Growing a Franchise
With decades of experience as a franchisee, broker and developer, Brunell brings a deeply practical, people-first perspective to franchise recruitment and growth.
Franchise Sales Leader: Dan Brunell
Brand: Spherion Staffing & Recruiting
Dan Brunell has spent most of his career looking at franchising from different sides of the table. His first exposure came all the way back in 1978, when his first job was at a Dunkin’ franchise. His first professional role after college was also with a franchise, this time in medical recruiting. From there, Brunell went on to become a franchise owner, broker, trainer, author and franchise development executive.
“I’ve been an employee of a franchise, been an owner of a franchise, been a broker of franchises and also a franchise developer,” Brunell said. “I’ve seen it from a lot of angles for many years now.”
Today, as senior vice president of franchise development for Spherion Staffing & Recruiting, Brunell uses those experiences to identify the right operators, support existing franchisees and help grow a staffing system with more than six decades of franchising history behind it.
For Brunell, great franchise development is not about putting as many dots on a map as possible. It is about finding people with the right experience, temperament and goals, then giving them the resources to build substantial businesses.
One of Brunell’s earliest professional experiences shaped how he still thinks about franchise ownership today. After college, he worked for the owner of a recruiting franchise who had left a successful career and invested his life savings into the business.
“I was very acutely aware of the fact that this gentleman had put his life savings into a business,” Brunell said. “He had left a brilliant career where he was making a very high income. He became a terrific mentor to me and somebody who’s really important in my career. I was acutely aware of what he had at risk, and it just motivated me all the more to want to try and perform for him.”
That perspective has remained with Brunell throughout his career. To the general public, a franchise can look like part of a large corporate chain. Brunell sees something different. “It’s really not some monolithic megacorporation,” he said. “It’s a collection of small business owners.”
Brunell’s experience eventually expanded beyond staffing into franchise brokerage.
After working in the staffing industry and corporate leadership, he reached a point where he wanted to “start working on my own family fortune instead of someone else’s.” His first business was a franchise brokerage, which he saw as a natural extension of his recruiting experience.
“To me, it was just another recruiting play,” Brunell said. “I started as a recruiter. I knew that space well. It was just a highly niche, very specialized recruiting play.”
He ultimately spent nearly 20 years in brokerage, developed a training company, trained hundreds of franchise brokers and authored “The Franchise Broker’s Handbook.”
That background gives Brunell an unusually broad view of the franchise discovery process. He understands how buyers evaluate concepts, where confusion can enter the process and why quality guidance matters when someone is considering a significant investment.
“There are some exceptional brokers out there,” Brunell said. “Some real estate agents are professional. They’re worth their weight in gold and exceptional at what they do, and a lot of them are kind of part-timers. It’s similar.”
For Brunell, the takeaway is the same whether someone is a broker or an internal development executive: The focus should be on finding the right opportunity for the right person, not simply getting a transaction completed.
That philosophy carries directly into Brunell’s work with Spherion. Unlike franchise systems that measure development primarily by how quickly they can fill geographic white space, Brunell says Spherion takes a more deliberate approach.
“The strategy here isn’t to fill the zone and get as many dots on the map as possible,” he said. “We’re mostly interested in coverage and market penetration.”
That means development decisions start with the franchisees who are already in the system. “We want to penetrate our markets, we want to support the franchisees that we have and we want to make sure that they’re successful,” Brunell said. “If we’re covering all that and we find a great guy in a new market, then yeah, we’ll open up a new shop there. But it’s not our prime directive to try and get as many dots on the map as we can.”
The strategy reflects the maturity of a franchise system that has been franchising for more than six decades. Spherion has franchisees who have been with the organization for 20, 30 and even 40 years, including second- and third-generation family ownership. Brunell says that longevity creates enormous institutional knowledge within both the corporate team and the franchisee base.
After decades as a recruiter, franchisee, broker and development leader, Brunell’s approach remains grounded in finding alignment first.
“A franchise is just a tool,” he said. “A tool in the hands of a skilled operator can do some wonderful things, and a tool in the hands of an unskilled operator can make a real mess.”
Want to learn more about how 1851 helps franchisees find the right franchise opportunity? Visit www.1851growthclub.com and start your journey.
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