OBS. 09 / 10 Franchise Operations  ·  Governance

Cost per appointment ranges from $73 to $354 across franchise markets. A 4.8× spread.

Twenty-two franchise owners operate across 135 DMAs with varying agencies, budgets, and tactical approaches — producing a cost-per-appointment spread wider than any other metric in the system. The best-performing franchise acquires an appointment for $73. The highest-paying franchise pays $354 for the same unit of demand. Same brand. Same product. Same customer. The gap is operational, not structural.

CPA Dispersion · 22 Franchise Markets
4.8×
The ratio between the most and least efficient franchise-managed digital programs. Peer retail networks with shared enablement routinely run at <2× dispersion. The gap is not franchise behavior — it is the absence of a network operating system.
The Fix, at a glance.
CURRENT → TARGET · 180 DAYS
Best / Worst Spread
4.8× <2×
CPA dispersion
Median Franchise CPA
~$180 ~$130
−28% blended
Shared Enablement
None Opt-in
benchmark + tooling
Annual Opportunity
$0 $8-15M
variance recovered
The Same Customer, Different Franchises A customer in Texas costs 4.8× more to reach than the same customer in Tennessee.
Senior couple walking hand in hand on a gravel path
Everyday Earl & Elizabeth
Woman jogging on a sunny park trail
The Weekend Athlete
Happy family playing outdoors, parents with child in nature
The Active Parent
Happy elderly couple walking together on a sunny day
The Return to Joy
01 Problem Identified

Twenty-two franchise owners. Twenty-two agency decisions. Twenty-two different economics.

The variance is not random. Each franchise has chosen an agency, set a budget, and picked a tactical mix independently — and the combinations produce wildly different outcomes. Some combinations work. Most are somewhere in the middle. A few are losing money every month. The franchisees themselves are largely unaware of where they sit in the distribution, because no one publishes the distribution.

22 FRANCHISE OWNERS · CPA DISTRIBUTION $73 best $354 worst MEDIAN ~$180 TOP QUARTILE $73 - $110 · 5 franchises BOTTOM QUARTILE $240 - $354 · 5 franchises The bottom quartile pays 3.3× more than the top — for the same customer.
$73
Best-performing franchise · CPA floor
One franchise owner runs a blended program producing appointments at $73 each. Clean tactical mix, realistic budget, disciplined platform management. The number is not theoretical. It is what's possible inside the existing The Good Feet Store economics, today.
floor
$354
Worst-performing franchise · CPA ceiling
Same brand. Same customer. Same product. 4.8× the cost to acquire an appointment. The mix is almost always a combination of over-investing in velocity channels (Obs. 06), under-investing in proven mechanisms (Obs. 04), and an agency relationship that isn't delivering optimization.
ceiling
22
Independent agency decisions
Each franchise owner has chosen their own digital agency, set their own budget, and approved their own mix. No shared benchmark exists. No franchise currently knows where it sits in the distribution. The market is operating blind to itself.
owners
$8-15M
Annual recovery · bottom half → median
If every franchise currently below median reached the median CPA, annual savings across the network reach the $8-15M range. No franchise reaches the floor. Most franchises would keep their current agency. The lift comes from transparency, not takeover.
recoverable
Why this matters

The variance is not a franchise failure. It is a corporate failure to publish the distribution. When franchisees cannot see where they sit, they cannot know what to change. A transparent, shared benchmark is the single highest-leverage corporate intervention in this observation.

02 The Data They Provided

Three documents. One consistent story. Your data.

Every number on this page is sourced to a document The Good Feet Store team provided in the RFP package. Nothing here is agency estimation dressed as insight. The evidence is corroborated across three independent sources that triangulate the same conclusion.

Primary Source Dec 2025

Adtaxi Franchisee All Hands

REPORTED CPA · BY FRANCHISE $73 · floor $354 · ceiling 4.8× dispersion · 22 franchises

Adtaxi's franchisee deck confirms the full CPA range across managed franchise accounts: $73 at the floor, $354 at the ceiling. The data exists. It is not yet shared back to the franchisees themselves in a way that creates peer pressure or improvement loops.

Corroborating Dec 2024

Adtaxi Corporate Review · Benchmark

CORPORATE vs. FRANCHISE CPA Corporate-managed ~$130 Franchise median ~$180 Corporate runs ~28% below franchise median.

Adtaxi's corporate-managed accounts perform materially better than the franchise median — $130 vs. $180. The gap is partially scale, partially standardization, partially agency continuity. Closing half of it across the franchise network is the near-term opportunity.

Contextual 2025

Franchise Agency Proliferation

INDEPENDENT AGENCIES · PER FRANCHISE 8+ Adtaxi is the largest shared vendor. Most franchises use different agencies.

Eight-plus independent agencies service the franchise network across 22 owners. Each agency has its own reporting cadence, its own bidding strategy, its own benchmarks. No shared learning loop exists — the best franchise's playbook is not reaching the worst franchise.

What's Driving the Variance

The 4.8× spread isn't random. Three factors explain most of it.

DECOMPOSITION · CPA VARIANCE DRIVERS DRIVER 01 · TACTICAL MIX ~42% of variance Over-investment in brand/retargeting (Obs. 06, 07); underuse of non-brand (Obs. 04); no CTV in most markets 42% DRIVER 02 · AGENCY CAPABILITY ~35% of variance 8+ independent agencies with different reporting, bidding, and optimization practices · no shared learning loop 35% DRIVER 03 · BUDGET SCALE ~23% of variance Sub-scale franchise budgets produce higher CPAs on upper-funnel channels that need meaningful reach to work 23% THE COMMON THREAD All three are solvable by enablement, not mandate. Publish the playbook. Let adoption do the work.
The Dominant Factor
Tactical Mix
Franchises that over-invest in velocity channels (brand search + retargeting) and under-invest in non-brand and CTV are systematically paying more per appointment. The mix problem is not unique to any single franchise — it is the default allocation most franchise agencies recommend.
What Corporate Can Do
Publish
The lift does not require franchise mandate, agency consolidation, or contract changes. It requires publishing the distribution, the best-in-class mix, and the benchmark CPAs — so franchisees can see what's possible and hold their agencies accountable with real peer data.
Back view of elderly couple walking together in a sunlit forest
What a networked franchise system feels like

22 franchise owners. One shared playbook. Twenty-two independent decisions.

03 The Money Left on the Table

Corporate cannot mandate. Corporate can enable.

The fix has to work inside the reality of franchise economics — owners with autonomy over their P&L, relationships with their existing agencies, and no obligation to adopt a corporate recommendation. Every lever in this section is an enablement, not a mandate. None requires a franchisee to change agency. None requires a contract amendment. All require corporate to build and share something the franchisees cannot build alone.

Lever 01 · Transparent Benchmark
Hidden Published
CPA distribution · quarterly

Publish where every franchise sits in the distribution.

Quarterly benchmark report to every franchise owner: here is your CPA, here is the median, here is the top quartile, here is the bottom quartile — anonymized but specific enough to know where you stand. The franchise in the bottom quartile calls their agency the next day. The agency either explains itself or gets replaced. Corporate does not have to do any of the follow-through.

Why transparency is the lever Franchisees in the bottom quartile today do not know they are in the bottom quartile. Their agency tells them they are performing "well." Without a peer reference point, the word "well" has no denominator. Peer benchmarking is the cheapest, fastest intervention that forces the conversation — without corporate saying a word.
Lever 02 · Shared Playbook
None Opt-in
Playbook + enablement tools

Package what the top quartile does. Make it free.

Corporate documents the tactical mix, budget ratios, and platform structures used by the top-quartile franchises — and publishes them as a shared playbook. Franchisees who want corporate's digital team to implement the playbook on their behalf can opt into a shared-services model at a nominal cost. Those who prefer their current agency have a reference to benchmark against.

Why opt-in works A mandate triggers franchise pushback. An opt-in shared-services offer lets the franchisees who want help get help, and the franchisees who prefer autonomy keep it. Early adopters produce a live case study for the network. Adoption tends to snowball once the first two or three opted-in markets show visible CPA improvement.
Lever 03 · Outcome Coaching
Ad-hoc Quarterly
Structured review with bottom-quartile

Meet with the bottom five — every quarter.

A quarterly 45-minute session between corporate's digital team and each bottom-quartile franchise owner: here is what's happening, here is what the top quartile is doing differently, here is the shared playbook, here is what we could do together. The tone is partnership. The goal is to move two franchises out of the bottom quartile per quarter.

Why the bottom-quartile focus The highest-leverage lift in the network comes from moving the worst performers closer to the median — not from pushing the already-strong franchises toward the floor. Ten franchises moving from $300+ CPA toward $180 is a larger network-wide impact than five moving from $100 to $80. Target the biggest gaps first.

Compression of the distribution is the compound lift.

Current State · 2025
Dispersion today
4.8×

Ratio between the highest and lowest franchise CPA. The ceiling is not the problem — the bottom is. Five franchises paying $240-354 per appointment are the most immediately recoverable opportunity in the network.

Year Two · Upside
Compression < 2× dispersion
$20-35M

Peer retail networks with mature enablement operate at <2× CPA dispersion. Reaching that ceiling across all 22 franchises produces compounding savings that feed back into higher same-store volume (Obs. 01).

What this means

The franchisees are not the problem. The agencies are not the problem. The absence of a network operating system is the problem. Build it once. Let every owner decide for themselves how much of it to use.

04 How We Solve It

One strategy. Two specialists. Shared accountability for the handoff where revenue disappears.

Franchise variance is fundamentally a governance problem, not a media problem. Jekyll + Hyde's national TV program already benefits every franchise equally — that part works. Ryze's role is to build the tooling corporate needs to publish the benchmark, package the playbook, and run the shared-services option for franchises who opt in. Every franchise keeps full autonomy — they just get a better operating environment around them.

A three-tier partnership model. Every franchise chooses their tier.
TIER 01 · CORPORATE · UNIVERSAL Benchmark publishing · Playbook · National TV every franchise benefits · no opt-in needed TIER 02 · SHARED SERVICES · OPT-IN Ryze executes the playbook for franchises that opt in franchise chooses · no lock-in TIER 03 · FRANCHISE AUTONOMY · ALWAYS Keep current agency · use playbook as reference full ownership preserved
Jekyll + Hyde
Supporting — National Baseline

The national TV buy already lifts every franchise equally. Keep it running.

J+H's contribution to the variance problem is ambient and positive: a strong national TV program raises the tide for every franchise, regardless of their individual digital agency. The franchise in the bottom quartile still benefits from the −6% CPO swing that the MPRB analysis documents. J+H's job here is to sustain that baseline and share flight data with Ryze for the benchmark dashboard.

  • Sustain the national buy National TV is the one investment every franchise benefits from. It is also the only investment that would cost every franchise more if it were distributed piecemeal.
  • Share DMA-level TV data with Ryze TV pressure by DMA feeds into the benchmark report so franchises can distinguish "paying a lot because TV is weak here" from "paying a lot because the agency is underperforming."
Ryze Agency
Lead — Network Operating System

Build the benchmark. Package the playbook. Run the shared-services option for franchises who want it.

This is one of Ryze's highest-leverage roles in the engagement: building the operational tooling that compresses the CPA distribution without touching franchise autonomy. The work is platform, analytics, and implementation — not mandate. Every lift comes from franchisees choosing to use what we build.

  • Franchise benchmark dashboard · day 30 Quarterly CPA distribution report published to every franchise owner. Anonymized peer positioning, top-quartile playbook summary, DMA-adjusted comparisons. Delivered as a PDF + dashboard link — no login complexity.
  • Top-quartile playbook documentation · day 60 Interview the top five franchises, document their tactical mix, budget ratios, agency structure, and reporting cadence. Publish as a shared playbook every franchise can share with their own agency — or use as a starting brief if they switch.
  • Shared-services pricing & pilot · day 90 Offer franchise owners a shared-services option: Ryze runs the digital program per the playbook, at a pricing structure designed to be meaningfully cheaper than independent agency fees. Start with 3-5 opt-in markets to create a visible case study.
  • Bottom-quartile coaching · ongoing Quarterly 45-minute structured review with the bottom five franchises. Partnership tone, not audit. Goal is to move two franchises out of the bottom quartile per quarter — measured, tracked, reported.
05 The KPIs

The instruments by which both agencies should be held accountable.

Three primary KPIs drive the intervention and define success. Four supporting KPIs surface the diagnostic detail that tells us why a metric is or isn't moving. All seven feed one shared dashboard that both agencies access and the client owns.

Primary KPI · P1
Best / Worst CPA Spread
4.8× DISPERSION · TODAY
Current
4.8×
12-Mo Target
<2×
Primary KPI · P1
Median Franchise CPA
$180 PER APPT · TODAY
Current
$180
12-Mo Target
$130
Primary KPI · P1
Shared-Services Adoption
0 FRANCHISES OPTED-IN
Current
0
12-Mo Target
8+
Supporting Diagnostic KPIs
Supporting P2 · Quarterly

Benchmark Report Delivery Rate

TARGET · 22 OF 22 Share of franchise owners receiving the quarterly CPA distribution report, on time, in a format they will actually read. The floor of the entire initiative — if the report is not delivered, no downstream lever works.
Supporting P2 · Quarterly

Bottom-Quartile Movement

TARGET · 2 PER QUARTER Franchises moving out of the bottom five (by CPA) each quarter. The cleanest leading indicator of whether the coaching and playbook mechanisms are producing real behavior change.
Supporting P3 · Ongoing

Playbook Distribution

TARGET · 100% SHARED Every franchise owner has received, acknowledged, and has access to the top-quartile playbook document. Precondition for every subsequent governance metric on this page.
Supporting P3 · Quarterly

Opt-In Shared-Services ROI

TARGET · > 25% CPA DROP Franchises who opt into shared services should see materially lower CPAs within two quarters. The number determines whether the offer is worth sustaining and whether adoption will snowball across the network.
The 180-day accountability roadmap. Every milestone is measurable.
DAY 0 kickoff DAY 30 Benchmark Built CPA data consolidated. First distribution report shipped to all 22 owners. DAY 90 Playbook Live Top-quartile doc published. Shared-services offer active. First 3 opt-in pilots. DAY 180 Compression Begins Spread at 3.5× or better. 5+ franchises opted in. Case studies published. YEAR 1 Under 2× Spread $8-15M network recovery. Ongoing quarterly rhythm.
Couple walking together on a tree-lined path in a peaceful park
What a networked franchise system feels like

22 owners. One operating environment. Twenty-two independent decisions — all made better.

The most important thing this observation does not recommend is a mandate. No franchise has to change agency. No franchise has to adopt the playbook. No franchise has to opt in to shared services. Every franchisee keeps full autonomy over their local program, because that autonomy is structurally built into the business. What the network is missing is not authority — it is information and infrastructure. The benchmark report tells each owner where they sit. The playbook tells them what the top quartile does. The optional shared-services tier gives them a cheaper way to execute it. And the quarterly coaching conversation with the bottom five franchises turns the worst-performing corner of the network into the highest-leverage improvement opportunity. Compress the distribution. Let every owner benefit in their own way. The economics of the entire network move together, without any single owner losing an inch of what they already control.

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The price objection — $1,611 vs. $800 expectation.
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MGH clinical claims sitting idle in the deck.