The Franchisee
What I Learned When the System I Trusted Stopped Holding
There is a moment—quiet, often invisible—when a person realizes the system they are in no longer fits.
Nothing dramatic happens.
No doors slam.
No one gets fired.
The work still gets done.
The paychecks still clear.
The résumé still makes sense.
But internally, something shifts.
Misalignment rarely announces itself.
It simply refuses to resolve.
For me, that moment didn’t come in corporate life.
It came after I left.
It came when I became a franchisee—inside a system that promised structure, support, and a proven path forward—and I discovered how fragile even well-designed systems can be when reality stops cooperating.
This is not a story about blame.
It is a story about discernment.
And it explains why everything I do now looks slower, quieter, and more deliberate than most people expect.
What changed was not my belief in systems.
It was my understanding of what they are actually for.
Why I Trusted Systems in the First Place
Before franchising, I spent close to two decades in corporate America, largely in technology sales.
I learned how organizations scale.
How incentives quietly shape behavior.
How performance metrics can drift from human reality without anyone intending harm.
Later, as a co-founder and entrepreneur, I learned a different lesson: freedom without structure creates its own risks. Autonomy is powerful—but it demands judgment, resilience, and constant recalibration.
So when I turned to franchising, it felt like a thoughtful middle path.
Independence with guardrails.
Ownership with community.
Risk informed by precedent.
I wasn’t chasing upside at all costs.
I was looking for fit.
A system that respected experience, rewarded discipline, and allowed me to build something durable without reinventing every wheel.
On paper, it made sense.
Discovery Day and the Comfort of Coherence
Discovery Day is designed to inspire confidence.
The story is coherent.
The model is proven.
The leaders are articulate and optimistic.
And to be clear: none of this is inherently deceptive.
The problem isn’t that franchising sells certainty.
The problem is that certainty doesn’t survive contact with complexity.
Within months of opening my studio, things were working.
A growing team.
Hundreds of paying members.
Strong net sales.
Early profitability.
This part matters.
The model wasn’t failing.
And then the world changed.
When Reality Stops Matching the Playbook
COVID didn’t introduce inconvenience.
It introduced a stress test no one had modeled for.
State-mandated closures shut down personal services.
Staff disappeared.
Members were isolated, anxious, and unsure.
The guidance that followed was rigid and remote.
The playbook assumed continuity.
The system was being made up as it went—and assumed compliance.
Advice presumed conditions that no longer existed.
There was little room for local nuance.
Little space for ethical ambiguity.
Little acknowledgment that the franchisee—the person closest to the customer—was now absorbing most of the risk.
This wasn’t malicious.
It was structural.
Franchising, like any system, is built on incentives.
When incentives misalign, pressure doesn’t disappear.
It transfers.
Downward.
The Thing Franchising Rarely Talks About
Franchising optimizes for replication, not adaptation.
That’s its strength—and its vulnerability.
When conditions are stable, replication works beautifully.
When conditions change quickly, rigidity becomes dangerous.
During the pandemic, franchisees carried:
Financial exposure.
Emotional labor.
Local accountability.
While decision authority remained centralized.
This isn’t a critique of individuals.
It’s an observation about systems.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Chaos Wasn’t the Lesson. Silence Was.
Yes, there were moments of chaos.
Staff instability.
Leadership breakdowns.
Human stories that felt absurd, painful, and surreal.
But chaos wasn’t the lesson.
The lesson was how hard it was—structurally and culturally—to say:
“This isn’t working the way it’s supposed to.”
Franchising rewards momentum.
It rewards optimism.
It rewards staying the course.
It does not always reward reflection.
And for people wired toward responsibility—those who care about culture, community, and long-term outcomes—that silence can be deeply disorienting.
What This Taught Me About Decision Quality
When I eventually stepped out of that chapter, I didn’t walk away cynical.
I walked away clearer.
Franchising is neither a shortcut nor a trap.
It’s a tool.
And like any powerful tool, it demands discernment.
The mistake I made was not trusting a system.
The mistake was assuming that a system, once proven, would continue to hold without ongoing judgment, context, and ownership.
Most people exploring a corporate exit don’t need more options, faster timelines, or louder success stories.
They need better questions.
Honest tradeoffs.
Space to think.
They need fit-first decision-making.
A Note on Innovation and AI
We are entering an era where information asymmetry is collapsing.
AI can surface financials, reviews, and market trends faster than ever.
But AI cannot determine fit.
It cannot feel culture.
It cannot assess readiness.
It cannot substitute judgment.
Technology will accelerate exploration.
Discernment remains human.
The Hard Truth (and the Quiet Relief)
There is no risk-free path to independence.
Only better-understood risk.
Franchising doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.
It reorganizes it.
And when people truly understand that, they stop asking:
“What’s the safest option?”
They start asking:
“What am I prepared to own?”
That shift changes everything.
Why I’m Telling This Story
I don’t tell this story to relitigate the past.
I tell it because it explains the present.
Why I slow conversations down.
Why I resist urgency.
Why I prioritize readiness over momentum.
And why I believe the most dangerous sentence in business is still:
“It works if you just follow the system.”
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Knowing the difference is the work.
This is not a conclusion.
It’s a pattern.
And once you see it, you start noticing where it shows up elsewhere.
-Chris