01 / The problem
It’s 8:40 on a Saturday, and the manual is in a binder in the back office.
A franchisee has a question with a right answer. Your manual contains that answer — somewhere in two hundred pages, inside a portal nobody logs into, or in a training module they finished fourteen months ago and have not opened since.
So they do the fast thing instead. They guess, they text the owner two towns over, or they call you. The first two produce drift that surfaces at the next audit, if it surfaces at all. The third produces a phone that rings on your weekend — and it rings more every time you sell a unit.
None of this is a documentation problem. You wrote it all down, and most of it is good. It is a retrieval problem: the answer exists, and it is not reachable at the moment somebody actually needs it.
02 / What it does
Your operations manual, answering in the franchisee’s own words.
- Ingest
- We load your operations manual, SOPs, brand standards, and training material as written — PDFs, decks, LMS exports, the shared drive. No rewriting required on your side.
- Answer
- Franchisees ask in plain language, from a phone, mid-shift, and get an answer in seconds. No search syntax, no page numbers, no waiting on a callback.
- Cite
- Every answer names the document and section it came from, so an owner can check it and you can trace it. Unsourced answers are not returned.
03 / What it refuses
Four categories it will not answer, at any confidence.
- Legal
- Agreement terms, territory, transfers, renewals, disclosure, disputes.
- Employment
- Hiring, discipline, termination, wage and hour, scheduling law, accommodation.
- Safety
- Injury, food safety holds, equipment failure, recall, anything with a report attached.
- Regulated
- Health department, licensing, insurance, tax, financial performance representations.
A consistent answer is only worth something if the system knows which questions it must not answer. Anything in these four categories stops, says plainly that it is stopping, and routes the franchisee to a named person on your team — a name and a number, not a general inbox.
04 / How it works
Four weeks from documents received to franchisees live.
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Week 0
Documents received
You send the manual, SOPs, and training material in whatever format they are already in.
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Week 1
Ingestion and routing
We index the material and map each refusal category to a named person on your team.
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Week 2
Review build
You get a working agent and a transcript of several hundred test questions to mark up.
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Week 3
Correction pass
We fix what you flagged. You sign off on the refusal boundaries in writing.
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Week 4
Franchisees live
Rolled out per location, with a monthly report on what was asked and what the manual could not answer.
05 / Who it’s for
Emerging systems, roughly 10 to 100 units.
- 10 to 100 open units, growing, with more franchisees than your field team can cover on a weekend.
- An operations manual that already exists and is current enough to answer from. We index what you have; we do not write it for you.
- No enterprise franchise-management platform in place. If you are already running FranConnect, Naranga, or similar, you have a system of record and a different problem than this one.
- Someone who owns operations by name. Refusals route to a person, so there has to be a person.
If you are at 400 units with a full field team and a franchise management platform already in place, this is not for you, and a call would waste both our afternoons.