Franchise Spotlight with Katherine LeBlanc

Lead conversion is the conversation franchise marketing leaders said they were prioritizing heading into this year, and for good reason. In this episode, Katherine LeBlanc sits down with Dave Hansen, CEO of ClientTether, and Lizzie Webb, VP of Operations and Marketing at Image Studios, to break down what's actually happening inside franchise funnels and what the brands getting it right are doing differently. One thing a listener will walk away with: the distinction between a lead quality problem and a sales process problem, and why it matters more than most marketers realize.

In this episode:

• Why low conversion is almost always a process problem, not a lead problem
• The two-metric system Lizzie uses to make the funnel visible across 150 locations
• Speed to lead: mystery shopping your own system and publishing the results
• When AI earns its place in the funnel and when it doesn't
• How to shift ad spend between channels and bring franchisees along
• The sixth call data point and what it means for follow-up strategy

Guest: Dave Hansen, CEO, ClientTether
 Dave has spent over two decades building sales automation systems and nearly eight years inside the franchise industry. He brings a data-grounded perspective on where franchise brands consistently leave conversion on the table and what it takes to build a follow-up process that actually works. If you've ever wondered what your average lead response time actually is, Dave's answer to that question is worth your commute alone.

Guest: Lizzie Webb, VP of Operations and Marketing, Image Studios
 Lizzie runs both marketing and operations at Image Studios, a 150-unit luxury salon suite concept across 31 states. Her approach to franchisee adoption, AI integration, and transparent benchmarking is one of the more practical examples we've had on this show.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

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Doug DeLor of Spherion Staffing and Recruiting and Patrick Conley of Fran Focus join Katherine to map out where AI belongs in the franchise development funnel heading into 2027 — and where it should never go. The one thing to walk away with: the funnel is splitting into AI-owned and human-only territory, and franchisors who haven't drawn that line yet are already behind.

In this episode:

• The Franchise Development funnel stage both guests would hand entirely to AI — and the one they'd never touch
• Why AI search summaries are pulling click traffic away from franchise websites
• How a 30-70% website traffic decline got reversed through video and AEO strategy
• Why most franchise nurture sequences treat every candidate the same — and why that has to stop
• The case against relying on email as a primary Franchise Development communication channel

Guest: Doug DeLor, VP of Marketing, Spherion Staffing and Recruiting
Over 30 years in franchising, including time at McDonald's launching McCafe before moving into global brand transformation work. Doug's team went all-in on video four years ago, well before AI search made it essential — a move that reversed a major traffic decline and improved lead quality significantly.

Guest: Patrick Conley, Founder, Fran Focus
25 years in the franchise industry, with a decade-plus focused on Franchise Development marketing. Formerly generated roughly 100,000 leads a year for The Entrepreneur's Source's coaching network. Now runs a boutique agency serving emerging and regional franchisors.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

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Ziebart's Chief Growth Officer Larisa Walega and Franchise Assembly co-founder Liane Caruso join Katherine LeBlanc for a direct conversation about what's actually working in franchise development marketing right now. From portals to PR to GEO, this episode covers the channel decisions and budget tradeoffs that franchise marketers need heading into the next planning cycle. You'll walk away with a clearer framework for where to put your Franchise Development dollars and why.

In this episode:

• Why contact rate, not cost per lead, is the metric that should be driving your portal decisions
• How Ziebart funds PR outside restricted ad fund dollars and what 17 years of that investment produces
• The Meta targeting shift that displaced Ziebart's website as their top Franchise Development lead source
• Why GEO scores are replacing Google search spend in forward-looking Franchise Development strategies
• Brokers: what it actually takes to make them work and where brands are leaving money on the table
• The resourcing gap in Franchise Development marketing and why consumer teams can't fill it

Guest: Larisa Walega, CFE, Chief Growth Officer, Ziebart
Larisa has spent 17 years at Ziebart, starting as a field marketing manager and growing into a role that now spans marketing, franchise development, data and analytics, and annual business planning. She thinks in compounding investments and long-view brand strategy — which makes her take on what's working in 2026 Franchise Development worth paying close attention to.

Guest: Liane Caruso, co-Founder, Franchise Assembly and Fractional CMO
Liane advises brands from emerging to 100-plus locations on marketing process, brand standards, and budget strategy. She also co-founded Franchise Assembly, which runs Mastermind programs for franchise CMOs and Franchise Development leaders. The cross-brand visibility she carries into this conversation sets her observations apart.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

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Brandon Rhoten has been in restaurant marketing for nearly twenty years — CMO at Papa John's, CMO at Potbelly, and the architect of the digital program that put Wendy's back on the cultural map. In this episode, he and Katherine get into the product launch process that most franchise brands are too impatient to build, why cultural relevance is a point of view before it's a tactic, and why franchisees don't care how many impressions your last post got.

In this episode:

• The filtering, ops testing, and market testing process behind a real product launch
• Why the product launch calendar has to be built a year in advance — and how to sell that discipline to a C suite that wants to move fast
• How Dave's Hot Chicken connects to culture without chasing it
• Building a marketing calendar for brands that don't have constant product news
• What franchisees actually want to hear from marketing — and it isn't impressions

Guest: Brandon Rhoten, CMO, Dave's Hot Chicken
 Brandon has spent nearly twenty years in restaurant marketing. He built the digital and social program at Wendy's, served as CMO at Papa John's and Potbelly, and now leads marketing at one of the most culturally visible brands in fast casual. He owns restaurants himself, which means he brings both the brand-side and the franchisee-side lens to this conversation.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

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Kim Gouch (Retro Fitness) and Will Fraker (The Good Feed Store) join the conversation to talk about what AI is actually doing inside franchise marketing right now — not the buzzword version, but the real decisions their teams are making around creative, websites, data, and channel strategy heading into 2027. If you leave this episode with one thing, it's this: AI is already rewriting the customer journey before your prospects ever land on your website, and most franchise marketers aren't watching.

In this episode:

• How AI is disrupting the customer journey before customers reach your website — and what to do about it
• The "go slow to go fast" discipline-first approach to AI adoption
• Where AI belongs in creative production and where it absolutely doesn't
• How to prioritize channels for the AI era — email, paid, website, and beyond
• What franchise marketers need to stop doing with AI right now

Guest: Kim Gouch, Chief Brand Officer, Retro Fitness
Kim has spent 30+ years in franchising across hotel, hospitality, restaurants, and fitness — including time on both the franchisor and franchisee sides. As the first-ever Chief Brand Officer at Retro Fitness, she's building the AI strategy for a high-value, low-price fitness brand with e-commerce at its core. Her brand-first perspective on guardrails and authenticity is one of the clearest frameworks in this conversation.

Guest: Will Fraker, VP of Brand and Performance, The Good Feed Store
Will has been in franchising for over a decade across home services, retail, and specialty. At the Good Feed Store — a 300+ location brand — he oversees brand and performance marketing while also supporting a much smaller early-stage stretch brand. That contrast gives him a uniquely practical lens on what AI looks like at scale versus what it looks like when you're a team of one.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

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Local store marketing is one of the most talked-about and least-solved challenges in franchising — and Laura Peever and Marci Kleinsasser are two people who've actually done the work. This episode covers what breaks down between the playbook and the franchisee, how to build activation that compounds, and why the most underrated growth lever isn't a media tactic at all.

In this episode:

• Why the playbook-handoff model fails and what to replace it with
• Setting franchisee expectations from day one — including in the franchise development process
• Alternative metrics for community-based marketing that can't show direct attribution
• The Budget Blinds daily tip model and what makes it work
• Customer experience as a local marketing engine: why your hire and training standards are a marketing decision

Guest: Laura Peever, Head of Marketing, Sportball
 Laura has spent her career across agency and client roles spanning retail, pharma, research, and brand strategy — and brings a generalist's lens to a franchise-specific challenge. At Sportball, a children's enrichment brand with 35-plus locations across four countries, she's building local activation systems that work from Brooklyn to Singapore.

Guest: Marci Kleinsasser, CFE, VP of Marketing, Voxie
 Marci has 30-plus years in franchise marketing, starting on the agency side and leading franchisee marketing, brand fund strategy, and franchise development marketing for brands across restaurant, retail, and service categories. She now leads marketing at Voxie, a text marketing platform purpose-built for franchise and multi-location brands — and brings that full arc of experience to this conversation.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Franchise Marketing and Growth Advisor | Apollo CMO

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Google and Meta efficiencies keep declining, and most franchise marketers don't have a real plan for what fills the gap. Chris McGee (Batteries Plus) and Karen Wenning (Suttle Strauss) join Katherine to debate connected mail, cable TV, and the channels worth testing before the 2027 budget cycle locks in.

In this episode:

• Why blanket direct mail without strategy is the channel both guests agreed should go first
• How connected mail programs deliver three to five touches before a mail piece even arrives
• The difference between a return on investment and a return on relationship
• Why Batteries Plus moved from store-level to market-level media pooling
• What "spray and pray" looks like in 2027 — and why both guests say it has to stop

Guest: Chris McGee, VP of Marketing, Batteries Plus
Chris has spent over 20 years across agency, analytics, and client-side marketing roles, with a career-long focus on brand storytelling. At Batteries Plus, he's led the shift from fragmented local media buying to a market-pooled, data-backed strategy that grew reach by 25% this year.

Guest: Karen Wenning, Director of Client Partnerships, Suttle Strauss
Karen has worked in franchise marketing for over 20 years, specializing in connected mail programs that combine direct mail with digital retargeting. She brings a rare vendor-side view of what local activation actually looks like across hundreds of franchisee relationships.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

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Digital media costs are up, attribution is murkier, and the default answer — more search, more paid social — isn't working the way it used to. Alex Preddie from Rocket Barn and Christy Johnson (CMO) and Madison Belfour (Director of Marketing) from Tint World sit down to get specific about what franchise marketers should actually be doing differently heading into 2027 budget planning. The one thing every listener will walk away with: a cleaner framework for how to allocate budget to customer moments instead of channel percentages.

In this episode:

• The right question to ask when performance looks like it's declining (it might not be)
• Why first-party data is now a survival strategy, not a nice-to-have
• AI-generated creative and what franchisee engagement data actually says about it
• How to activate franchisees as local content creators without losing brand governance
• Where franchise systems are over-investing their digital dollars right now

Guest: Alex Preddie, VP of Sales and Marketing, Rocket Barn
Seven years at a franchise-focused growth agency specializing in home services and automotive brands. Alex works directly with franchisees and franchisors on local marketing strategy, and has a front-row seat to what's working and what's bleeding budget across multiple franchise systems simultaneously.

Guest: Christy Johnson and Madison Belfour, CMO and Director of Marketing, Tint World
Christy brings decades of franchise marketing experience across major brands including Papa John's and Yum Brands, now six weeks into the CMO seat at Tint World. Madison has spent five and a half years running franchisee marketing operations at Tint World from the inside. Together they offer both the strategic view and the operational reality of what it actually takes to manage digital media across a franchise network.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

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Aren Johnstone (Franchise Ramp) and Dan Wheeler (CMO, K9 Resorts) join Katherine for a direct conversation about what franchise marketers are actually measuring and whether it's doing anything useful. This episode centers on the gap between data collection and decision-making — and what it takes to close it inside a real franchise system.

In this episode:

• Why "if it doesn't drive a decision, you don't need it" is the right test for your scorecard
• Cash flowable CAC: a franchisee-friendly framework for understanding marketing payback that goes beyond ROAS
• The tornado vs. the funnel: how rethinking the customer journey changes what you measure
• Building one source of truth: what it really takes, and why consistent imperfection beats perfect paralysis
• Why single-platform dependence is one of the biggest risks in franchise marketing right now

Guest: Aren Johnstone, CEO, Franchise Ramp
Aren leads a paid media and creative agency built specifically for franchise brands and franchisees — two of his partners are franchisees themselves. Franchise Ramp works with over 1,300 locations across 25+ brands, and Aren has spent seven years building the internal systems and tech stack to aggregate performance data across hundreds of disparate ad accounts. He knows the franchise data problem from the inside.

Guest: Dan Wheeler, CMO, K9 Resorts Luxury Pet Hotel
Dan came to pet care from a career in restaurant and hospitality franchising, and he's bringing the same rigor to K9 Resorts — a brand with 50 open locations and 150 in development. He's currently overseeing the build of a first-party data platform that ties reservation data, franchise-level P&L, and media performance into one place. His frameworks on franchisee communication and demand creation are the kind of thing you don't hear enough at franchise marketing conferences.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

Are you a franchise brand leader working on a growth challenge?
Katherine works with franchise brands as a Fractional CMO. 

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PR, email, and social — and what's actually worth your budget going into 2027. Katherine LeBlanc sits down with Ashley Mitchell of East Coast Wings and Girl and Zack Fishman of Fishman PR for a peer conversation on where each channel stands, what's changing, and what a franchise marketing team should actually be doing with their owned and earned media right now.

In this episode:

• Why GEO has rescued PR measurement — and how to make the case for it internally
• Local-first social strategy: why franchisee content outperforms corporate brand content and how to build the infrastructure to support it
• The reality of brand-level social: entertainment vs. education, and what that means for your investment
• Email personalization in practice — rebuilding from scratch vs. patching an old program
• Email as a paid media channel: an underexplored model for franchise brands
• The one thing both guests tell franchise marketing teams to stop doing right now

Guest: Ashley Mitchell, VP of Marketing, East Coast Wings and Grill Ashley has spent her career in franchise marketing communications — from a six-year stint at the Walt Disney Company into franchising across consumer marketing, franchise development, M&A, and fractional CMO roles. She brings a practitioner's lens to the owned media conversation: what's working at the unit level, where the social ROI math stops adding up, and why she's rebuilding her email program from the ground up.

Guest: Zack Fishman, Partner, Fishman PR and Franchise Supplier Network Zack grew up in the franchise industry — his mother founded Fishman PR, the largest franchise-specific PR firm in the space — and he's built his own career at the intersection of earned media strategy and owned channel technology. He advises brands on consumer and franchise development PR, and his work at Franchise Supplier Network focuses on the tools and systems that make local social, texting, and review management scalable for franchise systems.

Host: Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO | Apollo CMO

Want to go deeper? 🌐 apollocmo.com ▶️ @MyPodcastHost on YouTube 🔗 linkedin.com/in/katherineleblanc 📩 [email protected]