I've spent sixteen years building the sales and marketing systems that make franchise growth work — once from scratch, once at national scale:
Four years · From zero
Built the franchise system that didn't exist
I sold franchises directly, building a franchise system from zero — the CRM, the pricing model, the sales process, and a financing program for buyers, because none of it existed yet.
Twelve years · National scale
Inherited and reshaped sales & marketing across 75 locations
As national brand leader of a much larger commercial-cleaning franchisor: a national-accounts platform, the brand's first marketing automation system, its first outbound sales development program — aimed at the franchisees' own customers, not at recruiting franchisees.
Different buyer, same discipline: build the system, screen for fit, and follow up until it closes.
That discipline is what I learned shaping both systems — and now I'm putting it to work again.
If your conversion rate feels stuck, you're not alone. Most franchisors respond by buying more leads. That's the wrong lever — not to mention expensive.
~2%Average conversion
$351Cost per lead
Source: Franchise Update Media, 2026 Annual Franchise Development Report.
What's missing isn't more traffic through the door. It's who calls back on day one, who works the fifth touch instead of writing it off, and who screens for whether a candidate can actually run the unit, not just whether they can wire the franchise fee.
That's exactly why I named the company after a dragonfly. A meadowhawk closes in on its target with a success rate near 95% — it doesn't get there by chasing everything that moves. It perches, reads the field, tracks one target, and closes the distance once, decisively. Franchise development rewards the same discipline.
Stop chasing volume. Track fit. Close it.
I started Meadowhawk Franchise Consulting to bring that same discipline in-house — for franchisors who don't want to build a department themselves or hand their pipeline to an outsourced franchise sales organization. We take a defined mandate and a unit target, and we do the behavioral screening and the follow-through most systems are too busy building the rest of the business to prioritize.
