A few years ago, we started winning deals we hadn't won before.
Larger clients. More complexity. Franchises with a hundred plus locations, private equity holding companies, data architecture that hadn't been done before in HubSpot. We were forging into new territory without a playbook, and honestly, without always knowing how to do it well. But we saw the opportunity and we were willing to work hard and learn as we went.
What we didn't see clearly enough was that the delivery model that had gotten us there wasn't going to get us further.
We had built our implementations around one key person leading them. A strong HubSpot consultant or solution architect who owned the project and drove it across the finish line.
It worked well when the projects were more contained. But as the complexity grew, the cracks showed. Projects dragged longer than they should have. Occasionally there was rework needed. If someone left mid-project, it was hard to pick up the thread.
And when you're working with a franchise client that's also trying to manage input from numerous internal stakeholders, a hundred franchisees, and a private equity investor all at once, one person leading that project isn't a delivery model. It's a risk.
We knew we had to move to a pod model. An implementation manager, a HubSpot consultant, and a solution architect working together with additional shared services, like developers, collaboratively.
The pod model was more expensive. Until it wasn't.
Managing the change internally was challenging because not everyone on the team wanted to give up being the 'client hero'. There's something genuinely fulfilling about owning a project end to end, and we were asking our best people to share that.
But we had no choice. The complexity demanded it. We didn't choose to change the model. The work we wanted to do made that choice for us.
Building the better model took time. It wasn't easy. With the new pod model, we had to create clear swim lanes, different accountability, and our processes had to evolve. It was messy for a while.
Looking back, it felt like failure at that moment. Parts of it were. We were figuring out things we hadn't figured out before. What I know now is that it was just part of scaling.
You grow, something breaks, you fix it. You grow again, something else breaks. The goal isn't to never break anything. The goal is to see it coming sooner.
On a recent episode of RevOps Champions, Aicha Bascaro, founder of the American Franchise Academy and a veteran of Domino's, Popeyes, and Olive Garden, and experience working in 26 countries, has a name for the season we were in.
The "hell zone".
In the franchise world, she describes it as the stretch between owning one unit and reaching the point where you can hire a district manager and actually hand off operations. You're too big to run it yourself and too small to build the infrastructure you need.
Most operators try to muscle through it. Aicha says the only way out is to build toward a full pod of however many units a district manager can support as fast as you can, because staying in the middle is unsustainable.
Most franchisees find out they needed two district managers when they already have ten units and one burned-out manager. If a district manager can support six units, you don't want to strive for ten because you won't have enough units for a second district manager yet. You want to go from six to 12 as fast as you can. You need to build in multiples that enable you to add district managers proportionately.
Most people don't know the hell zone exists until they're already in it. And by then, the instinct is to work harder, not to restructure.
The hell zone isn't just a franchise problem. Aicha's point applies well beyond franchising. When you're growing, understanding the economics of your operating model and systems ahead of time will make growth easier.
You have to know your numbers well enough to know when you've outgrown your model, and you have to be willing to build the next one before you're comfortable.
For us, that meant understanding exactly how much work one pod could support, at what level of complexity, and building our capacity around that. Not around heroic individual effort.
For a franchise operator, it means knowing how many units a district manager can actually carry before you open one more location. Knowing when the math changes. Planning the structure before you're stuck in the chaos.
One path feels like growth. The other one feels like the hell zone.
Today, we support franchise clients with 100, 300, even 900-plus units, building their revenue operations system on HubSpot. There's no version of that work that happens without the pod model we built. And we built it the same way you probably will, by growing into the problem first and figuring it out from the inside.
If your sales process, data model, or marketing infrastructure is starting to feel like the thing slowing you down rather than the thing moving you forward, that's worth a conversation. I'd love to think through it with you. There's a link below to grab some time.
Cheers to building the structure before you need it,
Kristin
P.S. Aicha's book, The Franchise Fix, is linked in the show notes if you want to go deeper on the frameworks she covered in this episode.
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Kristin Dennewill
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