Mario Altiery of Upside Franchise Consulting acknowledges the ideal scenario would entail an affordable, cross-disciplinary leader handling everything in-house. But practically, Altiery believes brands better serve themselves by enlisting specialized consultants and agencies to architect tailored systems. Instead of spreading people too thin, companies can leverage existing sales training structures to lessen burnout.
By outsourcing technical components to dedicated experts, brands mitigate risk from non-specialists learning on the job—an expensive gamble given that franchise sales represent 10-20-year revenue streams. Unable to accurately assess where process breakdowns originate, companies struggle to retain mismatched hires and repeat fruitless searches.
Altiery sympathizes with well-intentioned leaders not fully grasping the position’s scope when recruiting, inevitably setting candidates up to disappoint. Since few organically develop full expertise running every aspect of franchise operations, inflated requirements commonly crumble in application.
Brands should build teams of experts in specific fields, according to his advice. The teams can then combine their unique talents to complete projects more efficiently. This allows playing to strengths and optimizing systems for scale instead of centralizing broadly defined but unrealistic expectations on individuals. Adjusting perspectives to leverage accessibly qualified contributors makes progress more consistent.
By distributing interconnected components across dedicated specialists, the vision brands hold for a turnkey Franchise Development Director transforms into realities through targeted roles. Altiery’s resourcefulness—recalibrating their viewpoint—has unlocked significant franchise growth potential and resulted in considerable cost savings.
Transcript:
Hi, this is Mario Altiery from Upside Group Franchise Consulting in Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re a full-service franchise consulting firm. We’ve actually run our own franchises—we’ve built them up from scratch and sold them. We’ve taken over brands, built them up, and sold them. We’ve also done that for many, many clients since 1999, so we’ve had a lot of success in all different aspects of franchising.
This is why we want to talk about this franchise development position—the Director of Franchise Development. Not a day goes by that we don’t see ads for this on LinkedIn and other places. There are a lot of companies looking for this person, and I know why—because they are a yeti. They are a Sasquatch. You’re not going to find this person. They don’t really exist. There are very, very few people with all of this expertise, and if you did find them, they would need equity and probably a quarter-million dollars a year, plus parts of every sale. It would be a very expensive position, so only the top brands could get them.
Even those top brands are not actually asking this person to do all these things because they have marketing departments and IT departments to do parts of the job. While I think the ideal solution would be to find someone like this at a reasonable price because when you do outsource certain tasks to marketing folks, marketing folks don’t actually understand franchising at the level needed to write the copy, scripts, and materials correctly. Some parts, like brochure layouts, can be outsourced, but overall, it’s probably not going to work out well. Unfortunately, that ideal candidate just isn’t out there.
So, I think the best bet for most people is to hire a consultant to build the parts of this. That way, you have a huge pool of people to choose from. If you have the system set up correctly, many different folks could work within it.
For those who think they’re going to hire someone from the outside to come in, learn their business, develop all these parts of the business, and also be the top salesperson while training and recruiting screeners and handling the sales process—it’s just not realistic. They’re not going to find that person. That’s why these ads are constantly up. Companies hire someone, it doesn’t work out, they let them go, and they don’t even know why the sales didn’t come or why they ran into problems post-sale. They don’t understand which part of the process is broken—and frankly, the person who set it up doesn’t know either.
Franchising is a small pool, unfortunately. There isn’t a deep talent pool growing organically within it. It’s very rare to find someone with the full set of skills needed for this role. Companies will have to find another solution.
I’m doing this as a service because this issue is never-ending. Every single week, there are more people looking for a Director of Franchise Development, and I know they struggle with it. The thing is, losing a franchise sale isn’t just losing the franchise fee. You have to remember—that’s a 10- to 20-year contract with all the re-ups. You’re losing a large revenue stream.
If you have someone developing these systems who isn’t an expert, it’s not a small issue—it’s a huge problem for your brand. I would suggest finding experts for different parts of the process or working with a consulting group that has specialists who can collaborate to create these systems. And then you can hire any number of salespeople, even train your own, and nurture them within your system. It will cost you a lot less money, cause a lot less frustration, and you’ll have much more predictable results.
Again, this isn’t an advertisement for us. We’re not saying this to try to get you to hire us. I just see this so often, and I bet most people don’t fully understand what the position even entails. They don’t really know what they’re asking someone to do.
Because of that, when they do hire that person, that person is immediately put into a role they can’t handle. Maybe they’ve never set up a system from scratch. If the company got rid of its original development person or if this is the first time you’re hiring for this role, all of these things need to be built and revamped—and it’s quite a job. Everything is interconnected, so it has to work really, really well together.
Most folks don’t have that experience. A lot of people who apply for this role come from big companies where all these systems are already in place. They were a salesperson who eventually rose to being a Franchise Development Director, but they didn’t create the system. If you ask them, “Did you write the original scripts? Did you write the brochures?” they’ll say, “Oh no, we had people for that.”
Now, you’re asking them to do it in your system, and you’re paying them highly to do it—yet they’ve actually never done it before. Maybe they did parts of it once, but that’s not the same as building the full system.
This position, as most companies envision it, just doesn’t exist in a realistic way. It’s something to think about.
Again, this is Mario Altiery with Upside Group Franchise Consulting.
