Every 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.
Walk any franchise expo and listen to the pitches. Better training. Better support. Better systems. Better culture. Every booth says "better," so candidates stop hearing the word.
"Better" is the weakest word in franchise sales. It asks candidates to trust a claim they can't check yet. It also drops your brand into a race with every other brand in your category, where the prize is a slightly louder brochure.
The brands that stand out do something harder. They find the one thing that truly sets them apart, then describe it in the words candidates already use.
These days I work on the other side of the table, as the founder of Waypoint Franchise Advisors. I'm a former franchisor who now helps buyers get beyond the marketing. I know how franchise brands sell because I used to do the selling. So I hear "better" a lot, and I watch candidates tune it out. If you're curious what buyers hear from someone in my seat, here's my plain answer to whether a buyer needs a franchise consultant.
What candidates don't tune out is a brand that knows exactly what it is.
It looks like one plain line that changes who calls the business. At Bloomin' Blinds, that line was "a blind repair company that happens to sell a lot of blinds."
I founded Bloomin' Blinds in Dallas in 2014 and ran it as CEO for 11 years. We sold blinds. So did everyone else. If we had marketed ourselves as one more place to buy blinds, we'd have been fighting on price with the big box stores and every decorator in town. So we didn't.
That one line changed who called us. A homeowner with a broken blind didn't want a pitch for a whole house of new blinds. They wanted that one blind fixed, and we fixed it. The repair got us through the door, and once we were in the home, the homeowner got to know us.
The repair side also carried us through recessions. When money got tight, homeowners stopped buying new blinds, but broken blinds still needed fixing. I never forgot how the repair side held up. Today, when I look at brands for the buyers I work with, I look for a repair side and a sales side.
We didn't invent that difference in a planning meeting. It came from what homeowners were already asking for, in the words they used in conversation.
Say your difference as the candidate's win, not your feature. This is where I see a lot of franchisors go wrong, and you may have done it too. You find something real, then describe it from your side of the table. Proprietary software. Award-winning training. A proven model. That's most franchise marketing, and all of it is about your brand.
The candidate isn't asking what makes your brand special. They're asking, "What's in it for me?" That sounds like:
If your difference doesn't answer one of those questions, it isn't a difference yet. It's a feature.
You study candidates on purpose. You can't guess your way to the right words. You have to go get them, and keep going back for more.
Then write your difference in one sentence a candidate would say out loud. If it doesn't sound like something a candidate would say, rewrite it.
They hear whether your difference is real. Candidates read your brochure, and then they call your franchise owners, including owners who left the brand. I tell the buyers I work with to make those calls.
If your difference is real, your owners will describe it in their own words without a script. If it only lives in your sales deck, those calls will show the gap fast. "Better" doesn't survive those calls. Something specific does, like one of your owners saying, "We fix the thing that's broken." Owners can say a line like that without a script because they live it every day.
So pull up your last few candidate calls this week. Write down what candidates said they wanted, in their own words. Then put your brochure next to that list. If the two don't match, rewrite the brochure to fit the list.
About the author: Kelsey Stuart is a franchise consultant and the founder of Waypoint Franchise Advisors, at waypointfranchise.com. Before that, he founded Bloomin' Blinds in Dallas in 2014 and ran it as CEO for 11 years.
Disclosure: Kelsey is a friend of Revscale's founder, and the two are working toward a future business partnership.
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