What Makes a Restaurant Brand Ready to Franchise | Casey Cooley

What Makes a Restaurant Brand Ready to Franchise | Casey Cooley Michelin-awarded restaurateur Josh Kopel sits down with Casey Cooley on FULL COMP — the show where Josh Kopel unpacks the tactics, tools, and strategies of the world's best restaurateurs. Casey Cooley came up through franchise development at Marco's Pizza, working under president Brian Stevens and chief development officer Cam Cummins as director of development for the Midwest and West Coast, and now runs openings at Pivotal Growth Partners, whose brands include Jeremiah's Italian Ice. His answer to what makes a concept franchisable is not the one most owners expect: three or five strong locations in a home market prove nothing, because the founder has never tested whether the systems travel. He wants to see a brand open a store four or five hours from home first, far enough that the team has to discover which procedures do not exist yet, and he argues the biggest capability gap always shows up in the eight weeks before and the eight weeks after an opening. There is no soft opening anymore — guests expect day-one execution — so the standard is open big and stay big. He details the local store marketing framework behind that: profiling the franchisee as a brand ambassador and "mayor of their mile," assigning real metrics to outreach at schools, churches, offices and nonprofits, and committing a defined grand-opening budget, often 15,000 to 25,000 dollars, spent across roughly 30 days before and 30 to 60 days after rather than on a single ribbon-cutting day. He explains why giving product away works when it builds awareness rather than begging for a return visit, including a Dallas-Fort Worth franchisee who bought product from a nearby operator and served it at schools across his market for weeks before opening, producing one of the system's best openings. On economics, he breaks down how franchise fees actually work — royalties typically 4 to 8 percent and marketing fees roughly 5 to 11 percent — and why Jeremiah's charges a 4.5 percent marketing fee with 3.5 percent staying at store level so franchisees can spend it locally. He covers loyalty and frequency through the JList app, used by well over 30 percent of customers who visit about twice a month, and the innovation hire brought in to build occasions beyond a summer cone. The back half is the hard part of a seasonal business: about a 50 percent swing between summer and winter, why he argues against closing for four or five months because guests simply form the habit somewhere else, how a labor pool of high school staff whose availability rises exactly when sales do requires hiring around 20 people per store, and why franchisees are screened for whether they actually like mentoring teenagers. He closes on over-franchising, noting that only 14 to 15 percent of concepts ever pass 100 locations, and that when a brand franchises before it should the founder gets hurt a little and the franchisees get hurt a lot. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱ CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro 00:18 From Marco's Pizza to Pivotal Growth Partners 02:15 What Actually Makes a Brand Franchisable 05:15 There Is No Soft Opening Anymore 06:59 The Blueprint for Local Store Marketing 08:27 The Budget Committed to Every Opening 09:45 Collecting Customer Data From Day One 11:01 The Eight Weeks Before Opening 14:28 Awareness Versus Begging People to Come Back 15:44 The Eight Weeks After You Open 16:56 Marketing Distilled to an Email, a Text, a Call 18:41 Driving Frequency When Visits Are Rare 20:49 What Makes the Opportunity Attractive to Franchisees 23:28 How Jeremiah's Italian Ice Scales 25:26 Running a Seasonal Business 26:52 Making the Year's Money in the Peak Months 31:45 Balancing Labor Through the Off Season 35:19 Expanding During Peak Pandemic Fear 38:08 Turning the Tables on Franchising ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT THE HOST Josh Kopel is a Michelin-awarded restaurateur, founder of Restaurant Scaling Systems, and the host of FULL COMP. After two decades operating restaurants — from fast casual to fine dining — Josh Kopel now teaches independent restaurant owners how to build profitable restaurants that run without them. For free restaurant marketing tools and trainings from Josh Kopel, visit https://joshkopel.com ▶ Subscribe for a new FULL COMP episode with Josh Kopel every day. #restaurants #hospitality #restaurantbusiness #FullComp #JoshKopel