The franchisor had its best quarter on record.
New units signed, a map filling in with pins, a leadership team with every reason to celebrate. Somewhere in that same network, a franchisee sat down with their year-end numbers and couldn't find the win. Revenue was up. The location was busy. And the bottom line barely moved.
Both of them were right. That's the strange part.
They were just keeping score with different numbers. The franchisor's scorecard is growth: units, signings, top-line momentum. The franchisee's whole life is the bottom line, the part left after labor and inventory and everything else takes its cut. Nobody set out to put them at odds. Each side was handed the number they were told to watch, and those two numbers point in opposite directions.
It gets harder to fix because of how the systems are built. In many networks, every location runs on its own island. Corporate sees the top line roll up, but not always the unit economics underneath it. So the franchisee carrying eight points more labor than the store one town over can't see how they’re different. Neither can the people who could actually help. There's no shared picture so that someone can ask the most useful question: how do these results compare?
On a recent RevOps Champions episode, Doug Imholte from Marsh McLennan Agency said something I think we’re all feeling. "There's so much data now," he said. "What's the key data? How do we keep the main thing the main thing?" Then he described what it would mean to see your labor, your inventory, your marketing sitting next to the other franchisees in the system, close enough to look at it and ask, why am I carrying more inventory than everyone else?
That's the whole game. Not more data. The right data, in front of the right people, at the right time.
The fix for opposing scorecards isn't picking a side. It's connecting them. When the growth number and the profitability number live in one system, and the few metrics that actually move unit economics are visible up and down the network, the franchisor and the franchisee stop rowing in different directions. Growth stops coming at the expense of the people delivering it. A struggling location becomes something you can spot and help, instead of something you find out about a year too late.
That's the system we build for franchise and multi-location brands. One source of truth, the KPIs that matter, visible to corporate and to every operator, so the whole network is finally reading from the same source of truth.
If your growth numbers and your franchisees' P&Ls feel like they're telling two different stories, that's usually a sign they can't see the same thing. There's a link below to grab some time, and we can talk about what it would take to fix that.
Cheers to everyone reading from the same page,
Kristin
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Kristin Dennewill
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