Franchise Performance Group Revolutionized Franchising by Treating the Industry Like a Business

What do smoothies, home care, supplemental education, auto-servicing, gyms, hamburgers, travel agencies and swim schools all have in common? Like virtually every other viable business, they have all found success through franchising. Because of the versatility of franchising, most people — even many industry professionals — think of franchising as a growth tool that businesses from a range of industries can adopt. Joe Mathews, the CEO of franchise consultancy Franchise Performance Group, disagrees with that characterization. Franchising is not simply a tool, Mathews believes, it is a business unto itself. That philosophy has made Franchise Performance Group one of the most effective and sought-after consultancies in the industry.

Mathews’s unique perspective on franchising is perhaps unsurprising given his unusual path to the industry. Unlike the career entrepreneurs who occupy most of the executive offices for most franchise brands, Mathews didn’t originally set out to make a splash in the business world. A Fine Arts major in school, Mathews fell into the business world accidentally.

Despite his academic expertise, Mathews admits he was “kind of a crappy artist.” So, Mathews took what he describes as “the only job I could get” — one in marketing. That’s when he first became aware of franchising, and he was immediately intrigued.

“I read about this little sandwich chain that was only in 15 states but was trying to take on McDonalds,” Mathews said. “I didn’t see how they were going to do it, but I was blown away that they were trying, so I went over there with my resume, and they hired me that day.”

That little sandwich chain was called Subway, and when Mathews was hired, he was just the third employee in the burgeoning franchise’s development team. Mathews worked at Subway for years as the brand grew from a roughly 400-unit up-and-comer to the iconic franchise behemoth it is today. Along the way, Mathews had a key revelation about the industry.

“I realized that buyers weren’t buying because they wanted to own a sandwich restaurant,” he said. “They bought because they wanted to start their own career.”

That insight was crucial to Mathews as a marketer, but it was also inspiring on a personal level. “I was taking this dream people had and folding that into our marketing to show them how it could be a reality,” he said, “and I remember thinking, ‘How could I get that? How could that be my reality?’”

So, in the early 2000s, Mathews struck out on his own. But rather than buy a franchise for himself, he decided to dig deeper into the industry and look at how franchising as a model could be both expanded and refined for greater impact. Franchise Performance Group was born.

“FPG started as a think tank — sort of my own personal playground,” Mathews explained. “I was interested in figuring out what worked across brands and industries and why. When a brand is successful, how much of that success is the brand and how much of that is the franchise model?”

What Mathews and FPG quickly found was that there was little agreement in the franchise industry about what the model even was. As Mathews explains it, “franchising had never done for franchisors what franchisors had done for franchisees.” In other words, franchisors didn’t have a single, proven model they could rely on.

That left a big opportunity for “someone to come in and codify the model,” Mathews said, and that’s exactly what Franchise Performance Group did, starting with franchise sales.

“We started by building a sales model and training recruiters,” Mathews said. “Back then, most franchisors were just placing ads in The Wall Street Journal or trade publications. It wasn’t very targeted or effective.”

FPG mapped out most traditional routes that franchise buyers took to ownership and found that “whether they’re looking at a fast food company or a cleaning company, the journey is pretty much the same,” Mathews said.

FPG was just the second certified sales training company in franchising, and the company quickly made a name for itself in the industry. In its first few years, FPG trained more than 1,200 franchise professionals, and franchisors started asking FPG to consult on sales practices after the training, so Mathews added a fee-for-service model to allow FPG to work more directly with franchise brands.

In the years that followed, FPG’s popularity in the industry grew, and the company continued to add new services and capabilities. Marco’s Pizza hired FPG eight years ago to help with franchise growth and has gone from 375 units to more than a thousand. A partnership with College Hunks Hauling Junk took that franchise from 40 franchisees to more than 200 franchisees and nearly doubled its average unit volume. Sport Clips* hired FPG to train its area development team and refine the franchise sales process. That project helped the brand jump from 375 units to nearly 1,700.

Today, the franchise industry relies on a host of standards and best practices for growth, marketing and operations, and it’s no stretch to say that FPG is responsible not only for establishing those standards and best practices but for demonstrating the value of having codified standards and practices in the industry in the first place.

“Back in the day, there wasn’t much connecting a sandwich franchise and a hair salon franchise,” Mathews said. “Today, they can rely on very similar models to grow much faster and much more effectively than ever before. And that’s our primary innovation: treating the franchise industry not as a collection of unrelated brands, but as a singular business model that can be applied to nearly any type of business.”