Franchise growth, operational gearing, scaling strategies, and technology for multi-site business models.
I built a working system in five days last week. The kind of thing that would have been a six-month project with a small team a decade ago. I am genuinely amazed at what AI tools now make possible. And then I spent another five days making it actually safe to put in front of …
Read more “I Built a System in Five Days. Here’s What Took the Other Five.”
I started my career at Argos. This was 25 years ago. Before you could buy online. Before buy-online-collect-later. The sale happened if the product was physically in the shop, and did not happen if it wasn’t. The stores had small warehouses. The catalogue had thousands of SKUs. The maths was tight — you could not …
Read more “What Argos Taught Me About Forecasting (That Most Businesses Still Miss)”
I had a conversation recently with an operations director at a large franchise network. We were talking about IT investment. Sharp person. Knew exactly what was going on. “I agree we’re underinvested,” they said. “But you won’t get the exec team to spend any money on it.” They had cut IT so hard, for so …
After a recent LinkedIn post about AI accuracy in franchise operations, the conversation went somewhere I did not expect. The most common response was not about artificial intelligence at all. It was about what happens after the efficiency arrives. One comment in particular stuck with me: “The risk is the savings just get absorbed into …
Read more “Measure What Matters to Your Customers, Not What Is Easy to Count”
Everyone is talking about agentic AI. Not the chatbot-answers-your-question kind. The new kind. AI that does not just advise — it acts. It processes a refund. It chases a late invoice. It triages a customer complaint, updates the CRM, and escalates to the right person. It reads the operations manual your franchisees never open and …
Read more “Before You Hire a Digital Agent; Fire a Bad Process”
Is it easy to use? Does it convert? That’s it. Everything else is noise. Not how it looks. Not what your agency said about your SEO. Not the redesign you did two years ago. Is it easy to use? Does it convert? Because here’s the thing – your website doesn’t care how good your brand …
Read more “Two Questions Every Franchise MD Should Ask About Their Website”
When people talk about scaling a franchise, the conversation almost always gravitates to the same metric: location count. How many units do you have? How many are you opening this year? It is the most visible measure of growth and, understandably, the one that gets the most attention. But it is not the one that …
Read more “Scaling a Franchise: Why Operational Gearing Matters More Than Location Count”