🔢 The Magic Number

I'm the CEO of a franchise system and I found myself still logging in to manually adjust payroll. Still personally chasing QuickBooks disconnects. Still doing bill pay approvals myself. Basically doing these $10/hr tasks myself.

I know better. I did the exact same thing at my LA location 13 years ago when I held on to these menial tasks for way too long. Apparently I'm doing it all over again (some lessons take a while).

So this week I finally onboarded a Fractional CFO. But the more interesting part was having to explain the business model to her — because it forced me to get clear on the ONE number I actually care about.

I break down the #1 North Star metric I discovered in this week's DoF vlog, check it out below.

In this week’s DoF, I mostly talk about how helpful it is to have someone who can push me on what are the important metrics I want to know. On our journey to 100 locations, a first big milestone is 50, because that’s often where franchise systems break even. To hear some of the metrics we are looking at together now, go to 3:23.

At 4:41 I talk about one of the pieces of the puzzle that will get us to 50, which is a Franchise Advisory Council. Here our senior and most successful franchisees can tell me whether what I am working on is actually helpful to what they are doing day-to-day.

As part of the current goal of $75k/month for this franchisee, getting to $15k/week is an important milestone. What’s helpful for the rest of the system when they see these numbers is understanding this success has come from consistently doing the fundamentals, not anything secret or groundbreaking.

Just a fun photo this week from one of our franchisees packing up goody bags for a promotional event.

As always, cats want to be in the middle of the action, but not necessarily doing anything.