The 34-Unit Problem: Franchise Business Consultant Span of Control Makes Coaching Impossible

Franchise business consultant span of control is the number of locations one field coach supports. It averaged 34 units in FranConnect's 2020 index, which allows about two visits per location per year once drive time, preparation and write-ups are accounted for.

Do that arithmetic honestly and something uncomfortable falls out of it. The deep, patient coaching that franchise agreements quietly promise has nowhere left to happen — the hours it would take are spent before anyone opens a calendar.

The arithmetic of franchise business consultant span of control

Fifty working weeks. Thirty-four locations, the 2020 average per FranConnect's operations research on field consultant span of control. Two visits each per year is 68 visits — roughly a location and a half every week, every week, with no allowance for anything else.

Except there is a great deal else:

• Drive time. Territories are geographic, and the locations are not adjacent. Half a day per visit is normal; a full day is common.
• Preparation. Pulling the P&L trend, finding last visit's commitments, checking what is currently on fire. Hours per visit, if done properly.
• The write-up. Notes, the action list, the follow-up email. Which is why so many of them get written in a hotel parking lot, or three weeks late, or never.
• Everything unscheduled. The escalation, the opening, the franchisee in crisis, the new-owner handholding, the corporate project that landed on the field team.

Net it out and the coach is running triage, not a coaching programme. I have talked to a lot of field coaches, and almost none of them describe their job the way the job description does.

What triage looks like in practice

Because the hours do not exist, the system defaults to a set of predictable shortcuts.

The coach visits whoever complained loudest, which selects for volume of complaint rather than size of opportunity. The visit opens with "so, how are things?" — because there was no time to arrive knowing anything. The conversation is therefore shaped entirely by what the franchisee chooses to raise, which is rarely the thing that matters most.

Five commitments get made. Nobody verifies them. Next quarter's visit re-discovers the same problems, and both parties quietly conclude the visits are a formality.

Meanwhile the steady mid-pack locations — the ones where a good visit moves the most margin, because they have both the capability and the headroom — get nothing, because they are not complaining.

The measurement problem underneath it

There is a second-order issue that makes the first one harder to fix: almost nobody can prove what field coaching produces.

Very few brands compare the performance of visited locations against comparable unvisited ones. So when budget season arrives, the field team defends itself with activity metrics — visits completed, compliance scores collected — rather than margin moved. And activity metrics are exactly what a CFO discounts.

It gets worse when the compliance scores themselves are the evidence, because during 2020 those self-reported scores pulled 33% further from audit findings — measured by the same industry operations index. A field programme measured in self-reported scores is measured in a currency the industry privately knows is soft.

The reframe: assembly versus judgment

Here is what I think the actual question is. Not "how do we get more coaches," because most emerging brands cannot afford them — the industry's own counts say most US systems are small ones — and a fully loaded coach plus travel against a modest royalty base is a real decision. The question is:

What would have to be true for one coach to perform like three?

Split the job into two kinds of work.

Assembly is gathering: pulling P&L trends, finding the last visit's action items, checking which commitments closed, assembling the pre-visit picture, drafting the write-up afterwards. It is necessary, it consumes most of the hours, and none of it requires a human who has spent fifteen years running restaurants. What it does require is a franchise tech stack whose pieces sit somewhere one query can reach them, which at most brands this size they do not.

Judgment is everything a machine cannot do: reading the room, knowing which franchisee needs pressure and which needs air cover, deciding what to ignore, connecting one operator to another who solved the same problem, being trusted.

You are paying for judgment. You are buying mostly assembly. Every hour moved from the first column to the second is a coach performing closer to the job description without a single new hire.

What a prepared visit changes

The specific difference worth chasing is this: the coach who walks in already knowing something the franchisee did not tell them is a completely different coach.

Not because it is impressive. Because it changes what gets discussed. When the opening line is "your Tuesday afternoon labour has been running high since June, and I noticed the schedule changed hands in May" instead of "so, how are things?", the franchisee cannot steer to comfortable ground, and the conversation starts at the real problem rather than reaching it in the last ten minutes.

That, in turn, changes the follow-through. Commitments made about a specific, evidenced problem get honoured more often than commitments made about a vague one — and when they close, the coach has something concrete to point at next budget cycle.

The version of this you can run today

None of the above requires new software to begin:

1. Build a one-page pre-visit brief for every visit. Even manually. Trend, last visit's commitments, open questions, one thing they did well.
2. Route by opportunity, not geography. Same drive time, chosen by where a visit changes the outcome rather than where the loop is convenient.
3. Ship the write-up same day. A shorter note that arrives today beats a thorough one that arrives in three weeks.
4. Track visited versus unvisited margin. Start now, imperfectly. In two quarters you will have the only argument that protects a field budget.

Treat 34 as a high-water mark rather than a fixture. It was a 2020 figure, and the index attributes part of it to a pandemic-driven increase of more than 21% — so the span will move, and what it should decide is when you hire the second coach, not what coaching is allowed to be. Either way, the thing worth changing is what each visit is made of.

Related: franchise compliance data accuracy — why the scores a field programme collects may not mean what they appear to.