Candidates call your owners before they sign. In a guest column, Waypoint Franchise Advisors founder Kelsey Stuart explains why franchise sales should lead with owner health, not unit growth.
Wingstop added 76 net new restaurants in the third quarter. In the same quarter, its U.S. same-store sales fell 5.4%, as Revscale Media reported. More stores, and the average store selling less.
Wingstop is a public company with its own story to tell investors. But the same pattern shows up in franchise sales decks everywhere. The deck opens with the territory map, the opening count and how fast the brand is growing.
I think that's backwards. The pitch that works is your owners, because the candidates I talk to care a lot more about them than about the map.
Because the candidates I talk to treat growth and health as two different things. A brand can sign deals fast while the owners it already has struggle. Revscale Media's look at Orangetheory showed that gap plainly. The brand terminated no franchisees from 2023 to 2025. Over the same stretch, the number of owners who reached the end of a term and chose not to sign again went from 1 in 2023 to 26 in 2025.
A candidate who reads numbers like that cares a lot less about your unit count. The question becomes "Are the owners glad they bought in?"
Candidates ask the things your sales deck skips. A validation call is when a candidate phones a few of your owners to hear how it's really going before signing. These are the kinds of questions candidates bring to those calls:
None of those are about how many locations you have. They're about what the candidate's life looks like after the check clears.
I'm the founder of Waypoint Franchise Advisors. I used to be a franchisor. Now I help candidates get beyond the marketing. So I see the other half of the sale, the part that starts after the sales call ends and the candidate starts dialing owners.
Lead with the health of the owners you already have, and let candidates check it. If your owners are doing well, they are the best sales team you will ever have. If they're not, your pitch won't cover the gap, because candidates tend to hear about it on those calls.
At Bloomin' Blinds, which I founded and ran for 11 years, we leaned hard into repair work each time the economy turned down. Repairs got us in the front door when homeowners cut big-ticket spending.
That's why, when I help candidates sort through franchise options today, I look for brands that have both a repair side and a sales side. I want to know how the owners hold up when a bad year hits.
So when you pitch your growth to a candidate I work with, that candidate is going to ask about your owners. Be ready for that question before your sales team gets it.
Ask your own owners the validation questions before candidates do. Call a few owners at random, not the names your team always hands out. Ask "Would you do it again?" and listen to how long the pause is.
If the answers make you nervous, slow down development and fix the problems your owners name. That will cost you signings this year, and your sales team won't love it. Domino's shows what happens when you don't get ahead of it. It cut its U.S. net new store outlook, and its CFO tied the cut in part to pressure on franchisee profitability. When owners stop making enough, they stop building, and the growth number drops anyway.
If the answers are strong, put them up front and open the whole list. Some candidates will still hit an unhappy owner and walk. Let them. I think brands that do that end up with better owners, because the candidates who sign already know what they're getting into.
Some candidates now hire a consultant whose whole job is to help them look past the pitch. If you've ever wondered whether a candidate needs a franchise consultant, know that the good consultants send candidates to your owners first.
So before your next big development push, pull your owner list and make those calls yourself. Start with the owners you'd rather candidates didn't call.
About the author: Kelsey Stuart is the founder of Waypoint Franchise Advisors, at waypointfranchise.com, where he helps people find a franchise that fits their goals. Before that, he founded and ran Bloomin' Blinds for 11 years, so he knows franchising from the franchisor's side of the table.
Disclosure: Kelsey is a friend of Revscale's founder, and the two are working toward a future business partnership.
Revscale MediaEvery franchise pitch promises "better," so candidates stop hearing it. In a guest column, Bloomin' Blinds founder Kelsey Stuart explains how to find your real difference and say it in candidates' own words.
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