A franchise leader told me one of his locations had just emailed asking to add $6,500 a month to their marketing budget.
That location closes 16% of its estimates. The brand benchmark is 32%.
It got me wondering what actually accounts for the gap between a strong location and a weak one. So I decomposed the quartile data from a franchise system with unusually detailed disclosure. Top to bottom, a 5.9× sales spread.
Multiplicatively, at this stage of the funnel:
Whatever separates these quartiles, it isn't the size of the sale. Average sale doesn't even rank: the bottom quartile posts the second-highest average sale in the system.
Two caveats I'd rather state than have pointed out.
This is accounting, not causation. It shows where the spread sits, not what caused it. Territory size, tenure, capacity and market density all drive volume, which is the more interesting question anyway.
And it only holds if close rate means the same thing everywhere. When the leader said 16%, I don't know whether that's of appointments booked or appointments run. Roughly 10 to 20% of booked in-home appointments never happen, so those are different numbers with different fixes.
When your locations report close rate, is it counted the same way at every location, or does that depend on who happens to be entering it?
Originally posted by Taylor Minnis on LinkedIn, September 2026. Taylor Minnis is a Growth Strategist at TapClicks in San Jose, California. More about Taylor.