The Most Important Person in Franchise Operations Is Also the Most Under-Resourced

For an industry that talks constantly about franchisee performance, we spend surprisingly little time talking about the people responsible for improving it.

Over the last twenty years, franchise brands have invested heavily in the infrastructure surrounding performance. They’ve built reporting environments, implemented POS systems, launched LMS platforms, standardized operating procedures, introduced scorecards, expanded field support teams, and created increasingly sophisticated ways to measure what is happening across their networks. Yet despite all of this investment, most franchise organizations still rely on a remarkably manual process to answer simple questions: What should this franchisee do next? Why? How? What will the impact be?

That responsibility almost always falls to the Franchise Business Consultant.

The Growing Complexity of Franchise Coaching

The FBC occupies a unique position within a franchise organization. Executives establish priorities. Franchisees run the business. The FBC sits between those two worlds, translating strategy into action. When a brand wants to improve profitability, increase compliance, drive local marketing execution, or improve customer experience, it is typically the FBC who helps franchisees understand what needs to change and how to change it. In practice, the FBC is often the single largest influence on whether operational initiatives actually make it to the unit level.

The irony is that while the importance of the role has increased dramatically, the systems supporting it have not.

When Coaching Becomes an Information Management Problem

Most coaching organizations still operate on a model designed for a much simpler era. An FBC today may be responsible for dozens—or even hundreds—of locations. They are expected to understand financial performance, customer sentiment, local marketing activity, compliance requirements, training progress, and the history of prior coaching conversations. Before they can have a productive discussion with a franchisee, they often need to gather information from multiple systems, determine what matters, identify root causes, and develop recommendations.

One COO we recently interviewed was operating more than 1,000 locations with six FBCs. Another estimated that standard call preparation consumed roughly three hours per location before a coach even spoke with a franchisee. Notes were stored in documents, action items were tracked manually, and critical context frequently lived in the heads of individual coaches rather than in any shared system. None of these practices are unusual. In fact, they are remarkably common.

Why Adding More FBCs Isn’t a Long-Term Solution

This matters because coaching quality has an outsized impact on performance. Across more than a dozen franchise brands, 3,000+ locations, and over 30 FBCs, we found roughly a fourteen-point spread in same-store sales growth between locations supported by top-performing coaches and those supported by bottom-performing coaches. Whether that gap is driven by experience, discipline, process, or intuition is almost beside the point. The implication is clear: coaching quality matters far more than most organizations realize.

Historically, brands have addressed this challenge by hiring more coaches or asking existing coaches to work harder. Both approaches have limits. As networks grow, every additional location adds more data, more context, and more decisions. The issue is not effort—most FBCs are already working incredibly hard. The issue is that the role has increasingly become an information-processing job disguised as a coaching job.

What Happens When Coaches Spend More Time Coaching

The clearest evidence comes from what happens when that administrative burden is reduced. One experienced FBC we worked with was initially skeptical of changing her process. Within a few months, she had nearly doubled the number of field visits she was conducting. Her coaching style did not change. Her expertise did not change. The only thing that changed was the amount of time she spent preparing versus coaching. We’ve seen similar patterns across multiple brands: faster intervention on emerging issues, more consistent coaching conversations, broader span of control, and ultimately stronger franchisee performance.

The franchise industry has built systems for transactions, training, marketing, scheduling, accounting, and reporting. What it has largely failed to build is a system for coaching itself.

The Missing Piece

For years, franchise leaders have asked how they can improve franchisee performance. It may be time to ask a different question: How do we improve the performance of the people responsible for improving franchisee performance?

If coaching quality can create a fourteen-point difference in outcomes, the FBC is not merely another support role within the organization. They are one of the most important performance levers a brand has—and the one that has gone the longest without purpose-built tooling (until now!).

Learn more at www.harmonyze.com

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