Where Do You Focus?

In the last 12m, the average franchise location grew 5.6%.

Sounds healthy.

But when you look under the hood, performance ranges from -26% decline to nearly 100% growth.

So the real question for coaching teams is:

Where do you focus?

📊 The Distribution Behind the Average

Across most franchise networks, performance isn’t uniform. It’s a distribution of outcomes.

Some locations are declining sharply. Some are slightly below flat. Most sit somewhere in the middle. A few are significantly outperforming.

Which creates a strategic decision for coaching teams.

Do you focus on stabilizing the struggling locations, the small handful of operators declining 20–26% year over year?
Do you focus on the slightly declining operators, often sitting around -5% growth, where small improvements might quickly return them to positive territory?
Do you focus on the middle of the network, the largest group of locations growing roughly 0–12%, where even modest gains could move the entire system?
Or do you focus on learning from top performers, the operators growing 12.6% to nearly 40%, and spreading those practices across the brand?

Most systems ultimately end up doing some combination of all four.

Coaching capacity is limited. Field teams only have so many visits, calls, and conversations they can have each quarter.

Which makes coaching, in many ways, a resource allocation problem.

When performance varies this widely across a network, the most important question often isn’t just what to improve.

It’s where to begin.

When the average location is growing 5–6%, it’s easy to assume the network is healthy.

But averages hide the real picture.

Behind that number is a wide spread of outcomes, with some locations struggling, many sitting in the middle, and a few significantly outperforming.

The real challenge for coaching teams is deciding where to concentrate their time and attention.

Because when performance spreads this widely across a system, improvement rarely comes from trying to coach everything.

It comes from choosing where coaching will matter most.

Written by: John Corretti, VP of Client Success at Harmonyze