Growing a Franchise
After developing dozens of franchise brands, Dowling says sustainable growth comes down to unit economics, strong founders, disciplined systems and candidate trust.
Franchise Sales Leader: Brent Dowling
Brand: Spire Franchise Capital / Better Days Franchise Co.
Brent Dowling’s entrance into franchising began with a Craigslist ad. After coming to the United States from Australia as a professional snowboarder, Dowling ultimately settled in Colorado and took an entry-level marketing job with a small popcorn franchise. That role became his introduction to franchise development. Working alongside his future business partner Mike Edwards, Dowling helped market the concept while Edwards handled sales, and together they sold hundreds of territories.
“I came in and did the marketing to find franchisees for that brand,” Dowling said. “We realized that we worked really well, that the process of recruiting franchisees and helping people achieve their financial and personal goals was really cool, and that it was something we could probably replicate at scale.”
That experience eventually led to the creation of Raintree, where Dowling spent roughly a decade helping develop dozens of franchise concepts. Along the way, he also became a franchisee, franchisor and investor himself.
Today, as CEO of Spire Franchise Capital and Better Days Franchise Co., Dowling approaches franchise growth from both sides of the equation: helping emerging brands become stronger franchise systems while helping prospective owners identify opportunities worthy of their investment.
After years building franchise development programs, Dowling has seen one mistake repeatedly: brands become obsessed with generating more leads before building the infrastructure necessary to convert them.
“Most of them, when they start out, just don’t know any better,” Dowling said. “They go in and start generating leads without a system behind it or a real process behind it.”
For Dowling, development starts much earlier. During his FSO years, his team could spend months identifying an ideal franchisee, interviewing existing owners and leadership, building marketing collateral, establishing a CRM and creating the sales processes that would eventually support recruitment.
The objective was to understand not merely who could afford the franchise, but who was most likely to thrive inside it.
“We typically started with understanding very clearly who the right franchisee was,” Dowling said. “We’d be interviewing current franchisees or founders or general managers and really trying to understand who’s likely to be happy and successful here and who’s not.”
Only then should the brand build marketing designed to speak directly to that candidate. Without that foundation, Dowling says changing lead sources rarely solves the underlying problem.
“If they don’t have the right CRM in place, they don’t have the sales training or capable folks, and they don’t have the right process, it doesn’t matter what channel you’re advertising on,” he said.
Dowling’s years working with franchise brands also changed the way he evaluates an opportunity. Initially, his investment philosophy centered largely on unit economics and Item 19 financial performance representations.
“The unit-level economics have to be there, but we saw a pattern in those brands that did really well,” he said. “More often than not, you started to see commonalities in the founder, not so much the model. The horse is important, but we started to bet more on the jockey.”
Strong founders, in Dowling’s experience, relentlessly focus on franchisee performance. Their leadership teams understand franchisee revenue, profitability and key performance indicators, and they continually ask how decisions will affect owners at the unit level.
The strongest brands also avoid viewing franchisees as subordinates. “The brands that did really well were focused on unit-level economics,” Dowling said. “And the second one is cultural. The ones that treated it as, ‘The franchisee is the customer. We’re here to help them any way we can. Their opinion matters,’ those brands tend to go on and do really well.”
That insight now plays an important role at Spire Franchise Capital, where Dowling and his partners invest in emerging franchise brands rather than simply serving as outside development vendors. Spire describes its role as providing capital, strategic guidance and franchise expertise to help promising emerging brands scale.
“We’re not just a vendor anymore,” he said. “We’re sitting at the table in those board meetings, vested in that, and it just creates a different relationship where they’ll actually listen to us as a partner.”
Dowling also believes franchise development is moving away from an old model in which brands withheld their best information until candidates reached later stages of the sales process.
Historically, a candidate might have needed to submit an application, take several calls and advance through the process before gaining access to franchisee validation or deeper brand information.
Today, Dowling increasingly believes brands should reverse that approach. Prospective owners are already researching brands independently, so the goal should be to give them substantive, trustworthy content before they ever submit their contact information.
His own experiments with video have reinforced the idea. Dowling said one Better Days video that cost roughly $3,000 to $4,000 to produce contributed to seven franchise sales.
The real value, however, extends beyond one campaign. Educational content allows candidates to understand the opportunity, leadership and philosophy of a company without immediately entering a formal sales funnel.
For Dowling, that is about “front-loading trust.” And that trust is especially important at Better Days Franchise Co., which approaches franchise matching with a franchisee-first model. The company says it analyzes financials, leadership, support and track record, recommending fewer than 10% of the brands it evaluates.
If there is one theme that connects Dowling’s career, it is the willingness to learn from both the franchise brands that succeeded and the ones that did not. He credits much of his own growth to surrounding himself with experienced people and listening.
“One of the few things I’d give myself an A on is simply surrounding myself with really smart people in the franchise industry and really learning to listen,” Dowling said. “If you’re willing to create the right relationships and, more than anything, just listen and watch, there’s so much talent in this industry.”
That perspective has also made Dowling less interested in short-term wins for their own sake.
His advice to his younger self would be to remain focused on the larger picture rather than letting one deal, setback or decision take on outsized importance.
“Everything’s long term,” Dowling said. “Understand that this decision or this event is very short term, and you’ve got to always stay focused on the bigger picture. This is such a long game.”
Want to learn more about how 1851 helps franchisees find the right franchise opportunity? Visit www.1851growthclub.com.
Sign up for the 1851 Franchise newsletter to get our biggest stories before everyone else
By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.
