By Michael H. Seid, CFE, Managing Director, MSA Worldwide

Part One in this series asks what we would do differently if we were designing the franchise system today. Part Two challenges one of the easiest measures of success — unit growth — and asks whether the growth we celebrate is actually producing a healthier franchise system. That leaves us with a more fundamental question:

Who, exactly, are we designing the franchise system for?

For much of modern franchising, we spoke rather casually about “the franchisee” as though the term described a reasonably identifiable type of business owner. In many systems, it once did. The franchisee was often an individual who invested personal capital, attended the franchisor’s training program, operated one location, hired employees, worked alongside family members, and depended substantially on the franchisor for operating knowledge and support. That franchisee still exists, and in many systems remains exactly the right franchisee.

But today the person or organization signing the franchise agreement may also be an emerging multi-unit operator, a regional operating company, a multi-unit and multi-brand enterprise, a conversion operator, an acquirer of existing locations, a private-equity-backed platform, a next-generation family organization, or an investor using professional management to operate the business.

Legally, they may all be franchisees. Operationally, financially and organizationally, they may have remarkably little in common. They may bring different capital, management depth, real-estate capabilities, training resources, technology, procurement expertise, local-market knowledge, and appetite for risk. They may also create very different risks for the franchisor.

Yet many mature franchise systems still relate to all of them through agreements, manuals, training programs, fee structures, development practices, and support organizations originally designed when the franchisee was something quite different.

Consistency and sameness are not synonyms.

The Franchisee Is No Longer a Single Category

This is not simply a matter of size. A ten-unit operator is not automatically more sophisticated than a three-unit operator, and a well-capitalized investor is not automatically a better franchisee than an owner-operator who understands the business deeply. The useful distinction is capability.

• A first-time owner may need help reading financial statements, recruiting managers, selecting a site, negotiating a lease, understanding labor scheduling, and translating the brand’s operating methods into a viable business.
• A sophisticated franchisee organization may already employ people responsible for finance, human resources, recruiting, real estate, construction, training, local marketing, analytics, procurement and information technology. In some functions, its capabilities may rival — or exceed — those historically provided by the franchisor.

Both can be excellent franchisees. But if they begin from different places, assume different responsibilities and require different resources, why should the franchise relationship automatically be identical? After all, other than historical treatment and what we might consider generally accepted practices, there is no reason that they should.

We recognize differences in business relationships and the economics of that relationship almost everywhere else in business. An automobile manufacturer does not typically structure its relationship with a national fleet operator exactly as it does with an individual buyer. Large commodity purchasers may receive different pricing, logistics, delivery, credit and service terms because of the responsibilities they assume. Government customers often purchase under arrangements different from private buyers. Commercial leases allocate continuing obligations differently depending upon whether the landlord or tenant assumes taxes, insurance, maintenance and operating responsibilities — and the economics follow those responsibilities.

We do not generally find those differences remarkable and in most cases, the absence of the differences would seem rather odd because we understand that different customers can bring different capabilities, risks, obligations, benefits, and economics to a commercial relationship.

Different relationships should follow different capabilities and responsibilities — not simply different size.

Define and Qualify Before You Differentiate

Before a franchisor creates different relationships, it has to do something more basic: define the franchisee organizations it actually wants in the system, and develop meaningful qualification standards for each. Too many systems still define a franchisee principally through financial thresholds, geography and whether the candidate can complete the sales process. Those may be screening criteria, but they are not a complete definition of the franchisee the system is being designed to support.

A useful definition should begin with the work the franchisee organization will be expected to perform and the capabilities required to perform it. Capital matters, but so do management depth, operating experience, leadership, ability to recruit and develop people, financial literacy, real-estate capability where relevant, technology adoption, cultural alignment, succession planning, and the willingness to accept the responsibilities that come with development rights. Qualification for a first location should also not automatically equal qualification to acquire ten more, operate a new market, become a conversion platform or succeed to a parent’s organization. As development rights increase, qualification should also consider whether the franchisee organization has — or has committed to build — the management, training, reporting, and other back-of-house infrastructure necessary to operate that larger organization successfully.

A class of franchisee should be defined by capability, responsibility and strategic role — not by a label management finds convenient.

That definition then has to be applied. If a franchisor says a sophisticated multi-unit organization will receive different rights or economics because it assumes different responsibilities, there must be a credible way to determine whether the organization actually has those capabilities. The same should be true when additional development rights are awarded. A franchisee that was qualified to operate one or three locations should not automatically be presumed qualified to operate ten, twenty or fifty. The franchisor should be able to identify the organizational capabilities expected at each meaningful stage of growth, and determine whether they exist before increasing the franchisee’s span of responsibility. Otherwise differentiation becomes negotiation, favoritism or simply another sales device. The qualification process is what makes the architecture principled.

Veterans provide a useful example of why a descriptor should never substitute for qualification. VetFran was founded in 1991 to help veterans returning from the Gulf War transition into the civilian economy. That was, and remains, a worthwhile objective. Military experience can provide leadership, discipline, logistics experience, resilience, and other qualities that translate exceptionally well into business ownership. But being a veteran does not by itself make someone qualified for a particular franchise any more than being a former corporate executive, second-generation family member, or well-capitalized investor.

To participate in VetFran requires participating brands to simply provide veterans with an initial franchise-fee discount of its choosing. Participating brands are awarded 1, 3 and 5-star designations, based on stated program criteria, and to its credit the IFA expressly says those stars are not rankings or guarantees. However, no one should doubt that the ratings are easily perceived by the veteran as a rating and possible endorsement of the opportunity. The program would be enhanced and would return to Don Dwyer’s original vision if it were more than simply “we charge you less to buy” and ask instead what additional education, mentoring, financing guidance, transition assistance, and business preparation may help a qualified veteran succeed after the sale. The objective should be a better transition into business ownership, not merely another category of lead generation.

A discount is not a qualification standard, and a marketing designation is not evidence of franchise system’s health or beneficial opportunity.

Uniform Brand Experience Does Not Require Uniform Relationships

One source of resistance to differentiation is the fear that doing so will undermine consistency or create conflict, joint employment, vicarious liability, or other regulatory or litigation risks. That concern is understandable, but confuses two very different forms of uniformity.

The consumer should receive a reliable brand experience — because brand standards matter. The trademarks and reputation of the franchise system must be protected, and nothing about a more sophisticated franchisee population makes those principles less important.

But consistency at the customer level does not necessarily require sameness at the relationship level. A franchise system can preserve brand standards, protect the trademark, maintain culture and deliver a consistent customer experience while designing different relationships for different classes of franchisee organizations. In fact, treating materially different franchisee organizations identically can create its own inconsistency:

• A first-time owner should not be left to operate under a relationship designed for an institutional platform.
• A regional operator with an established training department should not be treated as though it lacks organizational capability.
• A conversion operator may need different onboarding than someone opening a concept for the first time, and most assuredly needs different support from field consultants who may need to continuingly return the conversion franchisee back to understanding brand standards.

To treat them identically may look fair on paper, while being strategically careless in practice.

Fair does not always mean identical. It can mean applying a consistent logic to different facts.

Different Documents Have a Cost — and So Does Avoiding Them

The reluctance to differentiate is not irrational. It is easier and less expensive to maintain one disclosure document, one franchise agreement, one operating manual, one training path, one set of fees, and one administrative process. Depending upon how the offerings are structured and where franchises are offered, differentiated relationships may require separate or more complex disclosure documents, different agreements or addenda, different manuals, additional state filings or reviews, separate training tracks, new technology workflows, and more disciplined internal administration. Lawyers have to draft and maintain the documents. Management has to explain them. Field personnel have to understand which obligations apply to whom. None of that is free.

But cost is not the same thing as waste. A legacy system should compare the incremental cost of maintaining two or more intentionally designed offerings with the continuing cost of forcing materially different franchisee organizations through a relationship that fits none of them particularly well. Duplicate support, unnecessary training, weak franchisee selection, avoidable disputes, poorly allocated fees, frustrated sophisticated operators, and the inability to recruit the class of franchisee organization the system needs are costs too. They simply appear on different lines of the income statement — or years later.

The answer will not always be multiple FDDs or multiple manuals. A system may be able to use a common disclosure architecture with clearly disclosed alternatives, exhibits, addenda, class-specific training modules, or responsibility matrices. In other circumstances, separate offerings may be cleaner. That is a legal and business design question that needs competent franchise counsel after management decides what relationships it actually wants to create. The legal structure should implement the business architecture, not dictate it merely because one form is cheaper to maintain and originate.

The cheapest document structure can become the most expensive business structure.

When Capability Changes, Responsibilities Can Change

This is where the discussion becomes difficult for a legacy franchise system — because changing the relationship touches nearly everything:

• The franchise agreement may have been written around an owner-operator.
• The operations manual may assume that the franchisee personally manages the business.
• Initial training may teach subjects that a sophisticated franchisee organization already teaches exceptionally well.
• Field support may have been designed around unit visits, inspections and basic operating coaching.
• Fees may have been established in part to support services some franchisee organizations increasingly provide for themselves.
• Development criteria may have been established when owning three or five locations represented considerable scale.

Yet, the franchise agreement may treat them all the same.

If a qualified franchisee organization already recruits and develops managers, why must every manager receive precisely the same training in precisely the same way? If it has a proven real-estate organization, should site development work exactly as it does for a first-time owner? If it can perform portions of onboarding, local training, or operating support to the franchisor’s standards, should the franchisor continue to duplicate those functions simply because that is how the system was designed? Sometimes the answer will be yes. The franchisor must retain responsibility for the brand, its standards, its methods, and the aspects of training and support necessary to protect the customer experience. But sometimes the answer should be no. The relevant issue is demonstrated capability, responsibility and accountability.

And if responsibility shifts, it should be explicit. A sophisticated franchisee organization that assumes responsibility for training managers, recruiting employees, local quality assurance, technology implementation, or other functions should have clear standards, reporting obligations and consequences when it fails to perform them. Differentiation should not be a collection of informal exceptions. It should be intentionally designed.

A franchise system should not charge for, staff for, and duplicate work merely because it has always done the work. Neither should the franchise agreement and brand standards manual require it to do so.

Different Economics Should Follow Different Responsibilities

Once differentiated relationships are discussed, people often move immediately to fees. Should larger operators pay less? Should first-time owners pay more? Should institutional operators have different royalty structures? Those are legitimate questions, but they are not the first questions.

The first question is design. What rights are being granted? What obligations are being assumed? What support will the franchisor provide? What responsibilities will the franchisee organization perform? What risk does each party bear? What value does each party create?

Only after those questions are answered can the economics be designed intelligently. A lower fee with no corresponding change in responsibility may simply be a concession to bargaining power, or be viewed through a lens of just trying to sell more franchises. A different economic structure tied to different rights, obligations, support requirements and organizational capability is something else, because it is system design.

This may be particularly difficult for a legacy franchisor to present to its board. The first page of the analysis may show a decline in one revenue line, and a director may reasonably ask why the company would voluntarily give up revenue it already receives. It is a fair question, but it is not the only question:

• What happens to the cost of recruiting the next franchisee?
• What happens to onboarding and training expense?
• Can each member of the field organization effectively support more units?
• Does a different span of control reduce cost or allow investment in more capable people?
• What happens to headquarters headcount, development velocity, franchisee management quality, closures and transfers?
• And what happens to continuing royalty, supply-chain and other revenue when a successful franchisee organization commits contractually to additional development over an agreed period?

A committed development schedule also has value before the next unit opens. It does not guarantee revenue, but it can provide greater visibility into territories, real-estate needs, training demand, supply-chain requirements, capital planning, and future support needs. Predictability has value.

The highest revenue per unit does not necessarily produce the best economics for the franchise system.

The Franchisee You Do Not Have to Sell Again

Part One questions our tendency to celebrate the number of franchises sold. The changing franchisee organization gives us another reason to reconsider that measure.

If a qualified organization commits to opening five, ten or twenty locations over time, the franchisor does not need to reacquire that organization for every additional opening. The relationship already exists. Management is known. Financial capability can be evaluated. The organization understands the brand. Development obligations can be defined contractually, with appropriate consequences when commitments are not satisfied.

Additional units may therefore produce continuing royalty, supply-chain, and other revenue without requiring the franchisor to repeat every element of the capture and onboarding process associated with recruiting a new franchisee. We have long been comfortable reducing an initial fee for multi-unit development — because we understand that the economics of the later transaction are not the same as the economics of the first.

The least expensive franchise sale may be the one you do not have to make again.

That should cause franchisors to examine their dependence on third-party franchise sellers. Brokers and franchise sales organizations can provide genuine value when they introduce qualified candidates a franchisor would not otherwise reach, and they should be compensated for the value they create. But the modern franchisee organization makes automatic dependence on that channel harder to justify. It is also important not to treat every outside participant in franchise development as though it performs the same function. A commissioned broker or franchise sales organization principally engaged to originate a transaction is different from an Area Representative or other outside organization that has contractually assumed defined initial and continuing support responsibilities in addition to development activity.

Technology, data and artificial intelligence increasingly make it possible for franchisors to identify, qualify, communicate with and nurture candidates directly. More important, an existing successful franchisee organization is already inside the system. If the internal development team requires a third party to persuade an existing franchisee to invest again, management should ask what development function the internal team is actually performing and whether the current structure continues to add value.

Franchisors should be especially cautious about arrangements that give a pure third-party seller continuing economic participation in growth occurring after the original transaction and outside the development expectations for which that seller was engaged. Compensation for creating a relationship is one issue. Continuing participation should ordinarily correspond to continuing responsibility and continuing value. The analysis is different where an Area Representative or another outside organization is actually performing defined, measurable initial or continuing support functions that the franchisor would otherwise have to provide. In that case, the question is not simply whether the outside party shares in fees, but what responsibilities it performs, what those services are worth, whether the arrangement remains efficient as the system changes, and whether the compensation continues to be justified by the value being delivered.

Yesterday’s cost of acquiring a franchisee should not automatically become tomorrow’s cost of growing an existing franchisee organization. But continuing compensation for continuing support is a different economic question from continuing compensation for a sale completed years earlier. We will return to that distinction when we examine how the modern franchisor should organize, deliver, and pay for support.

Support Has to Follow the Organization

Different franchisee organizations also change what support means. A field consultant who is exceptionally effective working with a first-time owner may not possess the experience or capabilities required to add value to a sophisticated organization operating fifty locations across several brands. That does not make the field consultant less valuable, but it means the work has changed.

• For one franchisee, support may require more frequent consultation, explanation of the brand’s methods, help interpreting information, and access to appropriate resources.
• For another, it may involve working principally with the franchisee’s own general manager, district management or training organization.
• For a sophisticated organization, it may increasingly involve interpreting information, benchmarking, challenging assumptions, coordinating resources, facilitating strategic discussions and knowing when to bring the right specialist into the conversation.

In every case, the franchisor’s representative should consult with the franchisee organization rather than manage its units, managers or employees.

As franchisee organizations become more capable, field support must become more capable — or become less relevant.

That has implications for who the franchisor hires, how field personnel are trained, what experience they require, how they are compensated, and whether some positions should evolve or be replaced. It also changes the traditional distinction between field and headquarters support.

Technology has already begun to blur this distinction, and AI will likely blur it considerably further. Information that once required a field visit can increasingly be collected continuously; training that once required a classroom can be delivered and reinforced differently. Performance patterns can increasingly be identified remotely — and headquarters specialists can interact directly with franchisee organizations without information necessarily passing through layers of geography and management.

The opportunity is not simply to use AI and technology to make yesterday’s support structure less expensive. The more interesting question is whether they allow us to design a better support structure, including at a lower cost and in a manner that the franchisee organization prefers receiving.

Training Should Begin with What the Franchisee Needs to Know

Training presents the same challenge. Many franchisors still build initial training around the assumption that every new franchisee begins in roughly the same place. Increasingly, that assumption is wrong.

• A first-time owner may need substantial education in financial management, hiring, scheduling, local marketing and basic business disciplines, in addition to learning the brand.
• A sophisticated multi-brand organization may already possess those capabilities, but require deeper training in what is genuinely unique about the concept: the brand promise, product or service standards, proprietary systems, customer experience, multi-unit management, and the particular economics of the business. That suggests a more asymmetric approach to franchise training.

The objective should remain consistent qualification and performance, but the path to reaching that standard need not always be identical. Testing what an organization already knows, recognizing demonstrated capability, and concentrating training where knowledge is actually missing may produce better outcomes than forcing every participant through the same hours simply in the name of uniformity.

Manuals may need to evolve for the same reason. A manual designed principally to tell an owner-operator how to perform every task may not be the most useful management tool for an organization whose owner does not work behind the counter and whose managers instead need standards, controls, escalation rules, and measurable outcomes. The brand standard remains the brand standard, but the way capable organizations achieve it can sometimes differ.

Management Capability Matters on Both Sides

Another form of incumbent inertia is harder to see because it resides not in agreements, manuals or organizational charts, but in the experience of the people responsible for changing them.

Long tenure can be enormously valuable. It creates institutional knowledge, relationships, cultural understanding, and continuity. But spending twenty years inside one organization can also create a cocooning effect. If nearly all of an executive’s experience comes from one brand, one culture and one way of solving problems, the history of that organization can quietly become the boundary of management’s imagination, and conversations begins with some version of, “That’s not how we do it here.” The problem is not loyalty. The problem is when familiarity replaces curiosity about how other organizations are succeeding differently.

The same issue arises when a company treats promotion from within as the natural path to its most senior decision-making positions. Internal promotion has real advantages: the person knows the culture, understands the history, has relationships across the system, and often has earned the confidence of franchisees. But if every senior leader learned the business inside the same organization, under the same assumptions, promoting only from within can turn institutional knowledge into an institutional cocoon. The higher the position, the more consequential that risk becomes.

The choice should not be “insider good, outsider bad” or the reverse. It should be whether the person making the decision has enough range to recognize alternatives. An internal candidate can develop that range through meaningful exposure to other businesses, functions, markets, boards, competitors and external ideas. An outside executive can fail just as easily if they arrive believing that what worked at one celebrated brand can simply be transplanted. What matters is breadth of judgment, curiosity, experiences, and the ability to distinguish principles from habits.

Promoting someone because they know how we do it here is valuable — until the job is to decide whether how we do it here should change.

The same caution applies when boards recruit executives associated with a celebrated brand or a single period of extraordinary growth. A compelling résumé tells us what happened, but it does not always tell us why it happened, how much of the outcome belonged to the executive, or whether the same approach can be replicated in a different culture, at a different stage of maturity, with different unit economics and a different franchisee population.

It’s who Sam Ballas coined an “intellectual networker,” the person with the great personality, well respected and liked by members of the industry, and the person often featured as a speaker at a conference giving us their best practice advice and motivational charm. That person may have longevity in the business but, when you scratch the surface, they have limited experience and single-shot successes that may have come because of the brand they worked for or the leadership they looked up to. Like a frozen pond the ice will often looks strong — but the test will come if it can withstand the three-year-old’s weight on the ice. Intellectual networkers, like a frozen lake in March, often can’t.

Past success is evidence of capability. It is not proof of fit.

Deep experience can teach an executive how one successful organization worked. Experience across multiple organizations can broaden the range of solutions management is able to recognize. Neither background is automatically superior. But a legacy franchisor attempting material change should understand the difference.

Institutional knowledge becomes inertia when “how we do it here” replaces curiosity about how others are succeeding differently.

Succession Is Also a System-Design Question

Mature systems eventually confront another version of the changing franchisee organization: succession. A successful franchisee may have spent decades building an exceptional organization. That does not automatically mean ownership should transfer to the next generation; it also does not mean that it should not. The relevant question is capability.

A son or daughter who has grown up in the business, developed operating experience, earned the respect of the organization, and demonstrated leadership may be uniquely qualified to carry it forward. But working in a location does not by itself make someone capable of running that location, much less leading a multi-unit franchisee organization. Succession development should begin long before succession becomes necessary. That has implications for training, management development, qualification, communications, culture and financial capability. A mature franchisor should be helping strong franchisee organizations build the next generation of leadership — because preserving a capable organization can be considerably more valuable than merely approving a transfer of ownership.

McDonald’s provides a useful current example. The company did not eliminate what it calls Next Gen candidates, but it changed the way succession candidates are evaluated. McDonald’s announced that Next Gen, Spouse, and Registered Applicant candidates would be evaluated under a single approach for potential new owner/operators, using equally applied criteria and comprehensive onboarding and training. At the same time, McDonald’s replaced the old “Rewrite” terminology with “New Term” for the process of awarding another 20-year franchise agreement based on performance history, and it separated the New Term decision from qualification to buy additional restaurants.

I think the direction is right, because it separates family relationship from qualification. A successful franchisee organization is valuable and preserving it across generations can be valuable, but succession should not become an inherited entitlement. The next generation should have a transparent path to qualify, understand what is expected, receive appropriate development, and then earn the right to lead the organization. That protects the successor as much as it protects the brand.

The lesson is larger than McDonald’s. A mature franchise system should define what capability looks like before the founder retires, before the children begin negotiating among themselves, and before management is forced to make a succession decision under pressure.

Succession should preserve successful franchisee organizations — not merely preserve ownership.

This Is Also a Franchisee Question

This series cannot be written only for franchisors. Franchisees should be asking the same design questions from the other side of the relationship. If you want broader development rights, different economics, or less duplicative franchisor involvement, are you prepared to invest in the management, training, reporting, technology and capital required to assume the corresponding responsibilities? If you want to be treated as a sophisticated franchisee organization, are you building one?

Differentiation is not an entitlement for the franchisee any more than it is a concession by the franchisor. It is an exchange of value. A franchisee seeking a different relationship should expect clearer accountability, measurable obligations, and consequences when commitments are not met. Later articles in this series will continue to examine these questions from both sides because franchise system design only works when the economics, responsibilities, and expectations make sense to both parties.

The Boardroom Question

None of this is simple for a legacy franchisor. Different agreements can create understandable concerns among existing franchisees. Different disclosure documents, agreements, manuals and training tracks can increase legal, registration, administrative, and technology costs. Different fees require an economically defensible rationale; different responsibilities require clearly defined standards. Development commitments need consequences when they are not satisfied. More sophisticated franchisee organizations may reduce certain support requirements while creating concentration risk and greater negotiating leverage. The board should see those costs clearly — but it should also see the cost of preserving a single architecture after the franchisee population has changed.

Existing franchisees also need to understand how they may qualify for new structures, rather than seeing them simply as benefits reserved for newcomers or larger operators. Differentiation is easier to defend when it follows capability, responsibility and commitment rather than bargaining power.

Management also has to persuade its board that what appears to be a reduction in one source of revenue may produce stronger economics elsewhere: lower acquisition costs, reduced onboarding expense, different field-support requirements, contracted future development, greater visibility into future royalty streams, growth in alternative revenue streams, better exit opportunities and value, stronger succession, and a franchisee population capable of funding growth without requiring proportional growth in franchisor infrastructure.

Those characteristics may also make the franchise system more attractive to sophisticated multi-unit and multi-brand franchisee organizations and to professionally managed capital. But larger franchisee organizations create different risks. Concentration matters. Bargaining power matters. A system with ten organizations controlling hundreds of locations has a different risk profile from one with hundreds of individual owners.

There is no universal best practice here. Each change has to be evaluated in the context of the business, the brand, its culture, its unit economics, and the franchise relationship being established with defined classes of franchisees.

Differentiation should not be a reward for being larger. It should be an exchange of value — different economics for different responsibilities, capabilities and commitments.

Before Turning the Page…

The observations in this article are not prescriptions. Different franchisee organizations do not automatically require different agreements, fees or support structures, and size alone should never determine the value of a franchise relationship. They are questions about intentional franchise system design.

Consistency and sameness are not synonyms.

Different economics should follow different responsibilities — not simply different size.

The least expensive franchise sale may be the one you do not have to make again.

As franchisee organizations become more capable, field support must become more capable — or become less relevant.

Past success is evidence of capability. It is not proof of fit.

There is, however, a problem with everything I have suggested. Agreements can be changed. Fees can be modeled. Training can be redesigned. Development commitments can be negotiated. Responsibilities can be allocated differently. None of those changes answers what may be the more difficult question:

If the franchisee organization has changed, is the franchisor still organized appropriately to support it?

Many of the structures we take for granted inside franchising were designed for another time. Field consultants traveled from location to location, because information was local. Training occurred in classrooms, because there were few alternatives. Headquarters collected and interpreted information because franchisees often lacked the technology and organizational capability to do so themselves. Regional structures existed partly because geography determined how information and expertise moved.

Those assumptions are already changing, and AI may challenge many of the remaining ones. This does not necessarily mean the modern franchisor needs fewer people. It may instead mean it needs different people, with different capabilities, doing different things.

Part 1 of this series asks us to reconsider the assumptions embedded in the franchise system. Part 2 challenges one of the easiest measures of success—unit growth. We have spent this article asking whether today’s franchisee organization is still the franchisee our systems were originally designed to support. Perhaps we should now ask the same question about the franchisor, in Part 4.

If we were designing the franchisor organization today, would we build the one we currently have?

That is where our next article in this series will begin.

If this series raises questions about your own system — or if you’d like a candid conversation about what it would take to strengthen it — we’d welcome that discussion. MSA Worldwide has been helping franchisors build systems that are genuinely worth owning, worth operating, and worth growing for nearly four decades.

Michael Seid is Managing Director of MSA Worldwide. You can reach him at mseid@msaworldwide.com or 860-523-4257.