Build a franchise location strategy that's built for long term growth, in 7 steps. Download our full checklist for free.

A site judged on its own always looks fine. Decent frontage, workable rent, a broker who mentions two other brands are circling. You sign it, you open it, and eighteen months later the unit sits in the bottom quartile of your network and nobody can say exactly why.

The site is rarely the problem. The order in which the decision got made is. Here is the sequence that holds, in seven steps, plus a one-page checklist you can print and tick.

What is a franchise location strategy?

A franchise location strategy is the repeatable process a franchisor uses to set site criteria, rank markets, screen candidates and approve openings, always in that order. It replaces picking new sites based on limited broker data and vibers.

Why franchise site selection typically fails

Three things typically break the process :

• The first is borrowed criteria. Teams adopt a generic list, high footfall, good visibility, strong demographics, that describes every retail location ever leased. It cannot separate a good site from an average one because it was never built from your units.
• The second is sequencing. Sites arrive one at a time and get judged one at a time. Compared against nothing, a mediocre site clears. Compared against four alternatives in the same week, it does not.
• The third is exclusivity sold before it was defined. When a territory is granted as a radius on a map with no reference to how far your customers actually travel, overlap shows up later as a franchisee dispute. Draw your real catchment area from observed travel behaviour before anyone signs, not after the complaint arrives.

Your best units already wrote your criteria

Start with the network you have. Put every existing unit in one table: sales, surface, format, rent, opening date, operator. Then rank them fairly, two-year-old unit against two-year-old unit, never against your flagship.

Ask what your best locations share. Catchment size, footfall, visibility, neighbours, transport, parking. Then ask why the worst ones underperform, and be precise about it: wrong catchment, wrong format, wrong rent and wrong operator are four different problems with four different fixes.

What separates the two groups is usually three to five factors. Those are your key success factors, and they become a weighted criteria checklist you use on every site from now on.

Based on this list of your main criteria for success, choose where to expand. Download our full site selection process here. The full process fits on one page.