When hearing FranConnect for the first time you might be excused for wondering who Fran is. Well, this 'Fran' is 'franchise', and as the name suggests, FranConnect helps you connect franchisers and franchisees ensuring great outcomes for both. It's a SaaS product that manages the agreement across sales, operations, and processing, from selling new franchises to helping them operate, ensure compliance, and collect royalties.

iTWire had the opportunity to speak with FranConnect chief product officer Jaffrey Ali who explained selling a franchise is one thing, but opening is another entirely. And here's where FranConnect proves its worth by aiding both sides to manage the franchise agreement and delivering a plethora of tools and expertise to ensure that franchises are best placed for success. It's why, Ali explains, despite having under 30% of the US franchise market, over 50% of all new franchise openings were performed with FranConnect.

Jaffrey Ali has worked in the B2B space for 20 years and FranConnect for the last six. He heads the overall product strategy, including mergers and acquisitions, integrations, and responsibility for the platform itself. He leads a multi-national team with product specialists across the United States, Australia, and India.

Ali is ever conscious that FranConnect serves a specific industry vertical, and while the SaaS product equally serves multi-local businesses in addition to franchises, he must keep a watchful eye on what's driving the industry worldwide. While FranConnect has been serving the industry for two decades, it's "gone through multiple iterations," he explained.

"We have to anticipate where the market is going to go, what keeps the brands awake at night, how to sell units," Ali said. But one thing FranConnect has "done really well," he said, is to sell multi-location agreements. "Sales is different in franchises to other businesses. Instead of doing one-off sales, one location at a time, a multi-location agreement is a win/win that's brought in bigger enterprises."

Today, out of all sales performed using FranConnect, half are for multiple units. FranConnect anticipated this and built their platform with this capability early on.

And, while AI might seem to be the term of the day, popularised in the public eye by large language models, FranConnect also leveraged AI early in its history. "We worked with partners and made Sales Accelerator," Ali said. "It's a conversational AI chatbot that sets up the right appointment at the right time with a lead."

Now, a wealth of tools exists online; perhaps you could manage your franchise agreements through popular options such as HubSpot, Monday.com, or Asana. Yet, Ali explained, "the ultimate goal of franchise development is not to sell a unit, but to open" and there is no shortage of examples in history where a franchise sells but struggles to open due to a gulf in the data between their systems. "It's not that we have more sales tools or features than HubSpot, or that our project management has more capabilities than Asana or Monday, but the combination of these capabilities in FranConnect means we have more success with the franchise development process."

"Normal sales tools aren't designed for this use case," he said. "A sales tool only fills in the funnel. In FranConnect all customer and owner data is in our platform, and FranConnect can ensure compliance, and can identify who your best franchisees were to sell new units, and can support use cases and outcomes not possible with point solutions."

"This capability comes only from a platform-based approach."

Another example; let's say a new franchisee says they don't know how to set up the point of sale (POS) system. "I can assign training as a part of the franchisee tasks," Ali said. "Every time in the future, as I know some owners have problems with setting up the POS, I can assign mandatory training to the task. This ends up with an outcome where I can open units faster by eliminating friction."

"The FranConnect platform seamlessly ties together. There's no need to call your system integrator or IT department. It just works," he said.

Asking where he draws inspiration from yields an insightful answer into what Jaffrey Ali admires and values, and why he shapes FranConnect how he does. "It's easy to name the big guys like Microsoft or Google," he said. "But I admire Nvidia for solving hard problems. In the hardware business, they differentiated by implementing in software in a way that allowed them to dominate the chip industry."

A second example, "I have a lot of respect for Anthropic. When ChatGPT came out, people thought 'this game is over, OpenAI is going to run away with it' but Anthropic came in and raised the bar. They took longer to make sure their product was safe, and validated, and took a more deliberate approach, but they made OpenAI go back to the table. They did it through sheer hard work. They didn't just make AI a business winner, but came out with a better product."

"I respect companies solving hard problems in creative ways," Ali said.

Even so, iTWire questioned how Ali can ensure FranConnect applies to all the various sizes and shapes that franchise and multi-location businesses come in. Can one platform really serve them all?

The answer is yes; "FranConnect serves all the different types of franchise brands. Our customer base reflects the industry at large. 30% are restaurants, 5% are personal services, and so on," he said.

"The reason we could do this is because while each concept is unique - and we have extensions that only apply to certain verticals - there are some unique things that apply to all franchises. Just what you prioritise is different at different times."

"All franchising is about the agreement. What you are selling or marketing is an agreement. Whether it's a physical location, a territory, or a man in a van, it is an agreement that's signed with an individual or a corporation or an entity, and has a compliance and regulatory aspect," Ali explained.

"The foundation of the core components is the same. A brand sells an agreement, and the franchisee operates one or more locations on behalf of the brand, and is bound by certain agreements."

"Some brands may not need all the advanced capabilities that a large brand needs, and use a small portion of the product," Ali said. "But fundamentally they are similar more than they are dissimilar."

"We can serve from the really small to the large. A lot of customers started small and grew into household brands. A significant number started when they were small and grew. And a key to our growth is making sure you grow," he said.

Thus, when's the best time for a franchise owner to speak with FranConnect? "You're never too small to start, and never too large to outgrow," Ali said.