In this video, agency owner Dani Peleva recounts a recent experience where a national franchise contract was terminated by a new franchisor who owned only a single location. The franchisor mistakenly cancelled the nationwide marketing agreement, assuming the overall strategy was failing because their own location underperformed. Two days later, a franchisee from a different location praised the agency’s work and requested a direct partnership for local marketing. Peleva uses this story to illustrate the critical distinction between the franchisor’s national, network‑wide responsibilities and the franchisee’s local, single‑location focus. She warns new franchisors against conflating these roles, emphasizing that mixing local and national marketing duties can lead to disastrous decisions. The video concludes with a practical lesson: new franchisors should keep national brand campaigns separate from local marketing efforts and avoid canceling national contracts based on isolated location performance.
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Something interesting happened this week and I thought I should tell you the story about it. A bit of background story: a few weeks ago, one of our franchise clients sent their notice for terminating their services. Initially, my first reaction as an agency owner, I was gutted because I hate losing clients and I know that we did a really good job for this client, so I couldn't understand and this is where my frustration came from. Long story short, it was a franchisor that had taken over the business, so new to the business, and they owned one location. This is a mistake a lot of new franchisors make. Franchisor hat, you're the franchisor, you're responsible for all of the locations and you look at, you need to look at the big picture. Franchisee hat, you own one location and you need to look at the metrics and the numbers and focus on that one location. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster. What happened was that the franchisor, because their location was not doing so well, they decided to cancel the national agency contract because they assumed that the overall marketing strategy for all locations was not working. That was not the case, unfortunately. It was just a matter of them probably not being able to make that location successful, not knowing the business very well. Long story short, we got the cancellation notice. Two days later, I get this email from one of the franchisees from a different location that wants an urgent meeting. I'm a bit suspicious at this point. I'm like, what do they want? I jump on this Zoom call with the franchisee who tells us, I want to work with you. For the last 3 years that we've been working with you, everything you've done for me was amazing. My first idea, to get a testimonial from this guy because he's praising and singing our laurels big time. So I'm like, thank you so much. I'm really happy to hear that we've done a great job for for you. He's like, "They shouldn't have canceled the contract. I don't want another agency. You've done miracles for us." And all the other locations are of the same opinion. So you're gonna hear from more franchisees directly. So I guess one way or another, we're gonna retain the business, but we're gonna work with the franchisees directly and we're gonna do their local marketing. It still pains me to know that we lost the nationwide contract, but sometimes franchisors make these mistakes. So I guess one thing that you can learn from this, especially if you're a new franchisor, Do not mistake local-level marketing if you're looking after one or two locations with national brand campaigns and the responsibility that you have nationally for the entire franchising network. It's very easy to mix those two, but those are completely separate roles. I hope this was useful. Enjoy the weekend.
