Franchise Your Business
Building a sustainable franchise network requires founders to distill their vision and “gut instincts” into clear, repeatable training processes and opening support to ensure franchisee success.
A well-designed franchise model means very little if the people expected to execute on it don’t have the tools and direction they need to do so. For a founder considering franchising, transitioning from a single corporate unit to a wide-reaching franchise network is a major test of the business model itself and the structures in place supporting it. Bridging the gap between operational checklists and the realities of everyday business requires careful attention to ensure nothing gets lost in translation.
“We documented all of the processes as we designed the model,” said Tim Vogel, founder and CEO of Scenthound. “We have a recipe for how we ‘bake this cake.’ When we first started franchising, our franchisees were following a lot of the general processes but weren’t having the same level of success that we had originally. It was around 10 units in, all of a sudden we thought, ‘Something’s off here,’ and we had to go back and reinvent the wheel a little bit on that training.”
For Vogel and the Scenthound team, these gaps ended up being in the leadership and soft-skill coaching aspects of the business, but gaps can be exposed for a variety of reasons when building onboarding, training and opening support structures.
Standard training manuals are only half the battle. True onboarding requires reverse-engineering the founder's intuition and building a structured environment where a brand's culture can thrive without the founder in the room.
When stepping into the world of franchising, the initial instinct for most founders is to document the tangible, day-to-day tasks. But a rigid operational playbook doesn't automatically equal high performance.
This performance gap led to a major realization for Vogel. The missing ingredient wasn’t a lack of operational discipline; it was a lack of leadership training.
“There was an ‘ah-ha’ moment for me, which was around leading high-performing teams,” Vogel said. “It turned out that was a real natural skill for me to lead these small, high-performing teams. When we gave the franchisee the playbook on ‘here's the process,’ we didn't talk at all about these soft skills of building high-performing teams.”
So, when the team realized new franchisees weren’t achieving the results they expected, they went back to the drawing board. From daily management tasks to communication styles and career pathing, Vogel made sure all of the small, interpersonal details and habits were built into the training program, ready for any new franchisee to execute.
For founders who naturally excel at leadership tasks, explaining how to do it can be a big challenge, especially if they’re trying to coach someone who has never done it before. Rather than providing high-level, abstract statements, look at the daily habits that create the sense of leadership and culture. Document those, and go from there. This transforms leadership and culture from hard-to-pin-down ideas to repeatable, structured processes.
“Culture is the consequence of practices. It's not your gut feeling,” Vogel said. “And that was a really hard lesson for me, because it was intuitive to me, and when I was like, ‘Why is it working?’ I had to go through this really hard process of reverse engineering my intuition. ‘What am I actually doing? Why does it result in these things? What are the actions?’ Then you start to identify key behaviors there that can be replicated. Memorialize that, and get that down as a best practice.”
Once you identify those key behaviors, the next step is creating actionable tools that force franchisees to practice them. At Scenthound, this took the form of a highly structured, "one-sheeter" daily huddle protocol.
Rather than letting managers run meetings based on their mood, the daily huddle aligns each location with the brand's core mission every single day. The meeting starts with their North Star (enriching the connection between people and dogs) and reading a positive customer review to anchor the team to their purpose.
The huddle also includes a peer-to-peer recognition system where every employee fills out cards, shouting out teammates who exemplified the company's core values.
“Those are the kinds of things where you start to instill our why, you start to instill a practice of catching people doing things right instead of catching them doing wrong,” Vogel said. “Those kind of things start to develop momentum, create the ‘one pack’ mentality, which is one of our core values. So it's the processes that then encourage the practices.”
Even if an incoming franchisee has no natural leadership inclination, providing these specific operational routines allows them to learn the necessary soft skills through practice and over time.
The adjustments the Scenthound team made early on are a prime example of how founders are forced to pivot when entering the franchise space. When you build your first operational playbook or opening checklist, it’s hard to know that it’s really ready.
Vogel suggests taking a cross-functional, cross-departmental approach by assembling small "SWAT teams," containing voices from operations, marketing, learning and development and finance to identify blind spots. Incorporating these different perspectives early on ensures as much relevant information as possible is included. But still, you’ll have to accept that your first training and opening program likely won’t be perfect, and trying to get it there before rolling it out will only hinder progress.
“It's a bit of a fool's errand to try to get it perfect before you launch it,” Vogel said. “We kind of have this 80% mentality where then you launch it as a pilot to a handful of places, and then they find a bunch of other stuff. The feedback loop is actually one of the most critical parts of that process. Technology has really adopted this MVP (minimum viable product) approach. I think it's kind of in that same vein.”
In the earliest days of a franchise system, support is often highly intimate, reactionary, and conversational. The founder or a few executive members are personally on-site for every opening, throwing themselves into any issue that pops up. Vogel compares this stage to playing in a live jazz band.
“The way a jazz band works is there's no sheet of music,” Vogel said. “I create a riff, and then you're next to me, and then you create a rhythm, and then someone else piles on top of that, and then all of a sudden you make this really cool song together. That's kind of what startup franchising is like... everybody just pitches in, and they make it work.”
But once you’ve scaled past 50, 100 or 150 locations, improvising can create real liability. Lack of cohesion and inconsistency across markets and franchise owners can overwhelm a corporate team, hurt brand identity and ultimately slow growth.
“As the business really grows, complexity grows beyond the ability for me to riff,” Vogel warned. “You have to really transition from being a jazz band into being a marching band. When you think about the features of a marching band, you've got your brass section, your percussion section… every one of them has their sheet of music, they know what steps they need to take when, and everyone's kind of marching to the sheet of music they've got in front of them.”
Making that leap requires a fundamental shift in mindset and a willingness to invest heavily in scalable systems.
The training road map is just the first step. As a franchisee prepares to open, you should ensure they’ve completed everything outlined in the opening checklist, but it’s also important to do a quick check-in and ensure they’re really ready. Are they thinking about the business the right way? Are they leading? Are they aligned with what your brand stands for?
For example, at Scenthound, Vogel looks for three specific indicators to judge true operational readiness:
While financial and pre-sale metrics are clear-cut and binary, soft skill gaps require careful corporate intervention.
“With the presales, it's a number, and that's pretty cut and dry,” Vogel said. “If you don’t hit your presale numbers, we can delay your opening. On the other stuff, we just try to give a little extra support before we get there. We want to set up an extra call. Let's have a conversation. Let's do an extra training session.”
It’s clear that having the proper training and opening protocols in place is crucial to long-term brand success. Before building them the right way, franchisors must create the space to build them at all. Doing this while managing the day-to-day of a growing brand can be difficult, but it’s a non-negotiable.
Many franchises do not surpass the 100-unit mark, and even fewer do it with relative speed. Vogel attributes this drop-off to franchisors failing to build their support infrastructure ahead of their actual sales.
“You should always try to be a year or two ahead, infrastructure-wise, from where the business needs you today,” Vogel said. “If you've got 25 units, you should have an infrastructure that's capable of handling 50 units. If you're 50 units, you should be at an infrastructure that can handle 75 to 100 units.”
It can be difficult to do this. Many founders feel absorbed by the demands the business presents today and have a hard time thinking about future demands. Ultimately, avoiding this cycle comes down to capitalization.
“The number one reason businesses fail is if you're under-capitalized,” Vogel said. “The same goes for the franchisor. If you're having to make the choice between serving the franchisee today or putting infrastructure into place, it means you don't have enough resources presently needed to get you to where you need to go. It's because you didn't hire enough people and have enough tools in place to support doing both.”
Throughout the franchise launch and growth process, training, onboarding and opening resources should remain top priorities. They are what turn a founder’s personal passion and vision into the systems and supports that make the franchise opportunity what it is. Doing this thoroughly and carefully, all while staying ahead of your own growth curve, is what will set your franchise network up for steady, unified growth in the future.
Growing and selling franchises is difficult. Want to learn more about how 1851 helps franchisors grow their franchises with confidence? Visit www.1851growthclub.com and see what we can do for you.
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