The Journal · From Both Seats
Both sides of the franchise table.
I spend my days sitting between two groups of people: franchisors trying to grow networks with sales operations held together by spreadsheets and good intentions, and buyers trying to work out whether franchising is a shortcut or a trap. Both are usually getting the same thing wrong — they're underestimating what a proper system is worth.
You built a brand worth franchising. Then you tried to sell it.
Here's a pattern I've watched play out more times than I can count. A franchisor decides recruitment is the bottleneck, so they onboard an external firm to sell for them. The pitch is polished. The onboarding takes six weeks. And then their brand becomes one of forty on somebody's list, worked through the same generic pipeline as a mowing franchise and a juice bar, by people who've never stood in one of their sites and couldn't answer a second question about the model if a serious buyer asked one.
The problem isn't outsourcing — I am the outsourced option, so I'd be a strange person to argue against it. The problem is outsourcing to volume. Franchise recruitment is a long, high-trust, six-figure-decision sales cycle. It cannot be run like a call centre, and when it is, the leads don't just go cold. They leave with a worse opinion of your brand than they arrived with. That's the part nobody invoices you for.
And underneath it sits the quieter issue — the one that's actually costing you the most money right now, whether you outsource or not.
How many hours is your team manually spending each week?
Tick what your recruitment operation currently does by hand. These are conservative averages from the sales operations I've rebuilt — most teams tick more boxes than they expect to.
Your Weekly Leak
0 hrs / week
of skilled salesperson time spent on tasks a properly built system runs on its own.
Over A Year, That's Roughly
0 hours
Tick a few tasks and watch the number. Then remember: none of these hours were spent actually selling.
"We automated a plumbing company. How different can franchising be?"
Very. And I say this with genuine respect for automation consultants, because the good ones are brilliant at what they do. But there's a wave of them right now who've built AI setups and workflow systems for other industries and decided franchising is just another vertical to copy-paste into. It isn't — and franchisors are paying real money to learn that the hard way.
Franchise sales is not lead-gen with a longer form. It's a regulated sale under the Franchising Code, with disclosure obligations and cooling-off periods a generic funnel knows nothing about. It's a months-long trust cycle where prospects are weighing the biggest financial decision of their lives, not comparing quotes. It's objection handling around six and seven-figure investments, franchisee validation calls, finance approvals, site negotiations. A consultant who has never sat in one of those conversations cannot design the system that supports them — because they don't know what happens in the room.
What The Blanket Approach Builds
- A chatbot that answers questions the FDD is legally supposed to answer
- Follow-up sequences timed for a $200 purchase, not a $2M decision
- A "qualified lead" definition with no capital, timeline or intent behind it
- Automation that fires before disclosure, compliance or common sense
- A dashboard nobody on the sales team actually opens
What Franchise Recruitment Actually Needs
- Qualification built around capital, funding position and genuine timeline
- Nurture cadence mapped to a 6–12 week trust cycle, not a checkout flow
- Automation that hands hot prospects to a human at exactly the right moment
- Compliance-aware workflows that know what the Code requires and when
- Built by someone who has personally closed franchise deals
"The system isn't the strategy. The system is what lets the people who know franchising spend their hours doing the part only humans can do — building trust with a person about to change their life."
I build these systems for the brands I work with, and I'll tell you the unglamorous truth: the automation is the easy half. The hard half is knowing which conversations must never be automated. That judgement only comes from having done the job.
How do you expect your sales team to sell without ammunition?
Systems get leads to the table. Assets close them. And this is where I see even established franchisors fall down — they're asking their sales team (or their broker) to sell a $500K to $3M decision armed with a two-page brochure and a phone manner.
A serious buyer today has usually done hours of research before they ever speak to you. When they finally do, they expect to see high-level financials that hold up under an accountant's eye, evidence of a proven money-making system — not adjectives, numbers — and a complete set of digital assets that let them explore, compare and share the opportunity with their partner, their accountant and their bank. If your competitor has that and you don't, you lose the buyer before you knew you were competing.
Honest Audit — Tick What Your Sales Team Can Put In Front Of A Prospect Today
Sales readiness: 0%
Tick honestly. Most franchisors I meet start between 30% and 50% — which is exactly why good leads keep dying in their pipeline.
Now — want to see what the people you're selling to are thinking?
The two kinds of buyers I meet — and what each one actually needs.
Every buyer who lands in my pipeline is one of two people, and the funny thing is they need almost opposite things from me. Knowing which one you are changes which questions matter, which brands fit, and how the whole process should run.
Buyer № 1
The First-Timer
Ready to own something. Never run a business.
You've got the capital, the work ethic and the itch — what you don't have is the scar tissue. And that's exactly the gap a strong franchise network exists to fill. You're not paying for a logo. You're buying the mistakes someone else already made, systemised into a playbook, so you don't have to make them with your own money.
- Training that assumes nothing — operations, hiring, compliance, the lot, taught before you open the doors.
- Buying power you couldn't build alone — supplier deals, marketing muscle, and brand recognition from day one.
- A network to call — other franchisees who hit your exact problem last year and can tell you what worked.
- Bank-friendliness — lenders finance proven systems far more readily than a stranger's dream.
Buyer № 2
The Portfolio Builder
Stepping into multi-site. Building real assets.
You've run a site — maybe several — and you've worked out the real game: you're not buying a job, you're buying assets that produce income without your hands on them daily. Multi-site franchising is one of the most repeatable wealth-building paths I know, because every site runs the same proven playbook. The second one is easier than the first. The fourth is easier again.
- Repeatable economics — you already know the model works; now it's a numbers exercise, not a leap of faith.
- Management leverage — proven systems are what let a manager run a site to your standard without you in it.
- Territory strategy — securing the right areas early is where multi-unit fortunes are quietly made.
- A sellable asset — a well-run franchise site with clean books has a market waiting for it. That's the exit most independents never get.
"I'd rather build from scratch than pay royalties."
I hear this weekly, and I understand it — franchising has carried a bad reputation, and some of it was earned by bad brands. But the smartest operators I know did the maths differently. They worked out that royalties aren't a tax on their business. They're the price of skipping the hardest years of it. Drag through the years below and watch the two paths diverge.
Path One
Build It From Scratch
The blank page.
No royalties — and no brand, no systems, no suppliers, no playbook. Everything from the logo to the P&L template gets built by you, from zero, while you're also trying to trade.
Path Two
Buy The Right Franchise
The running start.
Yes — royalties from day one. In exchange: a proven model, trained launch support, established suppliers, and customers who already know the brand before your doors open.
The honest caveat, because I'll always give it: this only works when you choose the right brand. A franchise with weak unit economics is just an independent business with extra fees. That's what due diligence — and frankly, people like me — are for.
Smart franchisees aren't avoiding royalties. They're buying speed.
The business owners who go independent purely to dodge royalties often spend years one to three doing unpaid R&D — testing menus, burning marketing budget on trial and error, learning compliance the expensive way — to eventually arrive at the systems a good franchisor would have handed them in week one of training. They saved the royalty and paid for it in time, and time is the one input you can't raise more of.
Meanwhile, the operators I most admire run the opposite play: pick a brand with genuinely strong economics, skip the figuring-it-out years entirely, get to real ROI fast — and then do it again. Site two, site three, sometimes a second brand. They're not building a job that pays them. They're building a portfolio of income-producing assets, each one standing on a system that was proven before they ever signed.
Royalties look like a cost on a spreadsheet. On a five-year timeline, the right ones look like the cheapest shortcut in business. The whole skill — and it is a skill — is telling the right ones from the wrong ones.
Curious what the franchisors are wrestling with on their side of the table?
Whichever seat you're in, let's talk straight.
Franchisors — if your pipeline runs on manual hours and hope, I build the systems and the assets, and I've personally done the selling. Buyers — the roster is open, the education is free, and nobody here is going to pressure you into anything.