72 Business View Magazine - April 2016
“Our business is really about digging into data and
that’s one of our challenges. We’ve been doing this
for almost 11 years now, and we have the largest da-
tabase on franchisee satisfaction performance in the
world. So, we’re constantly looking at ways to better
interpret the data that we have to help franchisors di-
gest it. It’s so easy to look at a report or survey, get
results back, and make gut decisions, but many cli-
ents really don’t take the time to dig into the data and
truly understand it. That’s our biggest challenge on the
technology side: how do we help interpret the data bet-
ter for our clients to find insights that are actionable
so that they can improve and drive their businesses
forward?”
How do you see your company five years up the
road? What significant objectives would you like to
achieve over the longer term?
“Like I said, we do very little consulting today, and I
think that’s really the biggest growth opportunity for
us. Right now, we’re like the MRI clinic – we have peo-
ple come in and we give them a full-body scan and we
tell them what their problems are, but we don’t neces-
sarily help them fix them, or, at least, don’t help them
fix them as much as we should. So, that’s where we
see our business going; to help our clients understand
what the key issues really are and how to fix things,
and leverage all the best practices we have learned.
We have worked with over 900 franchise companies
and we’ve seen it all, and to be able to share that in-
formation across brands in many different industries,
but who share franchising in common, would be very
powerful.”
You mentioned the International Franchise Associa-
tion. What do you consider its main benefit to your
industry?
“One of the unique things about franchising is it’s a
strong, tightly-knit community. Franchise companies
and franchise executives do tend to be much more
forthright in sharing the good and bad of what’s hap-
pening in their businesses. I’ve worked in a number
