There were six of us in the room.
A unit economics class at the IFA convention back in February. Small enough that it never really felt like a class. More like six people comparing notes on the same hard problems.
One of them was a franchise business consultant (FBC) for a very large health and wellness brand. He managed about 80 locations. On his own.
He talked about his franchisees the way you'd talk about family. He knew their kids. He sent presents on their birthdays. He was almost as invested in their businesses as they were.
His revelations in that class were profound. For all of us.
He was learning unit economics. For the first time. After having been an FBC for years. And his mind was a little blown.
Not because he wasn't good at his job. He was clearly great at it. It was just that no one had taught him this financial view earlier. If he'd understood unit economics years ago, he could have taught it to all 80 of his franchisees. He could have helped them run smarter businesses long before the trouble ever showed up.
That was the first gap.
Here's the second, and it's the one I keep thinking about.
For all of that care, he had no system telling him when a location was slipping. He found out the way most people in his seat find out. Late. After the numbers had already turned. After the damage was done and the turnaround was going to be long and painful.
He didn't do a single thing wrong. He was doing the work of a small team by himself, with no way to see around the corner.
Caring was never his constraint. He had that in abundance. What he was missing was data. The knowledge reached him late. The warning signs reached him late. And by the time he could act, the moment to act proactively had already passed.
On a recent episode of RevOps Champions, Brian Schnell made the same point from the other side of the table. Brian's a franchise attorney at Faegre Drinker in Minneapolis, and after close to four decades advising brands of every size, he keeps landing in the same place. "The key in finding solutions to anything," he said, "is you got to have the right people having the right conversations at the right time."
He's right that it sounds obvious. He's also right that it almost never happens.
The FBC and the attorney are looking at the same problem from opposite ends. One lives it in the field, with 80 owners he loves. The other has watched it play out across hundreds of brands from the outside. Both arrive at the same truth. The problem is rarely that someone didn't care or didn't know what to do. It's that the information showed up too late, and the action came later still.
We call that the cost of inaction. Not the price of a wrong decision. The price of a right decision made six weeks too late. What does it cost a brand when the signal is there early and nobody sees it, or sees it and can't move on it? Across 80 locations, or 300, or 500, that number gets big fast. And it almost never shows up on a report, because the whole problem is that the report came too late.
This is the value of a well-built revenue operations system. This is the work we do at Denamico to help multi-location and franchise brands build revenue operations systems where the right information reaches the right person early enough to act on.
People first, then process, then data, then technology, in that order and on purpose. So the person who loves 80 franchisees like family can see what's happening across all 80 in time to actually help.
If that gap sounds familiar, we put together a playbook on where this gap typically lives and what the brands that get ahead of it build instead. You can get a copy here: Franchise Growth Playbook. Or better yet, I'd love to talk it through. There's a link below to grab some time.
Because the answer was never to care more. It's to capture the data and use it, so the right action to take is obvious.
Cheers to catching it while it still matters,
Kristin
Kristin Dennewill
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