Clarity Is King: Unit-Level Data Points the Way to Profitability

A busy store and a profitable one can look identical from the outside: same traffic, same staff, same hours. The difference usually lies in the numbers and whether someone is paying attention to the right ones.

Unit-level economics has always been at the center of franchising. Labor, inventory, marketing, and pricing all show up on each location’s profit-and-loss statement.

What’s changed is visibility. Today’s POS systems, loyalty platforms, and back-of-house tools generate more data than any previous generation of operators experienced. Access isn’t the problem anymore. Clarity is.

In a world of rising labor costs, tighter margins, and more demanding customers, the operators who succeed are the ones who know what matters. They build systems around the right metrics and act early before small issues turn into costly problems.

Know your P&L

Jeff Flannery spent years in procurement, supply-chain recruiting, and corporate strategy before becoming a Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa franchisee in 2019. He knew how to read a business.

“I thought I did,” he says of his early confidence in reading his own financials. “I kept finding stuff.”

Since then, Flannery has grown to 17 spas across three states. Along the way, he discovered how much complexity hides inside a membership model. Revenue may be steady, but line-item costs, like points redemptions, comps, charge-backs, and front-desk labor, can quietly chip away at profitability.

The challenge isn’t a lack of data. If anything,it’sthe opposite. His franchisor generates large amounts of information on member activity, service utilization, sales, and conversion rates.

“It’s like baseball,” Flannery says. “They count everything.”

The real work is deciding what matters and what to do with it.

“Our membership model has a lot of hidden costs that people aren’t aware of,” he says. “Make sure you really understand your P&L. And if youdon’t, talk to a franchisee who does.”

The lesson isn’t unique to the spa industry. Every single day, no matter how busy things get, Anytime Fitness multi-unit franchisee Amanda Rainsberger’s eyes are on sales.

With 14 Michigan locations and eight under development, Rainsberger tracks every revenue stream, including memberships, training, nutrition, recovery, vending, and retail, before anything else.

“I want to see we’re moving the needle,” she says.

Rainsberger organizes her business around four pillars: high-margin recurring revenue, labor cost control, strong four-wall EBITDA, and attrition and lifetime member value. As her portfolio has grown, her lens has sharpened.

“Early on, I was looking at revenue,” Rainsberger says. “Now, I’m looking at revenue quality, EBITDA per square foot, return on invested capital per unit, and really getting into the details. Every location is different, so youhave todig deep into each one and then translate those insights into operational changes your leaders can execute at the unit level.”

She also focuses on net figures rather than gross.

“A lot of franchisees make that mistake,” Rainsberger says. “If your cancels, delinquencies, and nonpays are high, your sales numbers are irrelevant.”

Customer satisfaction gets the same daily attention. Each day, Rainsberger monitors Medallia, the experience management platform her brand uses. She scans for patterns in friendliness, cleanliness, speed of service, and operational execution before they become bigger problems. She also tracks lead-response times and recently shifted the entire operation from monthly to daily KPI tracking.

“If we can put out a fire on day five instead of day thirty, that’s a whole month saved,” Rainsberger says.

Visibility

Knowing your costs is one challenge. Seeing them clearly across multiple locations is another.

After acquiring his first two spas, Flannery knew he needed more infrastructure to scale. He hired a software developer and began building a custom tracking tool inside Smartsheet, a cloud-based work management and automation platform that now serves as a real-time operating layer for the business.

“I joke now that I know more about what’s going on at my spas in a different state than I ever did from the spot that was 15 miles from my house,” Flannery says, “because I created so many processes and made a lot of the invisible things visible from an operational metrics standpoint.”

The system tracks more than financials. Customer complaints, response times, and employee requests are now measurable.

“I don’t know many places that have the visibility about how many customers have called in to ask about their membership or cancel,” Flannery says. “I can give you not only the metrics of how many of those things happen and complaints, but also how long it takes on average for my managers to respond.”

Front-desk labor, for instance, emerged as a major profit leak. Without clear tracking, managers sometimes overstaffed to avoid scheduling headaches.It’s a small decision that compounded into significant cost. One manager defaulted to scheduling two openers and two closers when the operation needed one of each.

“You can really blow all your profit by overstaffing the front desk,” Flannery says. Once those hours were visible against budgets, the behavior changed.

The same pattern played out with giveaways and charge-backs. By tracking them as a percentage of revenue, publishing weekly rankings, and tying performance to bonuses, Flannery reduced those costs dramatically.

“We went from that being like 2.5% of our revenue to 1%,” he says.

The shift, emphasizes Flannery, wasn’t about stricter enforcement; it was giving managers the information they needed to see where they stood, compare themselves to peers, and adjust accordingly.

Since building out the system, Flannery’s company, Purple Eagle, has scaled from $1 million to $25 million in revenue with plans to reach $100 million with 50 locations.

Brand first

Behind every well-run franchise portfolio is a franchisor paying close attention to the same numbers. The brand sets the baseline, and the strength of that foundation can impact everything that follows.

Cesar Coronado Jr. and his business partner, Marlon Sullivan, own 17 Tropical Smoothie Cafe locations across Chicago and South Carolina. For them, unit-level profitability is essential.

“Franchisors absolutely have to be obsessed at the unit level because that’s where the scale comes from,” Coronado says. “As you build a portfolio, you want a franchisor that is focused on making sure every location is profitable.”

For Coronado, that means partnering with a franchisor that helps protect margins through smart menu engineering, negotiates equipment and vendor contracts, and provides back-of-house systems his team can build on.

Rainsberger’s franchisor, Purpose Brands, gives her a CRM-based KPI dashboard, monthly Fab 5 reports, and access to the ABC billing system. She layers her own dashboards on top, monitoring marketing, staffing, financials, lease obligations, and facility performance. When Rainsberger needs something more specific, she reaches out to her franchise business coach directly. Read more about franchise business coaches on page 134.

The franchise disclosure document, she adds, is an often overlooked source of important data.

“It’s opportunity central if you want to grow or scale,” Rainsberger says. “You can also use it to plan ahead for things like fee increases.”

Forecasting demand

For some operators, the next evolution of analytics isn’t just understanding what happened; it’s seeing around corners.

In Coronado’s Tropical Smoothie business, managing sales variability often starts with the weather. A cold week can slow traffic. A warm Saturday can drive a rush. Minding the margins starts with being relentless about what Coronado calls prime costs, the two largest controllable expenses in the business.

“We focus on inventory and labor pretty aggressively,” Coronado explains. “We’ve done a pretty good job at managing that, and that’s facilitated our growth.”

Coronado’s back-of-house system, Synergy Suite, integrates real-time forecasts directly into sales projections, allowing his team to adjust labor and inventory before demand hits.

“What I found—probably the most useful case of it all—has been the integration of predictive analytics,” Coronado says. “Being able to put in all these variables from weather to pricing to economic uncertainty, consumer price index—how does that all correlate?—and not having to do that manually.”

On a recent Saturday, when temperatures in Chicago climbed to 78 degrees after weeks in the 50s, the system flagged the forecast and projected a 15% sales bump. Teams staffed up, and actual results came in closer to 22%.

“The conversation quickly shifted to ‘our labor budget has increased by this much, so let’s staffa littleheavier,’” Coronado says. “And that’s exactly what we did. We were able to capitalize on it and maintain that quality guest experience while dealing with that increased volume.”

Beyond staffing, Coronado uses a separate layer of data to give his general managers a clearer picture of what’s moving across the counter. Menu mix and sales mix analyses pulled directly from his POS system show which items are driving volume. The information feeds directly into inventory management.

“That allows us to communicate to our GMs and empower them to fully understand what it is that we’re selling,” Coronado says, “which then empowers them to fully own inventory management.”

Even with sophisticated tech tools, Coronado keeps coming back to the same principle. “The basics are pretty timeless,” he says. “You’ve got to get the basics right.”

Playbook

Spotting a problem in the data is only step one. What separates strong operators from the rest is what happens next.

Flannery relies on a structured playbook, a defined set of diagnostic questions managers work through when a number moves. When sales associate costs spike, the response isn’t guesswork. Is the location overthe budgetedhours? If not, are pay rates too high? The questions, he explains, follow a sequence until the cause is identified and the right intervention becomes clear.

“Know what the biggest levers are and then use the data at your fingertips to create a process to systemically evaluate those numbers and benchmark them,” Flannery says. “Maybe it’s training, maybe it’s coaching, maybe it’sdiscipline. This is how I do it.”

He applies the same thinking to revenue. With roughly two-thirds of his revenue already locked in through memberships, remaining targets are broken into daily levers: gift cards, enrollment fees, additional services, and product sales.

“For the manager to make a budget, that can seem like a scary, big number,” Flannery says. “But a big portion of it is already baked in.”

By breaking the remaining revenue into everyday targets and clearly defining how to hit them, managers gain both focus and control.

Rainsberger takes the same approach across her portfolio. Each month, she picks a handful of priority KPIs, and when a location needs closer attention, that list gets shorter. Earlier this year, two clubs were showing soft appointment show rates. Members were booking consultations and not showing up. Because she was tracking daily, she caught it within days and sent in a senior manager to retrain the staff.

“Every KPI tells a story,” Rainsberger adds. “You can dive deeper into any of them and find or fix an opportunity.”

For locations she acquires, pricing is usually where she starts, updating the rate structure to reflect what the club actually offers before turning attention to attrition, overall satisfaction, and labor costs. She also recommends franchisees benchmark against reality rather than aspiration.

“Look at the median in the FDD, not the top or bottom,” she says. “Most operators fall in the middle, and that’s the most realistic benchmark.”

Revenue and marketing

Nowhere is the impact of data and analytics more immediate than in marketing.

Flannery’s new prospect count in 2025 grew 23% through two structural investments: a CRM system integrated live with his marketing partner’s lead flow and an outbound call center that follows up on prospects with speed and consistency.

“That’s not the secret sauce,” he says of the Facebook advertising itself. The integration and the follow-up discipline are what made the difference.

“Because I have all this data, I can tell you down to the penny how much it costs me for a prospect from marketing. I could never get that before,” he says, adding that cost per lead, cost per prospect, conversion rate, and cancel rate are tracked in Smartsheet and visible in real time.

When his cost per lead climbs, Flannery goes straight to his marketing partner with specific questions: Is this a creative issue unique to his locations or a macro shift?

“If it’s just me, then I’ve got a creative issue,” he says. “What are we going to do—different content, different promotion, AB testing—to get that cost per lead back down?”

Rainsberger pulls spend from locations with staffing problems or operational warning signs rather than directing money into clubs that aren’t positioned to convert and retain.

“If a location has a staffing issue or a pattern emerging, we’ll pull back marketing spend until the operational issue is fixed,” she says.

The underlying principle that marketing amplifieswhat’sworking, not whatisn’t, runs through every allocation decision Rainsberger makes.

“Most people focus only on lead generation,” she adds, “but if your attrition is bad,you’rejust selling to replace losses. We focus on maximizing the value of the members we already have.”

Coronado found his most recent revenue opportunity not in marketing but in a granular read of hourly sales patterns across his two markets. He noticed his Chicago stores had relatively even traffic throughout the day while his South Carolina units spiked at lunch and dinner with a softer breakfast window.

He treated the gap as an opening, recently launching a morning happy hour ($5 smoothies from 7 to 9 a.m., Monday through Friday) across South Carolina.

“That whole opportunity came out of us going in and looking at the analytics and saying, ‘This is an opportunity for us,’” Coronado says.

Training the team

Even the best data is useless if people don’t know what to do with it.

Coronado and Sullivan came into franchising as self-described “spreadsheet guys,” so they were fluent in financial logic in ways their field teams were not. Bridging that gap became one of the franchise partners’ most important early lessons.

“Our folks that are out there working in the field every single day, they don’t appreciate spreadsheets, not how we do,” Coronado says.

The goal is to teach team members what the numbers are saying and how to respond. General managers are expected to operate as leaders of profit centers with accountability for sales, labor, inventory, and execution. Incentives reinforce that ownership through bonuses and advancement opportunities.

“We have general managers who have been with us for five years,” Coronado says. “We have a core group in Chicago of self-promoters, people who have grown within the ranks, because we communicate that there’s upward mobility. We’re big on being a meritocracy.”

Rainsberger emphasizes consistent communication and narrowing the focus when intervention is needed.

“We communicate KPIs constantly: daily, weekly, monthly,” she says. “If a location needs action, we narrow the focus to two or three KPIs and coach the actions that create change.”

The new layer

Attention is shifting to parts of the P&L that many franchisees still don’t fully treat as controllable, and new tools are beginning to change that.

For Coronado, the frontier is employee turnover and facility maintenance, which are costs that quietly compound in ways operators may underestimate.

“A big hidden expense that we’re starting to really dive in on is turnover,” Coronado says. “Employee turnover directly influences labor. It unfocuses your managers or your trainers because they have to be onboarding. It’s just a big hidden expense.”

He’salso experimenting with AI to analyze POS data faster, surfacing outliers and flagging issues without hours of manual work.

Flannery sees the same potential but has a caveat.

“AI is the smartest personal assistant and also the stupidest personal assistant,” he says. “You have to triple-check their work.”

Once the right processes are in place, though, he says the efficiency gains are real. His broader advice: Document your processes and automate the number crunching to spend more time analyzing rather than assembling reports.

Scale changes the job

Growth changes the nature of the business at every stage. More units bring more complexity, more overhead, and more people to manage. Coronado sees that as a challenge and an opportunity.

“If you care about people development, which you absolutely need to in this business because it’s a people business,” he says, “this business will be very rewarding not just financially, but also spiritually and emotionally.”

Flannery says maximizing unit-level economics will always be a worthwhile but moving target. “We fail every day,” he says. “I wish we did this perfect every day. We don’t. We keepfalling downand picking ourselves up.”

For Rainsberger, the metrics that matter keep evolving as she scales, and each location demands its own level of attention.

“What you track at one location is not what you track at fourteen,” Rainsberger says. “Every unit has its own personality, so youhave tobe willing to dig deep, adjust, and communicate changes clearly to your leaders. Data is only useful if you actually act on it.”

Key Takeaways

• Busydoesn’tequalprofitable. The difference shows up in the numbers and whether you’re tracking the right ones.
• Data isn’t the problem; clarity is. Operators have more data than ever. Winners know which metrics matter and act on them early.
• Know your P&L at a granular level. Hidden costs from labor to charge-backs can quietly erode margins if you’re not paying attention.
• Track daily, not monthly. The faster you spot issues, the faster you fix them and the more profit you protect.
• Make the invisible visible. Systems that track real-time performance across units expose costly habits and drive better decisions.
• Focus on controllable costs. Labor and inventory remain the biggest levers, so manage them aggressively.
• Turn data into action. Strong operators use playbooks to diagnose problems and execute consistent solutions.
• Marketing amplifies operations. Don’t pour fuel on a broken system; fix operations before increasing spend.
• Train teams to think like owners. Data only works if managers understand it and act on it.
• Scale changes everything. As portfolios grow, complexity increases and so does the need for sharper metrics and stronger leadership.