Business View Magazine - May 2016 93
Eric Stites is the company’s founder and CEO. The fol-
lowing is from a recent conversation between Stites
and Business View Magazine.
Can you start with a little bit of historical back-
ground about your company? What niche were you
trying to fill and what made it seem like the right
time?
“We started the company in 2005, so we’ve been in
business almost eleven years. I had been working in
the franchise industry for a number of years, prior,
and one of my last positions was with a company that
was basically a franchise information website - a di-
rectory of franchise companies, online. We provided
information to people who were looking to get into
franchising and generated inquiries to various fran-
chise companies on an advertising basis.
“During that process, we spoke with hundreds of thou-
sands of perspective franchisees over the years, and
I realized how hard it was to get any kind of real infor-
mation about franchise companies, out there – what
the best ones were. At that time, we were working with
three or four hundred franchisor clients and I knew
who spent the most money advertising their franchise
opportunities, but I didn’t really know if they were any
good or not.
“So, I just started thinking about that more and more
and, at the same time, I was working on a side project
with Dunkin’ brands. They were having development
issues in that they were having trouble getting new
candidates into their system as quickly as they wanted
to, because their franchisees weren’t validating the
brand very well. They were happy, but they weren’t re-
turning phone calls from candidates and helping them
understand what the opportunity was all about. That
was the light bulb moment when I thought, ‘everybody
wants to know the same thing: – Is the training good?
Is the support good? Are you making any money? Are
you happy?’ And there wasn’t any resource out there
that was specific to the experience of the actual fran-
chisees within all these different brands. So that, es-
sentially, is what I set out to create. In a nutshell, we’re
like the Consumer Reports of the franchise world.
“We survey tens of thousands of franchise owners each
year from brands all across the industry and make that
information available to candidates looking to get into
franchising; to understand which ones have the most
satisfied franchisees. It started as a tool to help those
candidates and where we’ve really grown in the last
ten years is in helping franchisors get better at what
they do. So now, probably two thirds of the work that
we do is more operational-focused to help franchisors
that don’t have great satisfaction with their franchise
owners understand where their issues are.
Are you saying you act as a consultant?
“In a sense. We do a little bit of consulting directly with
a client, but primarily we’re providing the insights in
the areas where they’re having challenges and we do
provide best practices, and, for a select group of cli-
ents, we do some direct consulting as well. And that’s
an area where we’re going to be expanding our busi-
ness going forward.”
Outside of consulting, where does your revenue
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Franchise Business Review
WHAT:
Source of independent franchise informa-
tion, highlighting today’s top franchise opportuni-
ties
WHERE:
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
WEBSITE
:
