in. That's when I got an executive coach to help take the business to the next level. With that, we grew to four locations in less than three years, and we became top 15% for all four locations, month over month, which was a big accomplishment.
When that happened, franchisees from all over the country started calling me, asking what I was doing differently, saying, "We're running the same model. Your life looks totally different than mine." That's when I realized it wasn't just me, it wasn't a failing of intelligence I brought into franchising. This was common throughout the whole brand. Then I started networking with other brands and found out it was common across all of franchising.
So that's a little bit longer story than you probably wanted, Brendon.
Brendon Dennewill: That was great.
April Porter: That's the full journey, really, of going from feeling like, and I think so many franchisees feel this way, that it's you, that you're just not good enough, you don't have enough intelligence, you didn't come in prepared enough, and you've got to figure it all out on your own. Especially when you see the dashboards showing where the different units are, I think that just makes people feel like they have to hustle more and more to try to get there. And that's not really the answer.
Brendon Dennewill: Right. It's almost like how do you change it from feeling like a hamster wheel to being more of a flywheel?
April Porter: A hundred percent. That's great.
Brendon Dennewill: So, that's really insightful, April. You said that franchisors do an excellent job teaching people how to operate a business, but not necessarily how to become CEOs of that business. Where does the gap come from, and why do you think it has persisted for so long?
April Porter: Eighty-one percent of franchisees own single units. That statistic is one of the most important in franchising, because the reality is people are not leaving jobs where they're earning high five- or six-figure salaries to come into a business and earn a high five-figure salary. Owning a business, as you know Brendon, carries a lot more risk, responsibility, time, and effort than showing up to a nine to five. That's not the vision anyone has when they make that transition, but owning a single unit in franchising will rarely take you to a six-figure income in most brands.
If 81% of our franchisees are stuck in a single unit, then we have a problem, because we're not delivering on the American dream of more wealth and time freedom that people believe franchising will provide. I think that's a big indicator of the gap.
I believe the gap begins because we're not addressing the psychological and emotional programming that people come to business ownership with. All of us who went through a normal institutionalized school system are programmed to believe that working harder is how you get the A. There's a lot of routine programming: when the bell rings, you go to lunch; when the bell rings, you come back. School was designed that way to produce excellent factory workers. All of that programming is meant to keep people at an employee level, and we have habits ingrained in us to show up as an employee.
When you move to become a business owner, you don't magically break those habits. Even if you could, you don't know what new habits to instill that a business owner lives by.
Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely.
April Porter: So all we're doing is teaching people how to operate a system. They take that, they operate it based on that programming, and then they get stuck at a single unit because they realize: if I leave this unit to open a second one, everything's going to crash, everything's going to fall apart.
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: Ultimately, I think that's the biggest evidence there's a gap. And that's what our clients tell us too. Our clients make huge strides in revenue. One client went from $7,000 to $50,000 a month. But when you ask them what their biggest win was, they always say mindset. Always.
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: You're making forty-three thousand dollars more a month, but they recognize that the shift in psychological and emotional programming is what allowed that. For them, that's the biggest win.
Brendon Dennewill: No, I could see that. So eighty percent of franchise owners own one unit, that's essentially the Pareto principle. The other twenty percent, the ones the eighty percent are aspiring to be, are the ones who really have success in franchising, whereas the eighty percent are kind of stuck with that one unit and essentially stuck in a job, even though that's what they were trying to replace.
April Porter: You'd think so, but it's actually a little different, because many people open more than one location. They get to two or three, but they haven't established the right skills to manage that, so they end up failing and closing, or having to sell at a loss to get out. There's a window, probably between 80 and 90% of multi-unit owners, maybe not that high, more like up to 85%. So there's probably three or four percent in there who really struggle as multi-unit owners. But there's also probably that top 10% of single-unit owners who are thriving and really enjoy owning a single unit. So it's not guaranteed, just by owning multiple units, that you're a success or reaping the rewards of what you'd define as success.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, that's really interesting. I know there are obviously some anomalies, like Chick-fil-A, for example. Their whole model is built around wanting their franchisees to be successful, and they believe that can only happen if they own just one unit. There have been some exceptions since then, but I think ninety-plus percent of Chick-fil-A franchises are single unit, and those single units are generating huge amounts of revenue and profitability. But the owner has to be there, right? It's not passive.
April Porter: Right. Chick-fil-A is a really unique brand because something they do differently that I wish all brands did is require the franchisee to work in the store for a year before they can be approved to receive the unit. That would be a huge benefit to all franchisees and franchisors, because that education happens before the risk on either side is taken, before the franchisee invests and before the franchisor approves that person. Approving the wrong franchisee is a major headache for franchisors and can be very detrimental to the brand.
The other thing Chick-fil-A does differently is you don't really own your restaurant. You don't have the right to sell it at the end; you're essentially leasing the right to operate it. It's a completely different model than what most franchise brands run under.
Brendon Dennewill: Okay, let's leave that one alone for now. As I was thinking around the time of IFA this year, the Chick-fil-A story comes up frequently because it's unusual. But another story floating around, though not talked about much at IFA, was that one or two brands are realizing the success of the franchise brand depends on the weakest franchisee somehow improving, or if they can't improve, helping them sell. That's getting a lot of pushback from people in the industry because it doesn't seem inclusive. But at the same time, you can see the value of the idea that a rising tide floats all boats. If there are struggling franchisees who maybe shouldn't have ended up with a franchise in the first place, helping them get out seems like a good option. What do you think about that?
April Porter: I agree. In fact, at IFA I was at a round table with a franchisor. I always have questions for franchisors because I'm hoping they can start to see things from a slightly different perspective. I think that's the key to all of us growing as humans: having hard conversations, but also being calm enough in those conversations to try to see things from the other person's perspective.
I'll give you some context first. It was about FACs. I asked the table, "How many of you have an FAC? And of those, how many let your franchisees elect who comes onto the FAC, versus appointing them?" Many franchisors simply appoint the people. So the next question was, "How many of you are putting people from the bottom 30% onto your FAC?" None of them did. One gentleman said, "Why on earth would I want the bottom 20%?"
I said, "Well, how are you going to learn what's going on with that bottom 20%? Why are they failing? What are they frustrated with? Where are they struggling if they don't have a voice in what's happening?"
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: Here's what he said: "That bottom 20% is just going to fail anyway, so I don't need their input." My response was: if you truly believe that, are you just letting them die a slow death until they fail in your system? I believe it's unethical to keep them in your system, and you should be signing a mutual release and letting them out.
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: I truly believe that. It shouldn't be, "We're going to hold you here until you can't go anymore, or until you find somebody else to sell this fledgling, failing unit to." It's your responsibility to convince someone there's an opportunity in it. Many times, those in the bottom 20% are there because they never should have been approved as a franchisee in the first place. There needs to be more responsibility across the franchising community, in addition to the brands themselves, to acknowledge: we shouldn't have approved this person, and we're not going to hold them hostage in the brand when we both made a mutual mistake in saying this was a good decision.
It comes down to a question of ethics. As an attorney, ethics is very important to me; we're required to take continuing education every year on ethics, particularly as a judge. It disturbs me that in franchising, and the IFA frequently says we're self-regulated and have plenty of regulation, I see it as a big failing that we don't have any ethical standards. We don't have an ethics commission. We don't have any way for anyone to report an ethics violation by anybody in franchising,
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: and we don't have an ethics council to review those things and say, yes or no, this is not how we want to conduct ourselves as a franchising community. I would advocate for that. I believe we should be working toward a true ethics commission that our community is held to standards by.
Brendon Dennewill: I agree, but at the same time, I think there are other things you can do before even getting into the ethics policing piece of it. It comes back to what you were saying about mindset: why do some businesses succeed and others don't? It doesn't matter what operating model you use, most should start with having a mission, a vision, and core values or principles that guide you and the people you're hiring today and in the future, so you have the right people equipped to make the right decisions from a principled perspective.
Then there's incentives. One of the things you talked about is if franchise development is incentivized just to sell units because they need to sell units, they're going to sell to people who shouldn't have qualified, and then the problem only starts. That's not the end of the problem, that's the beginning. I think this is a challenge for the industry: misaligned incentives, where franchise development and corporate folks are incentivized one way and franchisees are incentivized differently. I do believe this principle or values issue is at the table too, but it doesn't get talked about much, and it doesn't really show up explicitly in the FDD.
April Porter: I couldn't agree more. If you think about the sales process in franchising, particularly to a first-time business owner, the process can be, and I'm not saying the people necessarily, but the process itself can be very predatory. What it preys on is the emotions of a first-time franchisee who hasn't been exposed to business, strategy, and business-type decisions.
Why are we selling multi-unit packs to a first-time business owner, and why are they buying them? Because they're told, "Let's lock in your three territories now, this is selling like hotcakes, and we don't want anybody..." There's a whole FOMO element: if I don't buy my three territories now, somebody else will come in and start competing with me, and I'll lose out on the best territory in my area. There's an advantage to being first, and all of that is based on emotion, not data, not on whether the concept has been proven in the area.
I was the first to bring my brand to St. Louis, and I knew that was an advantage. We bought a three-pack, and I ended up opening four, but I did it purely out of FOMO: if I don't lock it down, somebody's going to sneak in and box me in. I think the incentive would serve us much better if franchisors said, "You can buy one as a first-time business owner, but we'll give you the right of first refusal if you're hitting all your benchmarks and KPIs. If you're not hitting them, you don't get the right of first refusal."
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: That way the franchisor isn't locked into a right of first refusal, but there's incentive all around to make sure the franchisee is capable of running a good, profitable business before they expand. That's really where we get into trouble: people expanding too quickly without the processes or people in place to support it.
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: I see that happen, and often people don't open the second or third license, which adds to that statistic of single-unit owners. Or, on the other hand, they do open them and aren't prepared, and it becomes complete overwhelm and burnout, and then they want out instead of having the wherewithal to right the ship. To me, it's just a lose-lose situation. Occasionally you get that diamond in the rough, like me, who figured it out, struggled through the first two, and realized I had to do something different to really make it work. I had the capital to make the right investments to turn it around, but I think that's the exception to the rule.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, that's really interesting. It is sad there isn't a better way to do this; it really does come down to the fittest surviving. Anyway, let's move on, April. One idea we talk about often on this show is that technology doesn't solve business problems, it amplifies them. You've made similar observations about AI. Why do so many organizations rush to adopt technology before strengthening their leadership processes and operational discipline?
April Porter: I think so many times we hear what we want to hear. With AI, a lot of what we're hearing is that it solves a lot of issues. People see AI as a shortcut: maybe I don't need to hire this person now, maybe I can do it through AI instead.
I think that feeds into it, it's the propaganda that's out there, and that propaganda comes from the least educated people in the space speaking the loudest, because they're the best salespeople and can't back it up with quality most of the time. Right now, anyone could jump into AI and say, "I've got this great AI tool and it's going to do this and this and this for you." Across social media and every other channel, people are hearing from every angle that AI is supposed to be easy, fast, and take over redundant tasks, meaning I don't have to hire again, or I can reallocate my labor differently, and I don't need a process because AI will do it.
I think everything in business boils down to psychology, to what you're consciously and unconsciously assuming based on what you're hearing. The normal progression of a business is you get processes in place, you get your departments aligned, you figure out the next best hire or what you can do fractionally to make the business work. Now it's, "What do I not need to do? What can I avoid doing because of AI?"
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: I think it'll probably take about eighteen months for the people doing this to realize, "Wow, we really did this backwards," and then they'll have to go back and shore everything up. I hope it would be faster, but the reason I think it'll take eighteen months is that people with small teams aren't going to implement a whole bunch of AI right away, they'll do it a little at a time, telling themselves that once they get the next couple of AI employees or agents in place, it's going to fix things. Or they'll be playing whack-a-mole, fixing one piece, then another.
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: So it'll take about eighteen months before they realize this still isn't working, and they have to go back to basics and get their business in order first, so they're not amplifying chaos. The key is asking yourself right now: as a franchisor, a business owner, a franchisee, could you go on a three-week vacation to Europe with no cell service, or on a cruise without Wi-Fi, and have your business not just survive but actually grow while you're gone?
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm.
April Porter: If the answer is no, you're not in a great position to start implementing a ton of AI. Not to say you can't use AI or put things in place, but you can't turn your business over to AI if you can't turn it over to humans.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, that's really good advice. It's interesting, we see this even outside the franchise space, across multiple industries, and now we're seeing it over and over again in franchising: a franchisor comes to us because their systems have broken. They got to a hundred units, or two hundred units, but their systems are still the ones they built for when there were thirty units, and we all know that doesn't typically work well.
One of the other things they tend to forget is that going from ten to thirty units, or thirty to a hundred, whatever the next ceiling is, requires a change in leadership. Either the leadership had to elevate, or they had to add people with that additional experience and strategic thinking ability, people who could bring the mindset to the rest of the team that what got you here isn't going to get you to where you're going. I think this mindset is so critical, and it seems to be one of the most powerful mindsets: knowing that whatever got you here isn't going to get you where you're going, assuming you want to keep growing.
It's crazy how often a franchisor thinks that implementing a new CRM or revenue operations system is actually going to fix their process and people problems, and of course that doesn't happen. We learned that the hard way, realizing halfway through an implementation that the real issue is they have the wrong people in the wrong seats, or their processes aren't at the level they should be for where they are in scalability and growth. Shiny object syndrome is real, but to me it shows a lack of leadership: if you really believe your technology, AI or otherwise, is going to fix your problems, you're in for a rude surprise.
April Porter: Yeah, I see the same thing happen over and over with franchise brands. When somebody first franchises their business, they don't have a lot of revenue coming into the franchise entity, and they need doers because there's more to do than they can do themselves. So you hire the lower-level employee who accepts the salary you can pay at the time, and that's a doer who gets things done. Then you grow, and a lot of times, because whenever you're in a startup, and I'm sure you understand this too, Brendon,
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, I've been there. I've made all those mistakes.
April Porter: the initial people are so critical, and you form such bonds over that startup struggle of getting over the hump, that when it comes time to need executive-level help, the first place people look is to promote the people who've been with them. You have to be really honest that this person isn't an executive, this person doesn't have the strategic thinking skills you need to go to the next level. Your business can only grow as much as you do. You have to grow, take the emotion out of things, and start objectively looking at what's best for the business. That's hard, especially
Brendon Dennewill: Really hard, yeah.
April Porter: when you've relied on people you care about deeply to get you to the current level. I see that happen all the time with young franchisors. It's a difficult thing, but I think having the right counsel and support system outside your brand is essential to helping you through that phase of growth.
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm. I think the fact that you're open to having that outside advice or counsel means you're probably already halfway there, because you have the mindset of not having all the answers, but knowing you need to improve the questions you're asking.
April Porter: Yeah, I'd say probably nothing's more dangerous than a franchisor who doesn't have some kind of coach.
Brendon Dennewill: Yes. Well, like in anything else you want to be successful at, if you try to do it without a coach, it's going to be really, really hard, and your chances of success are greatly reduced.
Brendon Dennewill: What we've been touching on here, April, is there's no shortage of AI tools available, and many businesses are creating complexity instead of simplifying what they should be doing. What's your advice on how leaders should think about AI implementation, so it strengthens the business instead of simply adding another layer of technology or complexity?
April Porter: I think the number one rule has to be doing an assumption check. So many times we see a tool advertised, or we see a bottleneck in our business, and we think, "Let's get AI into that," or "I want that tool," or "let me fix that bottleneck with AI." That's an assumption, and that's the wrong place to start.
Most founders, most business owners, whether franchisor, franchisee, or non-franchise business, don't have the time, the bandwidth, the expertise, or the objectivity to look at their business and say, "Where is the most strategic place to start? Where will we get the biggest bang for our buck in time, energy, and money? Or where is there a simple, safe thing we can implement, and layer onto in the right order, that will ultimately make the biggest impact in the fastest way?" That requires a lot of strategy, understanding both business and AI. That's really where I think AI implementers are going to be an essential piece of every business moving forward.
Unfortunately, I also believe many businesses won't realize that until they make the mistake of not working with an AI implementer, until things have really gotten out of control. That always makes an AI implementer's job harder: coming into a situation where you have tools piecemealed together, not communicating, not working off a central brain, and processes still not documented, or the wrong people in the wrong seats. That drives an AI implementer's costs up, and the workload up. Quite frankly, as an AI implementer, I might come into that and say, "No, thank you, this isn't a project I want to take on because it's such a mess. I could go help three other companies in the time it would take to help you." I'll feel more successful making much more progress elsewhere, which is a more enjoyable project for an AI implementer.
Brendon Dennewill: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I totally agree. The first thing we're looking for in that situation is mindset, again. If they don't have the right mindset about how to approach implementing AI into their organization, and they think of it as just the next tool, the chances of that implementation succeeding are greatly reduced, and we'd rather move on and do that work somewhere else.
April Porter: Right. I do think there's a danger it could set your whole business back. You're trying to move into the future and remain competitive, but you could actually decrease your competitiveness by implementing AI incorrectly, because if your competitor does it the right way, they're going to be flying past you while you're fixing all your mistakes.
Brendon Dennewill: Right, which brings us to my next question: growth as a way of exposing problems that were already there. As franchise organizations expand, with that competitive mindset, what weaknesses tend to surface first, and where are leaders often surprised by them?
April Porter: No one's going to like the answer to this. The weakness typically shows up first in the founders, because the founders are working and hustling so hard that they haven't spent much time on their personal or professional growth. This becomes apparent when they attract a more sophisticated franchisee, someone who's been a multi-unit or multi-brand owner elsewhere, or owned other businesses, and comes in saying, "I see how cool your concept is and how much potential it has. I want to be early, I want to be an area developer." That franchisee likely comes in believing they know more about running the business than the founder does.
That's where friction starts. The founder's feelings get hurt, they're frustrated that this person doesn't want to listen to them or respect them enough. Now we see egos clash. When you insert ego into the franchise as a founder, that's the biggest red flag to me, because I've seen ego kill more brands than anything else. You have to be humble enough to say, "I don't know how to do this." My recommendation is to hire someone, even fractionally, to help do it, while simultaneously learning from them, constantly developing your own personal and professional growth that way, without delaying the growth of the brand. Don't try to learn it all before you take action.
That's one of the biggest bottlenecks I've seen, that scenario playing out. It plays out in multiple ways. It could just be that you don't get that multi-unit, multi-brand person in, but you're three years into franchise ownership, you have eight to ten franchisees, and they're not seeing enough progress. They're demanding: "We want AI, we want this, we want that." As a founder, you still don't have a lot of revenue to work with and don't have great bandwidth, so all your franchisees see you as not doing enough.
We see it all the time: the franchisor-franchisee relationship is very fragile, and you really have to prioritize it as the most valuable asset in a franchise. Every day you should be asking yourself where the cracks in the relationship are, and how to repair them before they become huge gaps or wounds.
Brendon Dennewill: Yes. That comes up on pretty much every episode: that fragile relationship, because ultimately, without franchisee success, you don't have franchise system success.
April Porter: Right. That's why it's so valuable to have a third party like Secret Sauce providing business education and executive coaching to franchisees, just on business, nothing to do with the brand. Franchise owners are always saying, "Well, I want to make sure you're not telling them anything inconsistent with the brand." I'm not even talking about their brand. We're talking about leadership, vision, time management, how to understand numbers, how to get comfortable with numbers, how to make sure franchisees aren't avoiding looking at their numbers simply because it gives them a stomachache. We're getting them over the personal blocks that keep them from fully being capable of doing everything they're being asked to do.
That third party is so valuable. I was working with a brand whose franchisee was complaining about their franchisor, and I said, let me put some perspective on this: there's a spectrum of franchisors, just like anything. You have great franchisors, absolutely terrible franchisors, and most people are somewhere in the middle. As a franchisee, you're so insulated you don't know what's going on in the rest of the franchise world. So I told them, "Look, what your franchisor did was make a mistake, they owned it, and now they're trying to correct it, and they're being very transparent with you about that. Let me show you what's happened in some other brands." These franchisees were like, "Are you serious? Oh my gosh, that's happening?"
Just understanding where their franchisor falls on that spectrum gives them a much better appreciation for what their franchisor is doing, instead of constantly judging them based on what they perceive the franchisor isn't doing. But that's not possible without that third-party, objective involvement, where the franchisee feels, "I can trust what you're saying because you either don't have a dog in the fight, or you're on my side, helping me become the best version of myself, so you have my best interest at heart." It creates a whole different dynamic in how that information comes to them.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. Well, like I always say, if there's just one franchisee or prospective franchisee listening who gets help from this, then we know your job and my job here are done.
April Porter: Yes.
Brendon Dennewill: April, I know we could go on for a long time, but unfortunately we're running out of time, so I'm going to wrap us up with one last question: if you could change one thing about how franchisors prepare and support franchisees, what would it be, and how would that change the long-term health of the entire franchise system?
April Porter: I love this question. If I could change one thing, I'd say start explaining to franchisees during the sales process what you do not provide. The whole sales process is about what you're going to get and how they're going to help you as a franchisee. Franchisors should draw a hard line and say, "Yes, you're going to get all of these things, and here's what we are not giving you. We are not going to be your marriage counselors. We are not going to provide personal and professional development to you. We are not going to review your personal finances and tell you how your expenses should be structured."
Go through that, because the reality is a franchisee who's never owned a business doesn't have context for all the business details. They make the assumption, as I said earlier, that you're going to tell them and show them everything. Only once they're behind the curtain do they realize, "I don't know if my expenses are right, I don't know if I'm spending too much on this, should I be paying my personal cell phone and home internet through my business?" They don't know, so they ask. And if your FBC provides an answer, has your FBC just provided unlicensed financial or fiduciary advice? There's a lot of liability in making those mistakes while purely trying to help.
By drawing that hard line, you're setting up the expectation: we are giving you the business model, we're going to make business ownership easier for you, we're the gateway to moving through business faster, but we're not your babysitters, we're not providing everything, we're not your schoolteacher. You are going to have to bring these things to the table. Name what those things are: emotional intelligence, the habits of a business owner rather than an employee, so they're on notice and can ask, "How do I know if I have those habits?" Then point them to resources like Secret Sauce or other qualified coaches who can fill that gap for them, instead of going and hiring a random person who doesn't have the qualifications, credentials, or understanding of franchising. Coaches who don't understand franchising will tell people to do things that may not be compliant with your brand, which is one of the worst mistakes you can make.
That would be my biggest piece of advice: just be honest about what you don't provide.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, I think that's really good advice, and it almost provides a checklist. If you start at the top with all the things you do provide, and then have the empty unchecked boxes at the bottom, "we don't do this, we don't do this," that helps franchisees or prospective franchisees figure out where they can get those boxes checked with outside help that they know cannot and will not come from the franchisor. Really good advice.
April Porter: Yeah. And that's why some franchisors just require Secret Sauce as part of the system. Then they can check those boxes off and say, "This is where Secret Sauce comes in, you'll pay them directly, and this is where you get these things."
Brendon Dennewill: Really good. Awesome. April, thank you so much for joining me today. I know we have a lot more conversations coming up, but I think this was really valuable to our listeners. Thanks for being here.
April Porter: It's been my pleasure, and I can't wait to host you on our podcast and put you in the hot seat, Brendon.
Brendon Dennewill: Sounds great. I look forward to it. Thanks, April.