About the Author
John W. Francis (“Johnny Franchise®”) is a franchise strategist and advisor with more than three decades of hands-on experience as a franchisee, franchisor, operator, and board member. He works with franchise CEOs and leadership teams on franchise strategy, operational consistency, and long-term multi-unit growth through Next Level Franchise.
January's plans have collided with six months of reality. By now you know which parts of your strategy were right and which parts were wishful thinking.
I sit on multiple franchisor system brand boards, boards of advisors, and boards of directors right now. I talk to franchisors and suppliers every week through the Next Level Franchise masterminds. And every July, without fail, the same conversation surfaces across brands that have nothing else in common: something they committed to in January has quietly stopped mattering, and nobody has said so out loud yet.
That is what this is. Not a Q3 planning template. A gut check.
What did you commit to in January that you have not touched since March?
Not the stuff that got deprioritized on purpose. The stuff that got dropped because it was hard, or because a louder problem showed up, and nobody ever formally killed it. Name it. Either restart it or retire it. The worst place for a strategy to live is in limbo.
Where are you still operating like the original founder rather than a modern CEO?
This is the shift I coach into constantly, and it never announces itself cleanly. You know the org chart says CEO. But if you are still the one getting pulled into every field fire, every vendor dispute, every unit-level escalation, you are still running the business the way you built it rather than leading the system it has become. Mid-year is a good time to ask where you are still in the weeds you should have handed off by now.
Strategy documents age fast. Teams do not always notice when the plan changed underneath them. If you have not re-articulated priorities out loud in the last 90 days, assume some part of your organization is still running on outdated instructions.
What pattern are you seeing that you have not said out loud to your board?
Boards exist to catch blind spots. But they can only catch what gets brought to the table. If there is a trend you have noticed in your unit economics, your franchisee sentiment, or your pipeline that you have not formally raised, that is worth fixing before Q4 planning starts.
Founders scaling through this range face a specific version of this problem. You are big enough that you can no longer see everything yourself, but not yet big enough to have the layers of process that catch drift automatically. That gap is exactly where January's good intentions quietly die in June, and where the founder-to-CEO transition either takes hold or stalls out.
"The brands that come out of a year like this stronger are not the ones with the fanciest strategic plan. They are the ones willing to do the uncomfortable mid-year audit and adjust in public."
I will be at the Faegre Drinker Franchise Summit on August 18 and 19 in Minneapolis, and I am looking forward to comparing notes with the people in the room about exactly this kind of mid-year recalibration. For the friends and clients who will already be in town, I am penciling in a dinner the Monday night before on the 17th. Nothing formal yet, just something to have on your radar if you are around.
For now, take an afternoon. Pull out what you committed to in January. Be honest about what is still alive and what quietly died. That is the whole exercise, and it is worth more than another framework.
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