Extraordinary Brands is heading into 2026 with a simple premise: boutique fitness demand did not disappear, but many concepts scaled faster than their infrastructure could support franchisee success.

That idea sits at the center of the platform’s recent moves. Over the past year, Extraordinary Brands added CycleBar and Rumble Boxing to a portfolio that includes Row House and NEIGHBORHOOD barre, strengthening its position as a multi-brand operator focused on sustainable growth. Lou DeFrancisco, who joined the company as President to lead its turnaround and growth strategy, said the focus is on pairing brand-level investment with a disciplined support engine that keeps franchisee profitability at the center of every decision.

“There’s a lot of people who think franchising is an easy growth mechanism,” DeFrancisco said. “What they underestimate is the support structure required to build a durable foundation and help franchisees succeed long term.”

DeFrancisco described the past few months as foundation work following recent acquisitions, including rebuilding teams, strengthening resources, and upgrading technology, while establishing a more disciplined operating rhythm across the brands. He said the company is focused on reinforcing confidence across its franchise networks through transparent communcation on where each brand stands, what investments are being made, and how responsibilities are shared between the support team and local operators.

“Our number one priority is franchisee profitability,” DeFrancisco said.

For Katy Richardson, who founded NEIGHBORHOOD barre and now serves as Chief Operating Officer across the portfolio’s wellness brands, joining a larger platform has shifted her operating model. Instead of carrying every function herself, Richardson said she can now focus on the areas franchisees feel most, including tightening operations, accelerating problem solving, and helping owners run stronger studios. NEIGHBORHOOD barre is seeing positive year over year average unit volume growth, she said, and the brand has sold four new locations. The focus now is getting those units open and leaning into territories where demand is already proven. 

“When you’re a founder and you’re doing it by yourself and you have the weight of everything on your shoulders,” Richardson said, “[joining a team] where you have tons of support and people around you allows me to focus on where I add value.”

Richardson emphasized that additional resources do not replace owner execution. A larger platform can provide tools and clarity, but it cannot instantly fix a studio. She said Extraordinary is intentional about communicating that expectation early and often.

“Sustainable improvement comes from consistent execution, not quick fixes,” Richardson said.

DeFrancisco acknowledged that each brand is at a slightly different point on the “J-curve,” but said CycleBar, Rumble and Row House were acquired while they were sliding and now need stabilization before aggressive growth returns. He described a monthly cadence of owner-only calls where leadership shares goals, metrics and priorities, including targets tied to revenue and margins. He also pointed to practical levers: resale support for owners who want to exit, lease renegotiations, relocations and, in some cases, smaller-footprint builds to reduce fixed costs.

“At the center of the message is a push for disciplined execution. Franchising is not a shortcut to effortless returns,” Richardson said, “and franchisees have to keep doing the unglamorous work - marketing, sales and team execution - to sustain momentum after the initial launch phase.”

But the platform is also making the case that this moment is an opportunity. The brand equity remains, leadership said, and Extraordinary is investing in evolved brand marketing, updated tools and a stronger internal culture. DeFrancisco called culture the operating system that keeps everything else working — from daily huddles with brand presidents to the way corporate teams show up for owners.

“Culture is everything to me,” DeFrancisco said.

For prospective franchisees, Richardson’s pitch was straightforward: new owners are entering at a time when the portfolio is spending to rebuild and modernize, and when support is expanding across all four brands.

“Every new franchisee that comes into the system right now has it better than the franchisee before,” Richardson said. “We’re in the middle of making huge investments into all four of the brands that are evolving.”

DeFrancisco and Richardson were recently featured on the “Meet the Franchise” podcast, where they were interviewed by 1851 Franchise publisher Nick Powills. A transcript of the interview has been provided below. It has been edited for clarity and style.

Nick Powills: Franchising on a Friday. What’s better than that? Lou and Katie, thanks for joining me.

Lou, let’s start with you, and then, Katie, I’ll go to you. Give me the state of where things are at. Talk about Extraordinary — what’s going on with the business. 

Lou, give me your State of the Union address to kick things off.

Lou DeFrancisco: Awesome. Yeah, I’d love to. Happy New Year.

We’re in 2026 now. I can’t believe it. Extraordinary Brands made some big acquisitions at the end of last year, acquiring CycleBar and Rumble — added to the portfolio that includes Row House and NEIGHBORHOOD barre.

Three of these brands are in modalities that hit some rough times over the past year and a half, two years or so, for a variety of reasons. Extraordinary Brands had this vision of bringing on these brands and not being afraid to take on brands that need a little TLC — need a little love.

When I came on board with Extraordinary Brands, one of the things we talked about was the investment level needed: hiring the right people, bringing the right team on board. So, not only investing in the structure or the platform of Extraordinary Brands, but also making sure we’re investing in each of the individual brands.

That’s a lot of what we did. We can go into detail a little bit later, but it was a lot of heavy lifting over the past five months to build that foundation with Extraordinary, as well as starting to pour investments of time, money, energy and people into these four brands so that we can be prepared for a really strong growth year in 2026.

Powills: I’m intrigued by your perspective because you’re a founder of one of the brands. You’re riding this in a different mindset — going from founder, visionary, leader to now overseeing a category of wellness. From your viewpoint, how have things been going last year?

Katy Richardson: I think it’s been really exciting to see the growth at Extraordinary Brands. I took a leap of faith joining that portfolio back in August 2024. To Lou’s point, being able to invest in more people to support the brands is only benefiting the brand that I took a leap of faith with.

It’s been great for NEIGHBORHOOD barre specifically. The numbers are up year over year again, which is super exciting. We’ve sold four new locations.

We’re working on getting those locations open and putting more time and energy into getting more NEIGHBORHOOD barre open in territories that really want and need a NEIGHBORHOOD barre.

As far as transitioning from founder to COO over some pretty big brands, it felt pretty natural because when you’re a founder and you’re doing it by yourself, you have the weight of everything on your shoulders. Then you go to a place where you have tons of support — people around you — and people like Lou, with tons of experience, that you can lean on for help.

It allows me to focus on where I add value, which is really in that deep operational side of things, and helping the studio owners remember that you have to be scrappy sometimes. This is what you need to do. I love working with the brand presidents, the franchise business coaches and the individual owners to find ways to improve their business.

Powills: Love that answer. Lou, I’ll go to you with this — and I’m going to make a few comments based on what I just heard from Katie.

One, she said, “I have the weight of everything on me,” and now I can see the support around her in her role. I think about a franchisee of a brand that’s not in a portfolio company. It’s almost like the movement in franchising to be under a portfolio company that can have access to data across different verticals, plus build out a leadership team that can support all types of franchisees — where that data mixed with support can turn into something more valuable.

So I’m going to park that over here because I see that as part of what has happened here in that progression, and Katie set that up very nicely.

The other thing I think about is: sometimes it’s not the product that was the challenge. Sometimes it’s the way franchising was approached. If you sell a business based primarily on the financial side versus where passion and the franchise business — the rubber hits the road — then sometimes you can run into a challenge because that passion piece is currency.

Part of what I hear from your opening statement, and this next level with these four brands under an umbrella portfolio company, is that it’s allowing the magic of wellness to come back to the top.

Last thing I’ll say — and then I want your feedback — I think about self-serve frozen yogurt. I don’t think the customer stopped liking self-serve frozen yogurt. I think these brands sold so fast, didn’t put support in for franchisees, and then there was no foundation for the business models to continue. And then everybody closed — even though people still love frozen yogurt.

So I use that as a comparison back to wellness. In all the verticals you serve, people love this stuff. It might have been turbulent in a single-brand environment.

So, yes, I’ve said a lot — but comments on what I just said?

DeFrancisco: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up a whole other industry because I think franchising overall has grown tremendously fast over the past five to 10 years. There’s been a tremendous amount of change. There’s more private equity pouring into the world of franchising.

There are a lot of people who think, “I can franchise my business, and that’s an easy growth mechanism.” They don’t understand the support structure that’s really necessary to build a strong foundation to support a franchise that some people want to turn into a national brand.

Some people, when they decide to franchise, it’s just like, “Hey, let’s start franchising anywhere and everywhere that people raise their hands,” and the support isn’t there.

One of the areas of change happening in franchising as a whole — I like being an operator at heart. I started working at a front desk in a fitness business, worked my way up to general manager, and eventually found my way into franchising in the fitness space. I’m an operator at heart.

I’ve been a business owner for a long time. I’ve been a franchisee. I understand that piece of the business. Paul, the owner of the company, his mentality is that we have to focus on franchisee profitability.

When I ran brands as a brand president, I loved the opportunity to not just coach an owner — because I think that term gets thrown around too easily — but to actually say, “Hey, send me your P&L. Let’s review this. Let’s dive into how I can help you run your business better so that you’re profitable.”

Katie, in her time with NEIGHBORHOOD barre, that was a No. 1 focus for her, too. So we are completely aligned at the Extraordinary Brands level: Our No. 1 priority with our franchisees is franchisee profitability.

It’s cool to have a national brand like Rumble and have that cool factor — and it’s Jab’s birthday, so that’s what was on my mind — but at the end of the day, if the franchisees are not profitable, it’s not going to be long term, to your point about the froyo concepts.

If those business owners are not profitable long term, they waste a lot of money and a lot of time in their life. That’s what we don’t want. We’re building Extraordinary Brands to be here for the long run.

We’re investing in the support structure in a smart way so that we’re providing the right tools and resources for these franchise owners. We’re investing in the brand because you have to.

That’s something some founders — not that they don’t understand it — but they may not understand the volume of investment it takes to get a brand off the ground and truly turn it into a national brand that a portfolio company like Extraordinary Brands can help with.

It’s not that the founder did something wrong. They have a great idea. They have a great concept. They have great franchise owners. They just need a partner like Extraordinary Brands to put the infrastructure in place.

We have shared services, so we can scale and bring on another brand — or two or three — over the next couple of years and not dramatically increase our OpEx costs because we have infrastructure in place that can support additional brands.

Powills: I want to comment on that before I go over to you, Katie.

If you think about royalty — royalty is the wrong term. At some point, franchising needs to come together and say that’s a resource cost back to the franchisee.

If I think about royalty paid back to any of the four brands as solo brands, it was solo support, solo infrastructure. Profitability is part of what most franchise brands want to get to, but probably not the key focus.

So when I think about paying X royalty to a portfolio company that’s going to give tremendous resources, versus paying royalty to a single company — if it’s all the same, I’d rather have the additional resources for the same amount of money.

On the profitability side, I think this is the next transformation franchising needs to go through. Burger brands tout big gross sales numbers — one might be a little higher than the other. It’s irrelevant. It’s how much drops to the bottom line.

How quickly can we pay off our initial investment? Then, how much money will it take for us to scale our business? For whatever reason, in franchising we got it upside down. We’re in the business of selling franchises, versus the reality that all the money a franchisor makes is off successful franchisees who scale.

So what you’re talking about is changing the game to be aligned: You invested your life savings — now let’s show you how to make that successful, how to save up enough, and how to scale the business.

Katie, over to you. You had franchisees before, and you’re making this transition into being part of a holding company in a different role. The legacy franchisees — across all brands — do they understand what we’re talking about? That the depth of resources just quadrupled for the same amount of money they’ve been paying historically, and this team cares deeply about profitability to help them achieve their financial goal.

Do you think current franchisees — legacy franchisees — get that at this point?

Richardson: For the most part, yes. For NEIGHBORHOOD barre specifically, absolutely.

One reason I chose to take my 22 franchisees into a portfolio is because I couldn’t singlehandedly give them the support they deserved for the royalty they were paying. I was doing it, but it wasn’t at a pace I could maintain — personally or financially.

So I needed to make a shift to protect their investment. I consider royalties an investment into their business. I had to make a change to continue to provide the proper service for those royalties we were collecting.

Now, one thing that needs to be pointed out: There is no magic wand that’s going to come in and fix someone’s business.

One thing we’re very transparent about at Extraordinary Brands is you cannot come into the portfolio and have us wave a wand and, all of a sudden, you feel this difference in the first 30 days. We move quickly, but we also want to set a proper expectation that we need time to diagnose the system, diagnose the franchisees, and understand what we’re solving for in order to put our plan into place to help stabilize or grow the brands that are part of the portfolio.

Powills: I love that last line.

Two things. One, you didn’t just buy a business that magically makes money. Nobody does that in franchising. For whatever reason, people buy in and think, “I’m going to get rich quick.” That’s not business. This is a shortcut because there’s already a blueprint written, but it’s not a guaranteed pathway to giant riches.

If I’m speaking at a franchise conference, the keynote I talk about is self-accountability — looking in the mirror. Here’s the baseline of what you have, and every decision you make is your decision. The franchisor gives you the tools. It’s up to you what to do with it.

A gap happens when perception changes — when a franchisee swings more negative than positive. What this moment should do is even it back out and say, “Let’s push hard reset. You’ve got a business — hard reset. Now let’s put the machine in place.”

Lou, I want your answer to this. But, Katie, any feedback before I go over to Lou?

Richardson: There are different life cycles of your business, no matter what. When you first buy your franchise and you’re getting through that pre-opening process, you’re very excited. If you follow the playbook — if you use the tools — you can see growth happen very quickly.

But you have to understand there are things you have to do to maintain that growth pattern, and keep your business turning in the positive direction and not the negative direction. So I 100% agree with you. There’s a lot of self-accountability that has to take place.

What I really try to push to our brand presidents and our franchise business coaches is: The easier we can make our franchisees’ lives, the easier our lives are going to be — and the easier it’s going to be to coach them — because their businesses are going to be more successful.

So when I ask you to do something — even if it seems minuscule — it’s making a difference in how easy it is to find tools and resources, and how easy it is to implement them. We can’t complain about franchisees not using the tools if they’re not easy to access — and easy to implement.

That’s where I put a lot of my focus, because we don’t want to be like, “It’s on document No. 217 in Section F. What do you mean you didn’t see the update?”

Powills: That’s right. Lou, what stage in the J-curve are you at now?

Anybody that buys a brand, step one is lifting up rocks and recovering some of the investment we saw in due diligence — and then putting pieces in place. Naturally, a business is going to go down before it goes up and gets into the right place.

What stage is the portfolio company — and the individual brands — in on this J-curve journey?

DeFrancisco: Yeah, the portfolio company is still low on the curve in terms of the number of brands we would like to have in the portfolio.

Within each of the brands, it’s slightly different life cycles. Outside of NEIGHBORHOOD barre, the other three — Extraordinary Brands acquired while they were on the downslope.

Our goal — and what we communicated clearly to the franchise network in each of the brands — is: We’re going to work as hard and as fast as possible to invest in the people, invest in resources, invest in technology, and we’re going to communicate with as much transparency as possible to help stabilize the brands and turn them back into growth brands.

So we’re still in those early stages. I’m an optimist by nature, if you couldn’t tell. I think our teams are doing a fantastic job. I know they’re doing a fantastic job.

Coming into this first week of January, we have a communication rhythm. Beginning of each month, we do what we call an owner call within each of the brands. Katie and I are a part of that, and brand leadership is a part of that.

We use that opportunity to talk with owners only. We communicate our roadmap, our plans, the investments, what we’re doing. We share data and metrics, and we try to be as transparent as possible so franchisees know the state of the business today.

This week, we shared our goals for the brands in terms of growth, average revenue, profit margins, and how we’re going to help get there.

Then we talked about — on each one of these calls — there are things we’re going to do as the franchisor. We’re going to provide certain people, certain resources, certain training. But there are also responsibilities you have as a franchisee: daily marketing activities, daily sales activities. What do you do to meet with your team on a daily and weekly basis? What’s the client experience like inside your four walls?

Those are things we can train you on and teach you how to do, but you have to execute on a daily basis.

We try to walk that line: We’re excited. We’re passionate about the brands. We’re passionate about being small business owners. We can teach you and give you tools and resources.

If they’re not there — some resources were not there — we’re investing in them or negotiating with new vendors, new contracts, to help save money here or give better technology there.

So my hope is we’ve reached the bottom of that curve at this point. After our owner calls this week, there was a lot of positivity — positive feedback from franchisees.

Inevitably, I think the stats are somewhere between 3% and 5% of a franchise every year is going to resell or close. We’re not blind to that, either.

That’s why early on we were transparent: We know some of you are toward the end of your life cycle, but we want to help. The solution is not closing the doors. The solution is trying to help you sell your business because it’s still an asset.

No matter what it’s doing from a revenue or profit standpoint, there’s a member base, there’s equipment — there’s a business there. It’s an asset. We can help you find someone else who may be interested, who may be willing to take on the challenges you’re facing and do something with it.

So we’re looking at this from every angle — not just, “Let’s sell new territories and grow that way,” but also: How do we help franchisees through a resale process? How do we help them renegotiate a lease? How do we help them relocate, find a new location?

Boutique fitness — in general — especially with our modalities, we have opportunities to shrink the footprint of some modalities. Not necessarily NEIGHBORHOOD barre; that was already a small footprint. But CycleBar, Rumble and Row House were on the larger side.

From an OpEx standpoint, in any business, if you can shrink a fixed cost, that’s a big bonus.

So that’s going to be an opportunity for some of our legacy brands that have been around, like CycleBar. Some are coming up on renewals of their franchise agreements, and there could be opportunities to relocate, find new spaces with smaller footprints, and save costs and expenses there.

We’re trying to be as creative as possible with the existing franchise group to turn around their mentality because, for the past couple of years, there’s been a lack of leadership and a lack of investment in the brand.

On your froyo example, I think about boutique fitness: a lot of these modalities are cyclical. So we’re confident CycleBar is going to be around a long time, Rumble is going to be around a long time, Row House is going to be around a long time.

We’re finding ways to help these franchise owners be successful in their communities and, ultimately, profitable. That’s how we build strong brands for the future.

Powills: I’m going to comment and then I’ll go to you, Katie, to close.

I remember reading a quote — it was in QSR magazine — from the founder of Panda Express. He became a franchisee of Tide Cleaners. Someone asked, “Why would you buy this?” He said, “Because I don’t want to miss the next McDonald’s.”

Tide Cleaners has not become the next McDonald’s, but it grew into a good brand under a different type of portfolio. At that point, he was saying, “I want to get in on the ground level.”

I’ll use that as an example: Ground level for great investors creates tremendous opportunity because they can scale fast. They own the marketplace, economies of scale, open additional units. That’s probably the example of the best franchisee that ever existed.

When you’re in a J-curve business building infrastructure to support growth — even if you’re toward the bottom of the curve — the reality is: If someone buys in today, they’re buying in at a prime opportunity. You’ve weathered the first storm — the transition storms — to get to this point. Now it’s a fresh opportunity with backing, with a machine behind it.

So it’s not me selling this for you, but I look at this and I’m like: We have four brands. We have a leadership team. Culture, business model. We have a North Star of profitability. The consumer did not go away. We just have to readjust the energy.

If I’m an existing franchisee and I can change my mindset, huge opportunity. If I’m new blood looking at an opportunity, this seems like a “don’t miss the next McDonald’s” moment for all four of these brands.

Lou, any comments before I close with Katie?

DeFrancisco: I appreciate that. You mentioned culture, and I’m a big proponent of culture.

I didn’t say this early on, but that’s really where I started. There were brand presidents already in position, but I’m a big believer that culture is not just who you hire — it’s what you do with them every single day.

Katie and I meet with the brand presidents every single morning with a daily huddle. We have a weekly meeting. We review monthly metrics. We are intensely focused on building the right culture within the Extraordinary Brands team, as well as the brand franchisor teams.

I know, being in franchising, every single day we have to put that face on for our franchisees because they’re out there working hard every day — opening the doors at 6 a.m., 5:30 a.m., whenever that first class is — all the way until 6 p.m., 7 p.m. at night — delivering a great experience.

We have to bring that customer service experience to them because they’re our customers. So culture is everything to me. It’s the key to success in business, no matter what kind of business you’re in.

Powills: Katie, closing-pressure question. If someone is watching this right now, give me a definitive statement on why they should consider joining the system now.

Richardson: Well, I think you pretty much said it, Nick. Every new franchisee that comes into the system right now has it better than the franchisee before.

It doesn’t mean those franchisees didn’t have tools, but we’re in the middle of making huge investments into all four of the brands that are evolving — the brands themselves, and the brand marketing evolution.

If people are familiar with Rumble, CycleBar and Row House, they can go to their Instagram accounts and see the difference. CycleBar and Rumble’s brand campaigns just started rolling out this month. NEIGHBORHOOD barre is next on the docket to go through the same type of overhaul.

To your point, there are more investments and more tools being created every day. We’re learning more and more about the brands, about the franchisees, and what they need to be successful, and we’re prioritizing that in our support.

So it’s a great time to be a part of Extraordinary Brands.

Powills: I love it. The purpose of me doing these videos is that if someone is watching this, it unpacks some of the culture. At the end of the day, the business ends up being the widget; the people around it end up being the magic.

Anybody who watched got to see Lou and Katie in action. I’m grateful you gave me some time on a franchise Friday — words I never thought I would say, but I just said them.

Thanks for the time, guys. For Katie and Lou, I’m Nick. This is another episode of “Meet the Franchise.” Take care.

Watch the full interview here.