In a franchise system, the growth problem is almost never the ad channel.

Four areas and a plan. Unit economics, meaning contribution by unit, cohort and market type and the gap between your top quartile and your median; the ad fund, meaning what each programme returns at unit level and how it is reported to operators; territory and mix, meaning which markets earn the next openings and where adjacent units cannibalise; and candidate pipeline work, meaning the candidate funnel and multi-unit expansion. The output is a written plan with owners, a marketing brief your vendors can be held to, and a monthly scorecard.

No. We do not sell franchises, we do not place candidates, we take no commission on a signed agreement and we have no interest in your unit count going up for its own sake. We measure the development funnel and recommend how to improve it, and your own team or your existing partners do the selling. That separation is deliberate: it is what lets the plan say that a market is not ready or that support has to improve before more units open.

No, and we will say so quickly if a question heads that way. We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal, tax or securities advice, so franchise disclosure documents, agreement terms, registration states and fee structures stay with your franchise counsel. Where our commercial findings have implications for a local marketing requirement or a fund contribution, we write them up plainly so your counsel can review the wording before anything changes.

An agency is paid to buy media and generate leads for the brand or the units. This engagement is paid to find out where the system actually loses money, and in franchising that is usually unit-level execution, pricing or the support model rather than reach. Because we take no execution work inside the engagement, the plan can conclude that the fund should spend less nationally and more on enabling units. If you want execution afterwards it is scoped separately, and the brief is written so any agency, including your current one, can deliver against it.

Carefully, and with the brand's cooperation rather than around it. Most systems already hold more than they use: point-of-sale or booking data, royalty reporting, call tracking and the local marketing spend reported for compliance. We start there, then ask a sample of operators for the missing pieces, and we tell them what they get back. Where the data is thin we say which findings are solid and which are directional rather than smoothing over the gap.

It can improve it materially, because most fund disputes are reporting problems before they are allocation problems. We rebuild the fund as a portfolio of programmes with a stated purpose, a measured unit-level outcome and a named owner, then design a monthly pack that answers the council's questions before they are asked. Only 49% of senior leaders say they can measure how marketing drives business outcomes, so the bar is lower than it feels.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of units and markets in scope, whether one brand or several are included and the state of the unit data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at an average 9.0% of company revenue, with 33.6% of digital activity run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

It is early enough to be useful and cheap enough to be decisive, provided there are enough operating units for the comparison to mean something. With twenty to fifty units the most valuable outputs are usually the unit playbook drawn from your own best operators and an honest view of what the fund can do at its current size. Below that, a smaller piece of work on the model and the candidate funnel is the more honest recommendation, and we will say so at scoping.

The same method, run per brand and then compared, because that comparison is the point of a platform. Unit contribution, fund efficiency, candidate conversion and support cost are cut by brand and by market, which shows which model deserves to become the standard and which integration assumption is not supported. The plan is written so a sponsor's operating partner can read it and act on it, and the marketing brief is portable across the group.

Sometimes, and only where the evidence supports it. The more common finding is that the sequence is wrong rather than the ambition: openings are being placed where territory is available instead of where demand, operator quality and support capacity line up, and two adjacent units are splitting one trade area. Fixing sequence and operator selection usually raises system revenue faster than raising the signing target, and it does it without a franchisee relations cost.

We analyse them and recommend, and your operations leadership decides and delivers. We are not an operations consultancy, we do not rewrite your training curriculum and we do not manage your field coaches. What the plan does is name where support capacity is the growth ceiling, sequence what has to change before more units open, and flag where a marketing recommendation would break if onboarding or field support are not ready for it.

Steady growth rather than a boom, which is exactly the condition where internal execution decides the winner. The 2026 Franchising Economic Outlook projects about 845,000 establishments, employment approaching 8.9 million and output above $920 billion, with franchise GDP up 1.8% to $558.4 billion. A system that closes its own top-quartile to median gap grows faster than that without opening a single extra unit.

The president or whoever can decide on fund allocation and expansion, the marketing lead, development, an operations coach who knows the field, and whoever owns the numbers. We also want a spread of franchisees, including one top performer and one who is struggling, because the difference between them is the engagement. Expect a kickoff, a data pull, several short interviews, one decision session and a final review.

A marketing audit examines what is currently running and what it returns. This engagement is wider: it covers unit economics, fund allocation, territory and development, which is where franchise growth is usually decided, and it ends in a plan rather than findings. Brands that want positioning work rather than commercial mechanics should look at marketing strategy consulting, and systems whose reporting is the real blocker at marketing operations consulting.

Your team runs it, and every workstream has a named owner on your side. Many brands book a review at ninety days to re-measure unit contribution and candidate conversion, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want ongoing marketing leadership rather than a project, a fractional CMO or scorecard advisory is the next engagement, quoted separately. The parent version of this page is growth advisory, and multi-unit service brands often read the plumbing and HVAC versions alongside it.