“We have taken control,” he says. “We
know who is selling and who is not. We
know what brands are selling and where. It
truly helps from a support standpoint.”
Frederick says the store-level information
reported is also useful to franchisees, who
have access to the same data. “If a multi-unit
owner gets up in the morning and logs in to
all his stores, he can see who should be his
first call, where there may be a labor shortage
or cash flow issue. With our system today,
they have that information at their
fingertips,” he says. “It’s a big selling feature
for the company.”
Melissa Bisogno, who manages two
company-owned units in Kansas, says the
system allows her to manage from a distance.
“I visit the stores as frequently as possible, but
I live 45 minutes from each one,” she says.
“A lot of people are on the clock and I can see
where there might be shortages I have to take
care of right away. I know right away what’s
going on at any time.”
A recent company special was not
moving at one of her stores. “I gave them a
call and they said they would start
promoting it right away,” Bisogno says.
“There’s no way you could operate like this
using just a quarterly report.”
With the obvious success of this
technology, Mr. Goodcents is looking to
upgrade other systems and integrate them
into the organization. A proprietary delivery
system to take orders by computer and
develop a customer database is now under
development.
“All information is so important,”
Frederick says. “It’s exciting to be here and
walk through the changes from having
limited information to having real-time
information.”
Now he wonders how the franchise ever
got along without this technology. “We
would operate with information that was
maybe a month old,” he says. “I can’t even
imagine that today.”
heyday and hung out his own shingle, one
of his first clients was a franchisor seeking
a dashboard system to track royalties.
Batchelor says he looked for something
already on the market. When he couldn’t
find one, he built it.
ZeeWise now caters exclusively to
franchisors and franchisees with a desktop
application that can pull together almost
unlimited information, including customer
profiling, royalties, staffing, inventory
levels, and sales reports. “We can automate
any collection of data they have,” he says.
“The information can be right at their
fingertips. It’s not just anecdotal, but based
on factual data.”
Trust levels for new technology are
often low, and acceptance comes slowly, he
says, and clients sometimes prefer to stay
with the tried and true. “I’ve been doing it
this way forever and it works for me,” they
tell him.
But Batchelor says new technology does
not replace certain aspects of business like
phone calls and personal visits (nor should
it). “I’m not advocating that an owner stay
home,” he says. “I’m saying continue with
the store visits, but now you can go into
the store armed with more information.”
Finding a niche
Rick Batchelor is owner of Atlanta-based
ZeeWise, whose Franchise Performance
Management Suite collects, analyzes, and
provides reports on any information in the
franchise units’ software. Batchelor is betting
that more franchisors will realize the
importance of real-time, on-demand
information, and developing an IT strategy
to gather it.
When Batchelor left his position as an
Internet consultant during the Internet’s
Batchelor says that
while his product is
seemingly a “no-brainer”
for owners and
operators, he finds
himself more in the role
of educator than
salesman. “Franchising is
typically non-technical
Rick Batchelor and this is very cutting-edge,” he says. “People in general need more
education to see what is available from
technology today and how easy it is to use.”
Franchising IT outsourcing
CM IT Solutions has taken the tech
boom one step farther, offering franchise
opportunities for its IT outsourcing
concept. Formerly known as Computer
Moms, the franchise system has made a
complete transition from helping residential
clients to consulting for small businesses,
helping them to manage their technology
so they can focus on their business.
Former Computer Moms franchisee
Gordon Bridge, now president and CEO of
CM IT, has spent a lifetime in information
technology. After college, he spent 20 years
with IBM, rising to vice president, vice
