The 90‑day franchise rescue: What I did when pulling out was the only option left

Franchise rescue and 90‑day turnaround in Melbourne began when I boarded a plane with a single objective: rescue a franchise territory that was haemorrhaging cash.

The brand had given me a 90‑day window. If the numbers did not shift, we would withdraw from the market for good. There was no room for theoretical discussions or long‑term planning exercises. This called for direct, on‑the‑ground action. Here is what happened.

Diagnosing the real problems

I have learnt over years in franchising that underperforming territories rarely suffer from a single flaw. Problems tend to feed one another, and Melbourne was a textbook example.

What i walked into was a corporate team that had mentally checked out, franchisees who had never received adequate training, declining service standards and a complaint rate that kept rising. Each of these issues was chipping away at the bottom line.

Through my Five Fs Framework, i could see immediately that this was not a matter of patching one hole. The franchise was experiencing a breakdown across several foundational pillars, and my recovery plan had to address them in parallel.

Fix 1: The focused team

The toughest call came first. I had to part ways with members of the head office team who simply were not pulling their weight: arriving late, leaving early and contributing very little in between.

But this was not purely about individual output. The corporate office establishes the cultural benchmark for every franchisee in the network. When the support centre operates without urgency or commitment, that attitude filters down. Under my Focused Team principle, your head office is either elevating the network or undermining it. There is no middle ground.

Fix 2: The franchisee network

With the right team in place, I turned my attention to the field. I needed to witness operations firsthand, so i hit the road. I rode alongside franchisees, sat in on their jobs, watched whether they showed up punctually and assessed the standard of service they delivered.

This had nothing to do with looking over people’s shoulders for the sake of it. It was a deliberate diagnostic exercise. You simply cannot identify the real gaps from behind a desk, and that is central to my Franchisee Network principle: the only honest picture of your system comes from the operator level.

What i had not fully anticipated was the trust it rebuilt. When franchisees saw someone from leadership physically present and genuinely engaged, the dynamic changed.

Fix 3: Fantastic reputation

The final piece was retraining. I converted a space at the Melbourne office into a dedicated training area and cycled every franchisee and their staff back through a proper onboarding programme.

The rising complaints had not been a customer attitude problem. They were a competency problem. People on the front line had never been properly taught how to deliver the service to the expected standard.

This connects directly to my Fantastic Reputation principle: a brand is only as credible as the poorest job delivered by its weakest operator. Once we raised the training standard, completion rates climbed and complaints dropped, laying the groundwork for real, lasting growth.

The outcome and the lesson behind it

By the end of those 90 days, the branch had reached break‑even and was moving into profit. But the timeline is not the important part. What matters is that none of these interventions would have succeeded in isolation.

Restructuring the team without retraining would have left the service gaps wide open. Retraining without first understanding the on‑the‑ground reality would have missed the point entirely.

It was only by aligning the Five Fs together that the turnaround took hold. When several pillars are compromised, the only effective response is to address them together.