A Guiding Hand: Coaches help Franchisees Make Better, Faster Decisions

Every two weeks, Caitlin Heidrick logs on to a video call with her business coach to review scorecards, staffing, and whatever challenges have surfaced since their last conversation. The meetings last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. For Heidrick, who operates three Drybar locations across three states, they’re a constant.

“I look forward to that call heading into it,” Heidrick says.

She uses the time to step back from the day-to-day and focus on the bigger picture, reviewing key performance metrics, setting priorities, and working through challenges with someone who can see the brand end to end. The goal is not just to keep operations on track, but to help her grow as an owner and leader.

“I always walk away from those meetings reinvigorated,” Heidrick says. “I always am very thankful and appreciative of her guidance.”

Heidrick’s experience reflects a common structure in franchising. She had a team to help her with all the details necessary to open her first location. Then, Drybar provided a coach, sometimes known as a franchise business consultant, field consultant, franchise business coach, or operations coach, to work with her over the long term.

A coach’s role can include everything from analyzing performance data to offering strategic guidance. But as several franchisees say, the value of the relationship can vary widely, depending as much on the operator’s attitude as the coach’s expertise.

Getting started

Before franchisees ever meet a long-term business coach, they typically work with a different kind of support team focused on opening a location. Heidrick says the process begins with specialists in marketing, training, and operations who usher new owners through site selection to hiring and opening day.

“You are guided along the way with what we call a new shop opening team that has support team members in every category to help you,” Heidrick says.

John and Eli Collier, who operate five HomeWell Care Services territories in the Nashville, Tennessee, area, had a similar experience. Before opening, they worked with coaches who helped map out timelines, ensuring nothing was missed in the rush to launch.

“They would say, ‘Okay, at this point, we need to be getting these things done. You need to be talking about getting insurance set up now. You need to be talking with a payroll vendor now. This is how long we’re seeing it take for licensing to come through in your state, so we can estimate about this much time,’” Eli Collier says. “It was making sure that we knew about everything that had to get done.”

While Eli and her husband have MBAs, they say the support significantly accelerated their timeline, especially as they navigated the challenges of opening during the Covid-19 pandemic. It also helped them see how the right coaching can directly affect the success of their enterprise.

“I think growth-wise it probably sped us up by more than a year,” John Collier says.

“Big rocks”

Once the doors are open, that support shifts. For the Colliers, the focus moved from checklists and timelines to ongoing problem-solving and performance. Instead of guiding a launch, their business coach became someone they could turn to with questions, challenges, and decisions as they built out their operation.

“They may not always have the answer, but they can point you to someone who does,” John Collier says.

For Heidrick, coaching conversations are less about solving immediate operational issues and more about stepping back from them. Her coach helps her focus on the “big rocks,” identifying priorities that can have the greatest impact across her business.

“It’s really helping you get that 50,000-foot view,” she says.

She adds that discipline is reinforced through her regular work with a coach, who helps her focus on what matters most and avoid getting overwhelmed by the data. Rather than chasing every metric, she prioritizes consistency, using regular check-ins and clear goals to drive performance over time.

“You can have the best process in place,” she says, “but if you’re not consistent with it, it doesn’t matter.”

Mike Davis, who owns 13 Elements Massage units in the Northwest, says that an outside perspective is often the most valuable part of the relationship. He says it can be easy for even experienced operators to become too close to their own business to see what’s working and what isn’t.

“A lot of times, you just have blinders on,” Davis says. “You think everything’s going well, or you don’t realize where you could be better.”

Coaching changes how operators make decisions over time, Davis says. Instead of looking for a quick answer, they begin to think more critically about the problem itself and how different solutions might play out across the business.

He’s found that the most helpful coaching is grounded in both data and direct observation. The franchisor provides specific benchmarking numbers so that Davis can compare his numbers with others in the system, but reviewing metrics tells only part of the story.

According to Davis, the Elements Massage coaching process has become more hands-on in recent years. It has shifted beyond reviewing reports to include more in-person observation, so coaches can see how operations are running and connect those insights back to the data.

“Just having numbers by themselves isn’t great, or just doing field visits isn’t great,” he says, “but when you combine the two, you’re going to learn things or find opportunities.”

Amanda Rainsberger, an Anytime Fitness franchisee with 14 locations in Michigan, has a team of coaches. In addition to working with her franchisor’s business coach, she also works with an external advisor from the American Franchise Academy and participates in a peer group, creating a broad support system around her business.

Rainsberger says there’s a difference between the brand systems provided by a franchisor and the internal business systems she needs to scale.

“They’re two separate things. Anytime Fitness is really good with their brand system. That’s how they’ve scaled all over the world,” she says. “But as a business owner, you’ve still got to have strong business systems and processes in place that work for you.”

For her, the value of coaching is in building those systems over time. Working with multiple coaches has helped her move beyond day-to-day operations and think more deliberately about structure, process, and long-term growth. Coaches have helped her develop a detailed set of dashboards that track everything from marketing and sales to staffing and financials, reviewing results daily, weekly, and monthly.

“You’re not figuring out things by yourself,” Rainsberger says. “With a coach, you’re making better decisions faster.”

At scale

When Rainsberger decided to expand her Anytime Fitness portfolio, she realized growth didn’t just mean adding locations; it meant learning how to run the business in a new way. She says early success comes down to effort.

“When you have one to three locations, you’re an operator,” she says. “As you scale, you have to become a leader. Your whole skill set changes.”

That shift, she says, isn’t always obvious at first. Systems that worked at a smaller scale can become limiting, and decisions that once felt straightforward require more structure. What started as a handful of key metrics grew into multiple layers of reporting, each tied to a different part of the operation. She has built detailed processes and developed new ways to manage people, performance, and growth. Coaching has helped her focus on the ways metrics interact with each other: how staffing affects sales, how marketing drives traffic, and how decisions in one part of the business ripple across others.

“You get to a point where you’re tracking things at a much deeper level,” she says. “It’s kind of like going from beginner to Jedi level.”

Davis says much of his early expansion was driven by his own experience. He added locations as opportunities came along. As his business grew, he says, the challenge shifted from opening new units to maintaining consistency across them, something that required more structure over time.

But with the growth, he says, the impact of coaching shifted. It wasn’t just about what he learned, but how well those ideas could be carried out across locations. Coaches don’t need to visit every location. Davis says insights from one store can be applied across others, so managers are responsible for implementing changes system-wide.

“I have a very aggressive management team. They pride themselves on being the very best,” he says. “They learned that coaching can make us even better. That’s part of the culture now.”

For the Colliers’ business, scaling introduced a different kind of challenge: staffing. As they expanded into new territories, they found it difficult to bring employees together for consistent training, especially when teams were spread across locations and reluctant to travel. While new employees didn’t mind driving 10 or 15 miles to meet with a client, they didn’t like the idea of driving 60 miles for orientation. The Colliers took the problem to their coach.

“It became almost a brainstorming session,” John Collier says. “He connected us with others who had similar kinds of territories. He might say, ‘This owner in state X is doing really well with multiple territories. Talk to him about how he handles it.’”

Eli Collier says franchise coaching isn’t about getting a single answer from a single person. It’s about having access to multiple perspectives and knowing how to use them.

“It’s not just about having the answer,” she says. “It’s about understanding how to get to the answer.”

To solve their training issue, they scrapped the idea of centralized staff orientation meetings. Instead, they put a manager in charge of training and tasked them with finding temporary locations.

“We talked with operators at the FBC’s suggestion,” John Collier says. “They were using these off-site orientations. They were using spaces that were more geographically friendly. That was very helpful.”

Attitude, attitude, attitude

For some franchisees, the value of coaching is obvious. For others, it’s less clear. Despite the structure and support available, not every operator leans into the relationship the same way, and not every coach delivers the same impact.

The Colliers fall firmly in the first camp. For them, the idea of ignoring that support doesn’t add up.

“I don’t understand why you wouldn’t take advantage of it,” John Collier says.

“You’re spending thousands of dollars to be part of a franchise system. Why wouldn’t you listen to them? It makes no sense to me,” Eli Collier adds.

She says small changes can scale across multiple locations. Rather than relying on instinct alone, they take full advantage of their coach’s expertise to test ideas, refine decisions, and apply what works more consistently across the business.

John Collier adds, “I think it helped because it made us willing to ask questions. I’d say we’re both very proud of what we’ve done, but I don’t think we necessarily have any ego about thinking we know more than we do.”

Davis says he’s happy for any advice that improves efficiency and profitability, but not every operator is eager to be coached, especially early on. Some believe they already have the answers or assume they can figure things out on their own.

Over time, he says, that perspective tends to shift. As the business grows and challenges become more complex, it’s easier to see where an outside perspective can help and where small changes can make a bigger difference than expected.

“We’ve consistently seen growth in our membership and growth in our sales across all the locations,” he says.

Rainsberger says the difference often comes down to how actively a franchisee engages with the process. In her experience, coaching doesn’t automatically improve operations; it requires effort on both sides.

“You have to ask for what you need,” she says. “It’s not like they’re going to chase you down.”

For operators who actively embrace coaching and apply its lessons, the relationship tends to be more productive. For those who don’t, opportunities can be easy to overlook.

“I feel very strongly about using the resources that are available,” Rainsberger says.

Key Takeaways

• Coaching shifts from start-up support to long-term growth. Franchisees first work with opening teams to launch locations and then transition to ongoing relationships with business coaches focused on performance and development.
• The value of coaching depends on the franchisee. Operators who actively engage, ask questions, and apply feedback tend to get far more out of the relationship than those who take a passive approach.
• Coaches help franchisees focus on the “big rocks.” Rather than chasing every metric, coaching encourages prioritization of the few actions that drive the greatest impact across the business.
• Data and real-world observation work together. Benchmarking and dashboards provide insight, but in-person visits and operational context help coaches connect numbers to actual performance.
• Coaching accelerates early growth. Structured guidance during the start-up phase can shorten timelines, helping franchisees avoid delays and ramp up operations more quickly.
• External perspective reduces blind spots. Coaches provide an outside view that helps franchisees identify weaknesses and opportunities they may not see within their own operations.
• Peer connections extend the value of coaching. Coaches often connect franchisees with others in the system, turning individual challenges into shared learning opportunities.
• Scaling requires a shift from operator to leader. As franchisees grow, coaching helps them transition from hands-on management to building systems, processes, and teams.
• Systems become more complex at scale. Growth introduces deeper layers of reporting, staffing, and decision-making, requiring more structured processes and disciplined execution.
• Coaching builds better decision-making over time. The long-term benefit is not just solving individual problems, but helping franchisees develop a repeatable way of thinking through challenges.

Perspective and Performance

Mentoring and coaching may look similar on the surface, but they serve different purposes. A mentor usually draws on personal experience to help someone grow over time. The relationship is often informal and built around trust, perspective, and advice. A mentor says, in effect, “Here’s what I’ve learned, and here’s what I’d want you to know.” The focus is broader, often centered on career development, confidence, leadership, and long-term judgment.

Coaching is typically more structured and immediate. A coach helps someone improve performance, solve problems, and reach specific goals. The relationship is less about sharing wisdom from a lifetime of experience and more about helping the other person think clearly, stay accountable, and make better decisions. A coach may ask more questions than they answer. Instead of saying, “Here’s what I would do,” a coach is more likely to say, “What are you trying to achieve, and what is getting in the way?”

In franchising, a mentor may help an owner grow into leadership and navigate the emotional side of expansion. A coach may help that same owner review scorecards, improve staffing, or identify the KPIs that most affect results. One relationship is often developmental, the other operational.

Both can be valuable. Mentoring helps shape the person. Coaching helps sharpen the performance. At their best, they work together, giving franchisees both perspective and practical support.

The Right Coach

Franchise business coaches (FBC), also known as franchise business consultants and field consultants, are excellent resources provided to franchisees by many brands. Franchisees who use them say they have made a huge difference in their business success. But what if your brand doesn’t offer the service? Well, you can look outside for business coaches, and there are many qualified experts available to help you. Independent coaches can help you both inside and outside of your business.

A franchise business coach works inside a franchise system and often comes equipped with:

• Deep brand knowledge. They know the model, systems, benchmarks, and what works across the network.
• Proven playbook. FBCs can quickly point to best practices and replicate success.
• Data and benchmarking. They have access to system-wide metrics and can show how you stack up.
• Aligned incentives. Their goal is to help you succeed within the system.
• Operational focus. FBCs are strong on execution, compliance, and unit-level performance.

An independent business coach is an external advisor hired by the business owner. They bring:

• Objective, outside perspectives. They work for you, not the franchisor.
• Strategic thinking. External coaches can challenge assumptions, models, and growth direction.
• Cross-industry insights. They bring ideas from outside your brand or even franchising.
• Highly customized. Advice is tailored to your goals, portfolio, and leadership style.