Tony White posted something last week that deserves more than a LinkedIn like. 800+ stores. 42 markets. $180M exit. His point: a franchise consultant used to charge $50,000 to produce an operations manual, a training programme, a franchise agreement, and a marketing playbook. Today, someone with a ChatGPT subscription and a free weekend can produce 80% of that.
He’s right. And the implications go well beyond the consulting sector.
The documentation business is already dead
Let’s be precise about what’s happened here, because vague statements about “AI disruption” miss the point.
According to the International Franchise Association, the average emerging franchisor spends between £25,000 and £60,000 on documentation and consultancy support during their first 18 months of franchising. A significant chunk of that spend has historically gone towards materials that could, today, be produced in a fraction of the time using publicly available AI tools.
That market hasn’t declined. It’s collapsed.
Consultants still selling documentation packages are now competing against a £20-a-month subscription. Not figuratively. Literally. The same deliverable, produced faster, available immediately.
But here’s where most of the commentary gets it wrong: the real problem isn’t the consultants. It’s the franchisors who were buying documentation and calling it strategy.
Scenario: The beautiful binder
A food and beverage franchisor — three sites, ambitious plans — commissions a full consultancy package. Twelve weeks later, they have a 200-page operations manual, a brand standards document, a training programme outline, and a franchise agreement.
It looks impressive. It sits in a folder on the shared drive.
Eighteen months on, they’ve recruited four franchisees. Two are underperforming. One is about to exit. The other is doing well, but nobody at head office can tell you why.
The documentation was perfect. The infrastructure didn’t exist.
The number that should embarrass the franchise industry
According to McKinsey research on multi-unit operations, companies that respond to a lead within the first hour are seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker than those that wait even 60 minutes.
In franchise recruitment, the average response time to a new enquiry is over 24 hours. Let that sit for a moment.
You can spend £40,000 on a consultancy package. You can produce the most technically complete franchise documentation in the industry. And then lose the best candidates in your pipeline because nobody called them back the same day. This isn’t a lead quality problem. It’s an infrastructure problem dressed up as a lead quality problem.
Research consistently shows that candidates exploring a franchise investment are simultaneously evaluating multiple brands. They are not waiting for you. The franchise that contacts them first, qualifies them properly, and keeps the momentum going wins the conversation. The rest get a polite “I’ve gone in a different direction.”
Remaining
61 of 140
34 of 140
12 of 140
What AI is actually good at (and what it isn’t)
Tony White said something precise that’s worth repeating: AI can produce the documents, but it can’t have the conversation that matters.
He was talking about the strategic conversation — the one where an experienced operator sits across from a founder and says your model doesn’t work at unit economics above 20 locations.
In franchise marketing, the equivalent conversation is this: your process is losing you franchisees you’ve already paid to attract.
AI tools have genuinely compressed the cost of producing strategy documents, campaign briefs, content calendars, and marketing playbooks. Useful. But in the same way that a beautiful operations manual is useful — it describes what should happen, not what actually does.
The gap between a well-written strategy and an executed one is where most franchise networks quietly bleed money.
Scenario: The six-week blind spot
A 40-location service franchise had been running a franchisee recruitment campaign for four months. Results were described as “disappointing.” The instinct was to increase spend.
Before doing that, they mapped the actual candidate journey. Here’s what they found across 140 enquiries:
| Issue identified | Enquiries affected |
|---|---|
| Never received a same-day response | 61 of 140 |
| Followed up only once after initial contact | 34 of 140 |
| Never followed up at all | 12 of 140 |
44% — 61 leads
24% — 34 leads
9% — 12 leads
23% — 33 leads
They didn’t have a lead quality problem. They had a process problem.
The documents were fine. The qualification criteria were sensible. The brand was strong.
None of it mattered because the infrastructure to execute consistently didn’t exist.
The franchise agency version of this problem
The same dynamic is playing out across the franchise agency sector.
Most franchise marketing agencies can now produce a campaign strategy, an SEO plan, a content calendar, and a social media framework with reasonable competence. The tools are democratised. The outputs look professional.
But producing a document that describes a franchise recruitment funnel is not the same as running one.
The agencies that will still be relevant in five years aren’t the ones with the best strategy templates. They’re the ones that can show you, in real time, where your best candidates are coming from — and where exactly the pipeline is leaking. That requires infrastructure. Not paper.
With KORE by SOOM®
100%
100%
44%
95%
28%
72%
14%
48%
6%
22%
What pattern recognition actually needs
Tony White talks about “judgement and pattern recognition” as the irreplaceable human element. He’s right. But judgement without data is just expensive intuition.
A franchise director who has seen 30 networks fail at scale has valuable experience. That experience is most useful when it’s applied to real, current, specific information — not based on reports that are two weeks old, manually compiled from Excel returns, and missing half the network.
Pattern recognition needs a pattern to read.
The franchise networks that will scale successfully in the next five years will be the ones that give their people — and their agencies — the data infrastructure to see what’s happening as it happens. Not retrospectively. Not quarterly. In real time.
KORE by SOOM® was built because we kept running into the same wall: the strategy was sound, the creative was good, and the results were being undermined by process gaps we couldn’t see inside a client’s inbox. No UK franchise marketing agency has built anything like it. It isn’t adapted from a generic SaaS platform — it’s built specifically for franchise networks, from the ground up.
The real lesson from Tony’s post
The franchise industry has confused deliverables with value for a long time.
A thick consultancy report feels like value. A polished campaign deck feels like value. A 200-page operations manual feels like value.
None of it is, unless something useful happens as a result.
The consultants and agencies who’ll still be in the room in 2028 are the ones who can answer a simple question: what actually happened?
Not what the strategy said should happen. What happened. Leads that were contacted within the hour. Candidates who progressed. Franchisees who signed. Revenue that resulted.
AI has accelerated the timeline on this reckoning. The document factories are finished — in consulting and in marketing. What’s left is the harder work: execution, infrastructure, and the pattern recognition to know what to do with the data you’re finally able to see.
The binder was never the value.
It just took a £20-a-month tool to make everyone admit it.
KORE by SOOM® is our proprietary franchise recruitment and operations platform — custom-built for franchise networks, not adapted from generic SaaS. If your recruitment infrastructure isn’t keeping pace with your ambitions, let’s talk.