If your franchise underperforms in a new market, you’ll face a question you can’t answer
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn in response to recurring conversations with founders and leadership teams around this topic.
I’m publishing it here as part of an ongoing body of thinking around restaurant strategy, market entry, and operational decision-making.
Was it the market, our brand, or them?
You can’t get clean data through someone else’s execution. If a franchisee cuts corners, substitutes products, or gets the staffing wrong, you’ll never know whether the market didn’t work or they didn’t.
The answer is to have one site of your own first.
Your suppliers, your training, your menu execution, and your baseline. From there you can roll out a model you know works, benchmark each franchisee against data you own, and spot underperformance early, knowing exactly where it’s coming from.
When you approach a franchise partner having done this, you’re not asking them to take a risk you haven’t taken yourself. You’re negotiating from proof, not projection.
And before you invest in the documentation, SOPs, and training manuals, decide whether franchising is the right model for your brand in that market at all.
Last week, I covered management agreements and the questions to ask before signing. Next week, licence deals: the model that feels like the lowest risk, but often isn’t.
Since first sharing this, I’ve seen the same issue surface repeatedly — particularly with businesses entering new markets or scaling too quickly. The underlying challenge is rarely strategy itself, but how early decisions constrain execution later.
Andrew Jobes is the founder of Jobes & Co., a Dubai-based advisory working with restaurant and hospitality businesses across the Middle East and international markets.