She got access to the HubSpot account on a Friday.
By Monday, she had a list of questions nobody could answer.
Six franchise development reps. A steady stream of inbound leads thanks to their paid ad spend. And under the hood: no pipeline, no stage progression, no way to tell where a candidate was in the process or why they'd gone quiet. Leads were hitting the system and disappearing into a third spreadsheet. The qualification form lived on Google Forms. The reps were using one of the most capable CRM platforms available as little more than a contact list.
Which is why she had a CEO directive to get the system running in four weeks.
She wasn't panicking. She was just quietly piecing together how a team of six people had been working this hard, for this long, with this little to show them where things stood.
Nobody had done anything wrong. The business had just grown faster than the systems behind it. And nobody had noticed. Because when you're in it, you don't always see it. You just keep moving.
A few days later, I was on a call with the owner of a home services company who'd built a team of seven salespeople, developed a sophisticated approach to routing leads based on close rates, deal sizes, and job types, and who was manually recreating estimates in multiple systems because none of them were connected. He said something that stuck with me.
"Two weeks after we sell the job, we figure out what we sold."
Then they have to decipher what materials they need, which ones they have in inventory, and which ones they have to buy. Same pattern. Different industries. Businesses with real momentum and real process thinking but running on gut and spreadsheets because the infrastructure hadn't kept pace with the growth.
John Francis has spent 30 years in franchising. He's been a franchisee, a franchisor, a multi-unit owner, and an advisor to growth-stage brands. On a recent episode of RevOps Champions, he talked about something he sees constantly in the brands he works with: the difference between growing and scaling.
Growing, he said, is adding. More units, more reps, more locations, more leads.
Scaling is something else. It requires a different kind of discipline. The willingness to build the infrastructure that can hold what you're adding. To slow down just enough to make sure the foundation is actually there before you put more weight on it.
"Ideas are cheap and easy and fun," he said. "Doing the work is the hard part."
What he's describing isn't a technology problem. It's a leadership decision. At what point do you stop adding and start building? At what point does the pace of growth require you to pause, look under the hood, and ask whether the system can actually support where you're trying to go?
Most of the franchise brands we work with come to us somewhere in that gap. I've had a version of that conversation more times than I can count. A new leader gets visibility into the system for the first time. Or a longtime leader finally has someone ask the right questions. Either way, the look is the same: not defeat, just recognition. Oh. This is what's been slowing us down.
They've built a real sales motion. They have people and process and genuine momentum. But the revenue operations system underneath it hasn't kept up.
They haven’t upgraded the engine for the horsepower needed to scale.
Nobody can see where leads are stalling. Reps are making decisions on instinct because the data isn't there. Leadership is flying on what they hope is happening, not what they can actually see.
That's what we call Revenue Fog. And it doesn't mean the business isn't working. It means the business is ready for the next stage, and the systems need to catch up. Otherwise the business risks scaling the wrong things.
Building that foundation isn't glamorous work. It doesn't feel like growth. But it's what makes scale possible.
We're in the middle of a rollout like that right now: an integrated revenue system live across 97 pilot locations for one brand, building toward a nationwide launch across 900. It didn't start with automation or AI. It started with the same foundational work every scaling business has to do first. Clean data. Clear process. Tech systems that actually reflect how the team sells and how customers want to interact.
If you're in that gap right now and want to talk through what it would take to close it, there's a link below to grab some time with our team.
Cheers to building something that can actually hold up to your biggest goals,
Kristin
Kristin Dennewill
|