From Signal to Action: Dean Hartley on How Modern Teams Turn Insight into Results

Dean. For those who don't know, Dean is the brand president of Five Star Bath Solutions. And pretty interestingly, Dean, you're also the biggest franchisee or one of the largest franchisees in the system, and I know that's pretty unique.

Folks are typically one or the other, you're both at the same time. Dean, I know I've told you this in the past, but you have been very much a mentor to me in the home services space. I feel like I've gotten a crash course over the last 12 plus months working alongside you.

A big thank you to that. Super excited to have you here with us and talking to us about, the way you think about coaching and AI and other things.

Well thanks for having me on today, Gary. I appreciate that nice warm intro. And yes, I have had the luxury, I guess you'd say of both running a brand and running a business, in this space. So it's been a nice journey.

So maybe that's a great place to start, right? You were the brand president and you took over, I believe one of the largest territories at, Five Star Bath Solutions and have been running it ever since. So, when you dove into that and you became the largest franchisee, what were some of those initial learnings for you as an operator?

Yeah, when we started, we started in 2014 and I became the brand president after being in the manufacturing space of the actual products we use today. And, we actually had a franchisee fail in 2015. And that, I didn't, I didn't like that. That's what prompted me in early 2017 to say if I can't

run one of these locations here using all of the playbooks and systems that we are teaching people, then I really don't deserve to be teaching people. So, what started as a small hobby, we call it the lemonade stand back in 2017. As we saw that, hey, these systems really work and Michigan happens to be a pretty good market.

It's large enough to have a large business in it. So we just continued growing it. And it started off at $400,000 in one year, went to a million, went to two, went to three, went to six, went to 10, went to 12, went to 18. It's been quite the journey.

So you guys have had a pretty incredible few years of growth, and I know you started at 14, 15 and have had a pretty phenomenal few years. Walk me through a new franchisee. Now that you were an operator, you're a franchisee. What are the things that you wish every new owner knows, or the patterns you think, you wish they'd recognize pretty quickly?

That every business comes down to a math equation. And the one thing we've done a very good job of here and something that I would implore every franchisor or business owner is understand the math of the business. There's, there's the operational, the task part, the procedural part of any business that needs to be done.

Obviously we have to install bathrooms, right? But from a financial and a sales specifically perspective, you have to have a handle on KPIs. You have to have a handle on COGS, you have to have a handle on profit. And, it comes down to simple math of you know, revenue minus COGS minus overhead.

Where the KPIs come into play is really in the marketing. And, the more insight, the more data, the more you can quantify the path from marketing spend to lead to whatever has to happen in your business to become a sale. The more you control that marketing spend, and then you're able to put a growth path together based on, those known numbers.

We've talked about this also, right? You said that there's two equations, right? The first was, figuring out everything that goes into that marketing input and then all of the operations afterwards. And like you just said, all those KPIs they're in. So my question for you is, why do different operators interpret those KPIs differently?

Right, tremendous amount of effort by home services brands is in making sure that people understand that and hammering it continuously. But why is that there that variability amongst operators?

Probably because of the access to the data in the first place. Most home service companies and even I see this in the franchising space, I do not have a ridiculous control over their data. They might have some control, certainly CRMs come with basic reporting tools and things like that.

But I do still see way too many spreadsheets. Over the last few years, I've come to the conclusion that I hate spreadsheets because anything necessary to go into a spreadsheet, probably is something that needs to be more. To be a true operator in a home service business, you need to have constant, trusted data

all the time. And, once you have a handle and understand the math of the data, it becomes a lot easier to be confident in the decision making process. If you're consuming all of your time trying to build a spreadsheet that quite honestly can get so complicated that you forget the input you even started with.

And you have to do that over and over and over again, it's an organizational nightmare. When you have access to data, in a more dashboard format, something that gives you the true insights you need into your business, you can make more educated decisions. So whether or not that's on a financial side

of just keeping proper books. I mean, if I could go back in time to 2014 or 15, I probably would've stressed the importance of yearly planning, quarterly visions. We've created calculators now so that you can input top line, input marketing, and kind of project profit, then use P&L to make sure that your assumptions were correct.

But, the thing that drives that is sales. Production does not drive these types of businesses. Sales drives these types of businesses, and on a production side, of course, KPIs are important. Service call rates or customer reviews, things like that. Those are important, but there's a built in

mechanism for knowing when you're doing something wrong on a production side called the customer. They will call you and tell you that you did something wrong. You fix it, you try not to do it again. On the front end of a business like this, when you're talking about marketing and sales, you lose the customer feedback.

In that case is not closing the customer, not setting that appointment, not turning that marketing dollar into an opportunity or a sale. The only way you have insight on that is through proper KPIs that follow whatever your sales system is.

In our case, it's a lead to an appointment, to hand it to a salesperson, to a close. So those four parts of the cycle need to have data points that I can look at every day to see if we are moving in the right direction. Otherwise, you're throwing dice at the craps table and hoping that

it comes out alright. We wanna engineer growth in sales, not make it guesswork.

Got it. So that's perfect. It's a perfect thing, it's what I want to talk about next, which is around you as the engineer. And I think I've talked to several people at Five Star, and in your organization more broadly, that have talked about you as something of a secret weapon for Five Star Bath Solutions. We have Dean and I think there's two parts to that, right? The first is what you just talked about, which is getting all the data. You've been able to identify what is all the data we need to be capturing, going farther back, and you kind of talked about the P&L ideally and kind of everything in those KPIs through the sales funnel, because you need data in the absence of any customer feedback, right?

Which is just the nature of. Almost any home services business. So kind of the flip side of that is your ability to interpret all that data. And that's something a lot of folks have told me, is like well, Dean has the ability to understand what these KPIs are and almost intuitively dive into them. Spreadsheets or not and then coach the franchisees. So like as in that knowledge base or that kind of your understanding of how to interpret these KPIs, how have you historically captured that know-how and tried to bring it out to the rest of the franchisees?

Well, the first thing as a franchisor or any operator, even a franchisee. If you're not being told this by the franchisor, then you're gonna have to come up with on your own if you want a successful business. But anyone in a space that has a sales cycle like this of marketing leads to a sale, it's not people walking into your restaurant.

That's a different, that would be a different model. The first thing I would do is, and what we did over years was first learn what is the actual process. What are the points of contact? What is the direct pathway from putting out a piece of marketing and then, watching that lead that is created by it, turn into revenue.

When you first see what those points are, where can you make a difference? Then what you need to monitor. And it's probably going to be a closing rate. It's going to be an appointment set rate, or it might be a sales rate on a phone. It might be a cancellation rate of appointments, which we would call an issued rate in our, industry.

But there are touch points in every business that go from lead to eventual sale. Once the pathway, now create something to see it every day. And a spreadsheet's not going to do that, it's just as simple as that. You will get bogged down and typing numbers into little cells, instead of running a business and making actual decisions.

So, we did have to create some of these dashboards ourself. But quite honestly, it would've been a heck of a lot easier to just have Harmonyze do it for me because there's so much data, especially in a franchise situation where you have 40, 50, a hundred, or maybe 200 locations. Now you can spend your time

from an operations standpoint, just making sure people are pushing the right buttons. And connect that CRM to say Harmonyze, that can translate the data based on what the franchisor says is the pathway. You do have to find that pathway first. Then it becomes synthesizing the correct data.

As you find that pathway, now you start altering your playbooks. Your operations manual, your systems. Because your system should always be optimized to increase those numbers, those rates. If setting appointments is a very important part of our business, which in home services it is. Then we should have a playbook, an operational book that is teaching our franchisees how to get better at

setting appointments. If the training's working, appointment set rates should go up. If you're monitoring those numbers. And what I do like about what you guys do is combine that idea of machine learning on one side, where we're able to crank out the numbers that you need to look at, but then combine that with analyzing the playbooks to offer

helpful suggestions of things that brand coaches, brand presidents, individual owner operators could be looking at in their business. It almost, I don't know if it completely takes the place, but it kind of takes the place of, those weekly calls.

It starts pointing to franchisee in the right direction, but it also starts pointing them to the answer so they can start thinking about it ahead of time, at least before they call someone like me or one of our brand coaches.

So I want to double click on something you said which is the two piece there, right? Which is identifying where the issue is. You guys have all the metrics, you have the KPIs, you have dashboards, but it still requires, you or coaches or somebody to get on the phone with some franchisees.

Not all franchisees, but like every system you have a range of performers and some of them need coaching and need the steering of how to do it, right? So there's two questions. There's what do they need to work on and how do they do it?

And the how is from the materials. What are some of the gaps that your franchisees can't seem to remember? Why do they need to, even though they have a dashboard, why do they need help answering that? Well, what do I focus? Where is the problem?

I mean, it's a unique person who can look at data immediately, know exactly what I need to do, and then go walk into the office of the person who's doing it and magically change it. I mean, we're all human beings. We're not AI agents doing this. We forget, we get in bad habits. We have personal moments in our lives that move us in one direction or another.

And what the data shows is when something is trending in one direction, whether or not something's an anomaly or a systematic problem, and that's where the data comes in. The instant access to helpful suggestions based on strategic playbooks, is a way to point the franchisee in a right direction automatically, as opposed to expecting that they're gonna see a number,

dig through some old flash drive or Google Drive link that you gave them three years ago and go reread the book. I mean, let's face it, people, most people are just simply not that, they don't empower themselves that much to do that. And what ends up happening in a franchise space specifically, since they didn't design the system, they're running the system.

If they start running it wrong, you might look at a number and go, hmm that's off, and then move on. And then it's off again, and then it's off again. And if you don't have somebody else point it out to you, and really have that conversation, then the time where you'll be begging for help is when the bank account number is telling you that you're off.

And unfortunately, it's too late at that point. So, and it's hard. A lot of pressure would therefore be put on brand coaches to be sifting through everyone else's data to try to identify who needs help and who doesn't. And that's hard to do. If a typical brand coach has 20, 30, maybe 40 or 50 franchisees, the old saying, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

It's actually not the right way to say that. The operator who gives a crap is who's gonna get the grease. The one who preemptively makes the phone call and says, hey, this KPIs down, what do I do about it? What's your suggestion? But for every one who cares about their business and cares about success, there's probably four or five that will just move on.

So software and something that can help the brand coach synthesize the data. So that they can easily see who is off, who's off tremendously, who's off a little bit. It also helps them prioritize their time to help direct franchisees on what they need to be working on. Sometimes it's not a matter of having to now make a hundred phone calls.

It might be able to be addressed with a few emails and I can focus on the people who are really off and let's save them before it is the bank account issue. So one of the things I've enjoyed about working with you, Gary, is by first synthesizing data, by adding in an AI component, it does give the, brand coach, the ability to prioritize those conversations and gives them a bit of a direction. Because from our standpoint too, you're looking at a lot of different data points. I mean, just pick one. My marketing rate is high. Okay, well that could be a lot of different factors. Is it because closing rate's low?

Is it because lead cost increased? Is it because average job went down? Is it because issue rate tanked? Is it because set rate tanked? Because my appointment setting team, I don't know, was hanging out with their kids on spring break? I mean, I don't know what the answer is unless I look at a lot of different data points. And by having some machine learning help out with that,

where it can say, yeah, your marketing rate's high, but this thing is low. I would suggest you reread the sales playbook, and I would suggest you have a meeting with your sales team. It helps narrow it down a little bit and, when you're, when you're focused, you tend to solve a problem.

When you're not focused, you tend to get scattered, know that a problem exists and then move on.

Yeah, I like that 4-5 : 1 ratio, right? Which is, there's the one franchisee that's going to pick up the phone and call you. Then there's maybe the two that they need a nudge and email. They need something to point it out and guidance, but they don't necessarily need high touch coaching.

And then there's the remainder where you need to prioritize your time as you know, there's only one Dean or there's only a handful of manpower on the franchisor side. How do you help those franchisees as much as possible? And that kind of best use of everybody's time to answer the what should every franchisee be working on, and how do I unblock them so they're actually doing the thing, right?

Because that's what matters. We could talk all we want, it's action that matters which I really like when you talk about that.

Well, and its those bottom. If you take 10, the two that are calling you and you're offering the advice, they're probably gonna succeed. They care.

The ones who you could preemptively send something to, and they listen. Even if they're not as successful as your top 10%, they're still in business.

It's actually the bottom ones that's the problem of franchising. Because what ends up happening is if they don't care enough to look at all these things or you don't give them access so that they can see it, and they can't make a change. What excitement when I buy the franchise in the first place, turns into bad sentiment.

Those become your problem franchisees. Those become the people that start the Facebook group or the WhatsApp group, so we can have a complain session every day instead of a problem solving session. And every franchise has this group. The idea is to minimize that group, right? And you minimize that group by saying, no, you cannot complain about the marketing anymore.

You cannot complain about the process. You cannot complain about the system because the data proves it works. The only thing you can complain about now is your own performance, and we're pointing it out to you early. When you're still flush with money, when you're starting off, and fix these problems quicker. Because the real issue is letting problems linger too long.

And especially as franchises get bigger, franchisors, as you grow, it's hard to give that personal attention. So you need dashboard style ways to point out the pluses and minuses in the month over month and period over period changes on your key metrics.

And then give them a place to easily find the information.

Yeah, so it's interesting, right? It's not so much that getting data in place, all the dashboarding, everything, critical step, right? Every good brand should have a huge amount of data that's feeding into it. Then there's the focusing the right franchisees and the right thing.

Then there's the how, and to your point, there's kind of this constant feed of new product, right? And I'm using product in a pretty generous term here. But the idea is that you, Dean, as the brand president, you should be spending a healthy amount of your time figuring out to create better processes, to make appointments more successful, to close more leads, right?

Like actually elevating the system. I'm kind of curious, how do you think about, as playbooks change or as best practices change, how do you bring that out to the rest of the network as fast as possible?

You use the power of the network, is at least the way we do it. Clearly I can't have a personal conversation and read the new playbook to the franchisee, like a bedtime story every night. So we, empower brand coaches to be part of the creation process in the first place.

I find that when your hand did something, you may read it you might slightly understand it, but when you're part of the creation of it, you understand it even more. And that breaks down what, I'm thinking from a growth perspective, including franchise brand coaches now who have smaller groups and they can then disseminate information.

But in a franchise system, you also want to get the buy-in from your top performers. They tend to be, say, franchise Advisory Council or FAC leaders who will maybe have 8, 10 franchisees on a team. When it goes from one person to maybe 10 people who are preaching a lot of the same things, then you can disseminate that information a lot quicker.

Having a central repository of these things is good too. So updating, you know, I mean, obviously you're in the AI space. I use a lot of AI to help me write the manuals. Not so much because I want, the opinion of, hey, write me an operations manual. It's more of a great way to just organize thought.

It takes a long time and a lot of proofreading for a human to write a hundred page playbook on a particular topic. If your business, it should be a little bit easier if you incorporate some AI to help organize that. The more organized the playbook is, the better a piece of software like yours works because now the components are organized very well so that they can be referred to based on the data that you're providing.

I love systems where we have a lot of communication. We actually do weekly meetings with our entire franchise system. I prefer this over town halls and things like that because over a course of a month or three months, fires that could have been put out a week later, smolder,

get forgotten about and by the time a town hall's coming up, there's a new fire or a new thing we want to talk about and you never even talked about something that was really important. So, in franchising weekly meetings, I find to be a much better way to continually bring up things, reinforce things, look at the data now. I mean, before I have a weekly meeting, I look at the data to say,

What should I talk about this week? What do I see in the system? I'll go to, Harmonyze software and say, what are the most people having trouble with, even if they do not know they're having trouble with this? And then I'll just preemptively make that meeting about that topic. So

You didn't even know I used the software that way.

No, I didn't. Well, I mean, listen, the thing I love about your weekly calls. As you know, we ingest those weekly calls and we have that inform the AI to say, how do you fix it? Right? So there's this really, interestingly, I'm now realizing, is that there's a feedback loop of you're figuring out what's talked about,

then you create that call, that immediately becomes part of how the AI is solving for it, right? You're in real time giving the AI the hardware. To go out and coach these franchisees better on the existing issues. And that way every single week, it's getting a bit smarter and more targeted, which I love.

The hardest thing about, you know, by no means am I an AI wizard. That's what you guys are for but, as I've had more, exposure to how AI works, I can see that the flaw of randomly going to ChatGPT and trying to figure something out, is forgetting the part where the

GPT needs to be trained and modeled first. If it's not modeled on something, it might go all over the place in answers that it's going to give back. And that could be bad for a franchisee, because it's not that the AI is making stuff up. It might be giving you the correct advice, but if it doesn't understand the industry you're in, if it doesn't understand the playbook at works, if it doesn't understand the data that made the playbook in the first place, it might be giving you advice on, oh I don't know, retail Google pay-per-click campaigns when home service, Google pay-per-click campaigns are an entirely different animal. And that training is what makes the GPT better.

It does have access to unlimited knowledge. But it's how that knowledge is applied specifically to your business that matters. What you guys do a great job of is by collecting all of the playbooks, by collecting all of the strategy, by collecting the weekly calls, the GPT gets that much smarter.

But pigeonhole smart on one specific industry, and I'm really hoping that we're right here, Gary, that as we do this for another six months, it starts getting to the point where the franchisee themselves can just have a chat with the AI in the system, and it will not direct them to the playbook,

it'll know the playbook so well that it just has actually a conversation of the answer. And, starts suggesting, well, you should be thinking of this, you should be thinking of this. This means that, and if we as franchisors keep making that AI more trained, then the franchisee has more access to a super brand coach.

And the only thing that can make a brand coach, a super brand coach is unlimited remembrance and knowledge of what the system's supposed to be, but then combine the data with it. So, when you accomplish those two things, it's pretty hard for a franchisee to ever say, I didn't know. Especially if you put it in with reports and things like that, which, might be off topic, but I, I've never seen anyone put a report together as fast as you guys have.

We do pride ourselves on knowing data and your data, in particular really well. Can I ask you about the importance of a third factor? So when we started building this AI together, we focused on those first two, right? We said we're gonna make sure the AI understands the structured data, all the KPIs going back years, and that's how we train the machine learning for you guys. And then we layered in the LLM based, how. Right, all those recorded calls, those reports, all of that. One of the things that we're getting into now, is the third bucket of, call it context, right? And the context being that, if Dean and Gary have the same exact numbers and Dean and Gary have access to the same materials, Dean and Gary still might be different people that need a different touch, that need a different, way of engaging or way of coaching.

And I'm curious, as somebody who sits across a hundred plus franchisees, you have had access to all this. How much is that context factor relevant versus how much of it is, we as a franchisor need to be hammering the same thing in the same way.

I think everyone always needs to hear things from a different perspective. It's amazing that one person can tell you the same thing over and over and over again, and it never clicks. And then another person says it just a slightly different way, and voila, it makes sense. And sometimes that's based on a trust factor of who's telling me this in the first place.

Sometimes it's, just how the information was interpreted. So is it important? Yes. You do find over time that a conversation with one franchisee can go perfectly and if you had that exact same conversation with another franchisee the same way, it could end up in an argument.

So, if I try to tie that in to specifically to AI chat and recommendation, I would hope that the unbiased nature of AI helps, when it's used, right? AI does not care actually. It has an absolute unbiased opinion. Information based on the facts given, it is not emotionally involved, it can't be. It can understand humor, but it only understands it to the point of, the language seemed humorous.

So, an unbiased view maybe and I hope becomes a more trusted opinion, based on data saying that the systems work. And if the data says that the system doesn't work, then it becomes my job and my team's job to change and adapt the system and then give it to you so you can retrain or update

the AI, so it's got fresh information. But an unbiased opinion I think should be, something that franchisees, if they understand that, hey, this is not making this up. Your number is what it is, and it should be this. And, maybe sometime in the future, the more information we can train the model on, the more, I mean, there's things that we don't even have insight to. I can't sit in every room that salespeople are in across the country. But funny enough, in our business, you can get pretty close to that now. There's software that records conversations. If we start taking those conversations and putting them into all-in-one types of AI that are also taking the data, the playbook, the conversation. I mean, imagine the helpful advice you can get now that, that would be amazing, but we're not there.

I think that's the direction that we're going in is, and where you guys are going.

Absolutely. The goal is to understand what makes top performers across, whether it's salespeople or franchisees or anything else, and making sure that the entire network is learning from that in real time. So last question I think for you Dean, is what are you excited for? I know technology's moving fast, but let's call it the first six months of 2026, what are you really excited for on the AI front and where machine learning for five Star BA solutions is heading with Harmonyze?

What I'm looking forward to the most is the predictive models that we've started creating. Now that you have the data, how can we use that data to not just say, how did the month go? Or how did the quarter go? That's interesting, but that's in the past, that's already happened. How do we now use that data to say what's gonna happen this month? That empowers the franchisor now to be able to understand the direction they're going, but be able to help franchisees before the month's over, before the quarter's over, before it's too late.

It's one thing to talk about why you screwed up. It's another, thing entirely to start seeing that you're screwing up early and fix it before it even becomes a problem. So the predictive nature of machine learning, is extremely exciting to me because it's too much data for anyone to possibly comprehend on themselves. Seeing the interconnection between, marketing data and sales data.

Unfortunately these are generally two or three or four different reportsin any canned CRM software, and it's very hard to look at this report, and then look at this one, and then look at this one and see how they actually do mix together.

So as I get you all of the new growth playbooks, it'll be interesting to see how the AI interprets that and learns from it. Prediction modeling, just so essential for any business. And to be able to provide that kind of level of support to your franchisors or just make ultimate super brand coaches is, that's where it's.

Why not both Dean, right. Why, why not the, the super coaches that, and to your point, as we're drawing the future, right? It's not to plan for current problems, but to plan for and adjust for future problems and seeing ahead into, as you said, three, six, nine, 12 months ahead, all very exciting.

I mean, if we can add a financial component, that'd be amazing. You know and I don't see why we can't really. I mean, you can drag a PDF into GPT and it can read a P&L in 12 seconds, two seconds, you know? So, I think there's a lot we can go with it. You guys are doing a great job. And, if I'd have found you two years ago, you would've saved me a lot of time making dashboards.

I'll tell you.

Well, we're happy to have had you as a partner. Dean, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for talking all the folks listening, and yeah, thank you.

You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on today.