It usually starts with coaching every franchisee the same way.
You can't coach every franchisee the same way. Not if you want them all to grow.
The first-year, single-unit owner and the operator running six locations need very different things. Most systems hand them the same field coach, the same playbook, the same cadence anyway. Both get shortchanged and neither the coach nor the franchisee is set up for success.
Why does that matter? Because the field coach is the throughline that turns a franchisor's strategy into a franchisee's result. It's where a system compounds or stalls. When it works, unit economics improve, franchisees grow, royalties get healthier. When it doesn't, you feel it everywhere and turning it around isn't easy.
On a recent episode of RevOps Champions, Brendon sat down with Keith Gerson, fifty years in franchising and more than 1,500 brands studied. Keith said it plainly: "we're expecting too much if we think our franchise business consultants are capable of working effectively with the smallest volume franchisees and the largest."
With many FBCs managing 80-130 franchisees, being able to give enough time and attention to actually have real impact to such a large group of people, with varying levels of business experience and acumen, isn't realistic.
Coaching someone at their level isn't about being accommodating. It's about growth. Imagine what growth would look like if FBCs were growing the AUV of their portfolio by 25% or more, year over year. A business that grows year over year, on purpose, becomes a more predictable one. And predictable revenue is what makes a business more valuable. For the franchisee building their own asset, and for you building the network.
Getting to that level of maturity isn't luck. It's a leadership team deciding that becoming more mature and more predictable is the goal itself, then building the infrastructure to match as the system grows.
Royalty self-sufficiency shows up somewhere around 50 to 75 units, and it only holds if the infrastructure grew up alongside it.
I watched this from a different angle last week. A marketing director at a former client got on a call with me. His marketing, sales, and customer service teams have been running their revenue operations on HubSpot for about eight years. Every year he goes back through their leads and adds up what they contributed, not just revenue but profit. In the last few years, the leads they're managing in HubSpot have added more than two million dollars a year in profit.
That impact has taken time. When he joined the company, shortly after the initial implementation, adoption was low. They kept at it and earned the trust one team at a time. Eight years later, that system is their "revenue engine" (in his words). They were intentional, they wanted to 'grow up', to use technology to make their lives easier, and to grow their business better.
That's exactly what we've been building toward. We just finished the first version of Franchise Performance Intelligence, an app that lives inside HubSpot, watches every location's numbers, and flags the ones who would benefit from coaching, and lets the FBC know.
Before they call you.
Your field coaches get their whole book ranked by who needs them this week, each sliding location with a proven playbook, and nothing reaches a franchisee without your team's approval.
It's early, and we're ready to start testing it with a real network or two. We're looking for a brand that wants to help shape where it goes. If that might be you, take a look at what we built and reply to this email if you’d like to discuss trying it. The only HubSpot subscription that's needed is Content Hub.
Cheers to building a business that gets more mature, more predictable, and more valuable every year,
Kristin
Kristin Dennewill
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