In this episode of RevOps Champions, host Brendon Dennewill sits down with Kristin Dennewill of Denamico, a franchise revenue operations expert who works inside franchise networks to solve the growth problems that surface once a brand crosses the 100-location mark. Kristin explains why the playbooks that fuel early franchise growth stop working at scale, and breaks down the four areas where networks most commonly stall: visibility, attribution, intelligence, and development. She argues that the real fix isn't another software rollout, but a rebuilt "franchise performance intelligence" system, a single source of truth spanning the entire franchisee lifecycle, from application through years of operation.
Kristin backs the framework with concrete results, including a 800+ location multi-brand franchisor that eliminated over 1,000 hours of manual work a year, and a regional franchisee that saved 1,800 hours through sales automation with over 90% user adoption. This episode is essential listening for franchise executives, RevOps leaders, CMOs, and multi-unit operators who sense that growth is compounding into complexity, and want a practical framework for regaining visibility and control before a full turnaround becomes necessary.
What You'll Learn
- Why growth playbooks expire at scale
- The four hidden franchise stall points
- Leading vs. lagging indicators, explained
- What "franchise performance intelligence" really means
- Why RevOps is a system, not a project
- Where CEOs, CMOs, and COOs feel the gap differently
- Real hour-savings from a single source of truth
- How AI will predict franchisee success
Resources Mentioned
Listen
About the Guest
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Kristin Dennewill | CEO & Co-Founder at Denamico
Kristin Dennewill is CEO & Co-Founder of Denamico, which she launched in 2011 on the belief that growing businesses could turn technology into a genuine competitive advantage. Today, she leads a team that builds revenue operations systems for service franchise and multi-location organizations, blending CRM strategy, data architecture, and change management into what Denamico calls "Revenue Clarity", the point where a business has the visibility and systems to grow without guessing. Kristin's path includes nearly a decade of financial systems consulting at McKinsey & Company and NCR across Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, plus founding two prior businesses in Spain and Namibia, giving her a genuinely global perspective on scaling organizations. She now works directly with founders, CEOs, and leadership teams building predictable, scalable revenue engines on HubSpot. |
Episode Transcript
Introduction: When Franchise Growth Starts to Slow
Brendon Dennewill: If you've been in the franchise world for a while, you've probably felt this. The brand's strong, the concept works, locations keep opening, and then something starts to slow down. It's not dramatic, it just starts to compound over time. That's the thing we're getting into today.
Kristin's on because this is what she and the Denamico team see up close every day, working inside franchise networks, trying to figure out why growth that used to feel automatic suddenly doesn't. Kristin, you and the team actually just put this into a resource, right? The franchise growth playbook?
Kristin Dennewill: That's right, we did. It's everything we're going to talk about today, laid out for anyone who wants to go deeper after this conversation. We'll include the link in the notes, but let's start the conversation.
Brendon Dennewill: Awesome, let's do it. So what actually happens to a franchise network once it crosses that 100-location mark?
Kristin Dennewill: So the premise of what we've seen, after speaking to many people, both advisors to franchisors as well as the franchisors and franchisees themselves, is that everyone creates playbooks for where they're at today and where they're trying to get to. At certain stages, and there are common stages of where this typically happens, that last framework doesn't work anymore. The playbook needs to be rewritten.
Certainly when you're trying to scale a franchisor beyond that 75 to 100-unit location range, the infrastructure that enabled you to get there isn't typically enough to get you beyond those 100 unit locations.
The Four Places Franchise Networks Stall
Brendon Dennewill: And then we talk about stalling in four specific places. What are they?
Kristin Dennewill: The four specific areas are visibility, attribution, intelligence, and development.
On visibility, we often hear the expression "we're flying blind," because the people who need to see the data to see what's not working are often getting that data too late. It's lagging indicators as opposed to leading indicators. So you're often flying blind for too long to react fast enough to make impactful changes.
Another piece is attribution. Most systems today track spend, but figuring out what that spend leads to, what kind of outcomes, gets harder and harder, often because the lead journey or the customer journey isn't linear. There are multiple touchpoints. But of course, the more you're spending, the more important it is to know what that attribution is.
The third piece is intelligence. As you're scaling up and getting to that 75 to 100-plus unit range, the questions that boards and investors ask are often more nuanced than what a single source report can tell you. If the data that tells that story doesn't have all the context and information in one system, it just requires a more sophisticated system to answer those more difficult questions.
Finally, on the development side, we've heard from a lot of multi-unit, more sophisticated franchisee owners that they're looking deeper into what a franchise brand can offer them. What you're looking for in a business as a single-unit operator is a little different from what you're looking for as a multi-unit operator. The more sophisticated multi-unit operators value a system, the technology, and the infrastructure that's going to enable them to be successful more easily.
Where Franchisors Feel the Pain First
Brendon Dennewill: Okay, so you touched on the four areas: visibility, attribution, intelligence, and development. Which of those four do you run into most in a first conversation with a new client?
Kristin Dennewill: It really depends on what's happening with that brand and where they're at when we first talk to them. Probably the visibility piece, the flying blind, applies to most franchisors in most cases. There are very few franchisors that have their entire operation on a platform where they can see end to end, from when a franchisee candidate comes into the pipeline through to that franchisee being onboarded and running their business over a number of years.
That's where AI is going to be amazing in the franchise space: helping find these patterns. We can be more predictive about what it takes for the most successful franchisees, what the pattern is behind that success. That's where we get into franchise intelligence as well, using leading indicators to be more predictive. If the franchisee does this, this, and this, or has this background, those are the things that will ultimately help that franchisee be more successful. I think that's really exciting.
One of the reasons we love HubSpot is that you can build that end-to-end platform for the entire revenue operations of the whole system on one piece of software. But the other thing I'd say is, as franchise brands are scaling, one of the earlier places they need help is the franchise development piece. If they're investing in ad spend, brokers, and things like that, that's a significant investment. Understanding the sales cycle and the cost of franchisee acquisition is important to track.
What Is Franchise Performance Intelligence?
Brendon Dennewill: Right. And these four things all lead to, or led to, what we're now calling at Denamico "franchise performance intelligence." For people who haven't heard that term before, what does franchise performance intelligence actually mean?
Kristin Dennewill: It's a lot of what I was just speaking about. It's having the right architecture, your data model, how your system is set up to make sure you're capturing the right information so you can see the patterns, get the leading indicators, and track end-to-end performance.
It's not "big brother" tracking, like we want to make sure a franchisee is doing the right steps. It's about using that franchise intelligence to help enable franchisees to be more successful, because we're proactively able to coach them based on the patterns we know will lead to success.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah. What does that architecture actually require? What's underneath it?
Kristin Dennewill: I'd say it's that single source of truth. If we can see the whole life cycle of a franchisee, from the time they apply to be a franchisee through operating as a franchisee with one or more units over a period of time, and we can see that whole life cycle in one system, that gives us the data and context needed to figure out the performance intelligence piece, and then really engineer performance.
What Changes With the Right System in Place
Brendon Dennewill: Which of course we want, right? So Kristin, tell us: what's the real difference between a network with this in place and one without it?
Kristin Dennewill: You've spoken on the podcast with Brendon Dennewill with numerous experts in the franchise space about how systems are going to break, and how it's different problems at different stages as you grow. Given that, having a system where we've got the whole life cycle of a franchisee connected, with a single source of truth, enables us to identify problems before they happen.
Even if we haven't predicted something will happen through a leading indicator, we'll know about it much sooner and can react faster, before it becomes a full turnaround effort. It helps us be far more proactive with marketing spend because we know what's working, we have benchmarks, and we can deploy resources in the most impactful way.
In any business, franchise or not, the initial stages are about figuring out what works. Scaling is being able to grow exponentially without having to rebuild things. Creating that infrastructure doesn't make sense at five units, or even twenty-five units. But once you've figured out what works and you get to that 75 to 100-unit range and you're really trying to scale, you cannot do that without the right infrastructure in place. You can't systemize things because you still need people and judgment involved; you haven't built the systems yet. If you truly want to scale, having that infrastructure in place makes it a lot easier and a lot less stressful.
How the Gap Shows Up Differently by Role
Brendon Dennewill: Right. As these brands grow through these inflection points, it looks different depending on the leadership seat each person has. Does this gap show up the same way for everyone, or does it depend on the role?
Kristin Dennewill: It definitely depends on the role. As an example, a COO might manage by exception instead of by design. CEOs are typically answering to the board and investors, and it's going to take time for them to find those answers if they don't have the system set up to have this performance intelligence piece.
With CMOs, the challenge is understanding what happens to leads generated at the franchisor level once they go to a franchisee, and being able to track that all the way through, which is another benefit of having the entire network on one software platform.
For the VP of development or the whole franchise development team, the questions they get in the early stages of selling franchises are different from later, when they're selling to multi-unit franchisees. Those are different buyers with a different level of understanding and sophistication.
Brendon Dennewill: And is there a role that feels this pain first, even if they're not the one who signs off on fixing it?
Kristin Dennewill: Like I said, I think the visibility piece is something we see across most franchisors. But as a brand is scaling, I think where they're often investing the most resources, which is why it's the first place this comes up, is the franchise development function.
Where to Start
Brendon Dennewill: So if someone listening is nodding along right now, where do they actually start?
Kristin Dennewill: We've got a great short assessment included with the guide that anyone can take for free to get started and gain a bit more visibility into what to think about and where they might begin.
One other key point: we strongly believe, as a core principle of how we think about this, that having this end-to-end view of the franchisee life cycle is really your revenue operations system. It's where you generate revenue through sales, marketing, service, the FBCs coaching the franchisees, all of that is part of your revenue operations system.
Often, because there's technology linked to this, people think of it as an implementation, a project: get the system implemented, get everybody on it. But then it's not treated as a living, breathing system that should have continuous improvement and optimization. Our clients who see the most success are the ones who don't treat it like a project, but treat it as an ongoing function of the business, allocating resources internally or externally to it. Those are typically the clients who see the most growth.
Real Results
Brendon Dennewill: Kristin, are there any real results you can point to?
Kristin Dennewill: Yes. One of our franchisor clients is a multi-brand holding company with over 800 locations. They saved over a thousand hours a year and were able to eliminate more than 10 spreadsheets that required real manual effort to maintain.
Another client, a large regional franchisee, added a lot of automation to their sales process and saved 1,800 hours a year at the franchisee level, with over 90 percent user adoption. So these are real results that go straight to the bottom line, not to mention the benefits to the customer experience as well.
Closing
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Kristin, this is exactly why we wanted to bring you on. This isn't theory, it's what you're watching happen inside real networks right now.
Kristin Dennewill: Right. If any of this hits close to home for anyone listening, the playbook is on our website. It walks through all of these points where franchise networks typically stall in more depth, and the quick assessment is included so you can see where your own network stands. It's a free download, and it's in the show notes as well.
Brendon Dennewill: Awesome. Go grab that franchise growth playbook. Kristin, thanks so much for being here.
Kristin Dennewill: My pleasure.
