frequently asked Questions

While we charge a nominal retainer fee, we are primarily compensated when we recruit new Franchise Owners for you. We don’t require long-term contracts. We believe in results-driven partnership structures. To dive into the economics of a partnership with us, request access to our partnership overview video (HERE).

Raintree is one of the few Franchise Development Companies that actually have a reputation for consistently meeting or exceeding franchise brands growth goals.

And within that group of proven, reputable Franchise Sales Organizations, Raintree is unique in that we don’t rely almost entirely on franchise brokers to grow franchises. While our broker relationships are extremely important to us, we believe that you should balance your deal sources with non-broker channels too, including SEO, PR, PPC, programmatic, social media, content marketing campaigns and more.

In doing so, you’ll keep much more of your franchise fees, and build substantial capital to fund a strong, healthy franchise support infrastructure.

You’ll also be able to more precisely target the right-fitting franchise owners, and therefore increase your overall franchise system performance through increased royalty margin.

Because of our focus on healthy hypergrowth, Raintree has a long track record of helping small regional brands become true national successes that go on to achieve their happily ever after via private equity investment or acquisition.

To learn more about the Raintree advantage, click (HERE).

Our program is designed to free you up to do what you do best – run your business.

In terms of your role as a Raintree development partner, you will need to provide Raintree with a point of contact, assist in validation management, run Approval Days and provide approval of franchise applications. We handle the rest of the development efforts, from managing your franchise marketing collateral and website to managing the franchise lead generation program and fully staffing the broker and sales programs.

This allows our brands to become better Franchisors. They have more time to focus on helping their Franchise Owners improve their economics and fine-tune overall relations. This in turn helps us with franchise validation and allows us to further increase sales results for you.

We don’t set up new franchises. While many other franchise sales organizations do, we believe in order to be the best partner possible to our brands, we need to stay laser-focused on franchise recruitment and brand development.

That being said, we can certainly refer you to the best of the best in terms of franchise disclosure document creation, operations manuals, local marketing and more.

Raintree is not a franchise consultant. Rather, we are best thought of as a bolt-on franchise development department. In essence, we become an extension of your company.

A consultant, or broker, is a lead-referrer. They send leads to the sales team of a franchise brand and are paid a referral fee if the lead becomes a Franchise Owner.

A full-service franchise development organization like Raintree, however, does much more than this. We are responsible for the entire development department. From websites and collateral, to digital lead generation, to consultant marketing, to lead qualification, sales and more.

To see a full list of WHAT WE DO, click here.

Raintree does, however, operate within a network of 1,500 franchise consultants who know and trust Raintree for the results we bring them. As a new Raintree brand, you’ll immediately leverage our years of relationships to give you a new stream of qualified candidates interested in joining your brand.

There’s a myriad of reasons as to why a brand decides to outsource their franchise development department to a full-service franchise development company, or franchise sales organization, like Raintree:

  • More time to focus on improving their model and unit-level economics
  • Greatly reducing their overhead and improving their bottom lines
  • Access to top industry sales/marketing professionals
  • Leveraging relationships and reputation with franchise brokers and key industry vendors
  • Finding better quality Franchise Owners through improved profiling and targeting

Without doubt, the primary reason Franchisors work with FSOs is simply that they want to grow much faster.

Take a look at any of the truly fast-growing emerging brands in the market, and if you scratch below the surface, it’s likely that they are working with a reputable outsourced franchise sales group like Raintree.

Take all the key ingredients that a concept like Raintree offers, including industry experience; access to elite franchise sales and marketing talent; marketing and sales programs that have been tested across multiple brands; volume buying power with leading industry vendors and more. It becomes easy to see the sheer advantage that a brand working with an FSO has over brands with sole internal teams.

The Raintree Founders have been building franchise companies and selling franchises for two decades. And in that time we’ve spent a great deal of time testing out a variety of processes, all designed to increase sales conversions, but only to those individuals who fit the ideal owner profile.

Most franchise brands, in our experience, have an education process that looks like this:

Most Franchisor Process

The Raintree Franchise Discovery Process, however, looks like this:

RT Sales Management

 
Without giving away the secret sauce, you’ll see above that our process is designed to be educational, first and foremost.

Jam-packed full of content that educates and excites, our Franchise Discovery Process clearly allows the candidate to see if they fit the culture and community of the brand. This process actually encourages many underqualified folks to self-select out. Combine this strategy with rich, detailed content and highly skilled recruiters, and you’ll see why Raintree’s lead conversion rate is light years ahead of the average franchise brand.

Raintree is a truly full-service franchise development partner. You won’t need to go out and find and manage other vendors for PR, SEO, PPC, and more. Whether that’s in-house programs or managing third-party vendors on your behalf, Raintree handles it all for you. This means you have more time to focus on improving your business model and relationships with existing Franchise Owners.

Let’s first say this – if you’re looking to sell a ton of franchises in a very short period of time to almost anyone willing to buy, then Raintree is not going to be the Franchise Development Partner for you.

We are not excited by the idea of quick pump and dump franchise sales partnerships. Rather, we are excited about long-term partnerships with brands who are willing to take the time, and do the work, to identify the ideal Franchise Owner profile, ensuring we stay disciplined about only granting franchises to individuals who tick all these boxes.

That said, Raintree has the bandwidth and proven experience to allow elite brands to quickly enter hypergrowth, which we define as more than 30 franchises awarded annually. This is typically the goal growth rate for all of our brands by year two of the partnership.

There are brand-specific variables that determine how long this takes for each brand, the biggest being a franchise brand’s support infrastructure and ability to properly handle an influx of new Franchise Owners.

Raintree is here to coach you on how to set up the proper support infrastructure to ensure you can reach your growth potential.

Other factors that contribute to growth rate include budget, investment level, unit level economics, and validation performance.

Raintree’s onboarding program is split into two phases, with each phase taking approximately 45 days. Phase 1 focuses on a deep immersion into your brand to fully understand all the moving parts and, most importantly, build what we call the dream owner avatar, or the blueprint for your ideal Franchise Owner.

At the end of Phase 2, with 82 pieces of professionally designed marketing and sales collateral, digital and consultant launches, and website optimization complete, we will begin to watch your pipeline swell.

As long as you are responsive and share our excitement to move quickly, we should have your brand fully onboarded with what we believe is the best sales process, CRM and marketing campaigns and collateral in the industry in 90 days.

Phase 1 (Days 1 -> 45):

  • On-site brand training
  • Ideal Owner Avatar creation
  • Build out CRM
  • Launch test ad sets on a variety of digital channels
  • First leads

Phase 2 (Days 46 -> 90):

  • CRM reporting & additional automation content added
  • Website built and optimized
  • 80 pieces of marketing and sales collateral created
  • PPC, SEO, PR, programmatic and other digital channel campaigns launched
  • Lead recycling and retargeting commences
  • Launch with select franchise consultant networks

Raintree is one of the few FSOs that have the ability to help with more than just franchise sales.

We are experienced Franchisors and Franchise Owners. When we partner together, we will be here to mentor you on more than just how we can grow into a lot of markets across the country. We’re here to guide you on:

  • Organizational Development coaching
  • Culture, Leadership, Employee Engagement
  • Feature Driven Development (FDD) Management
  • Territory Mapping
  • Real Estate and Construction
  • Hiring strategies for Training, Marketing and Operations
  • Technology
  • Finance
  • And More!

From proven strategies to vendor referrals, we’re mutually invested in making sure you avoid the pitfalls and mistakes most emerging Franchisors make.

There are 4,000 brands competing for approximately 15,000 franchise sales each year. This means there’s limited demand, and not a lot of margin for error when executing a franchise development program. The primary reasons why we see brands struggle in achieving growth consistency are:
  1. Poor lead generation strategies
  2. Ineffective sales process or sales team
  3. Undercapitalized and misaligned budgets
To learn more about how we are able to create franchise hypergrowth for our brands, check out our WHAT WE DO page.

If your goal is just a few new franchises each year, then we’re probably not a fit for each other.

We believe in taking the time to carefully identify the right type of Franchise Owner for your brand and going slow initially. But once this careful foundational work is complete, we believe in moving quite quickly.

Unless you’re willing to invest the millions of dollars necessary to build out a full Franchise Ownersupport infrastructure team prior to realizing your intended growth, we believe this old adage rings true: grow fast or die slow.

Growing your franchise with just a few new Owners each year will still require investment in support systems as it does if you’re growing considerably faster than that. The only difference is that with the slow-growth option, you won’t have the capital to invest from more franchise fees, and your quality of support may therefore suffer.

For that reason, we are looking to partner with brands who want to grow quickly with only the best-fitting Franchise Owners, and most importantly, be excited to reinvest some of the franchise fees we bring back into building a world-class Franchise Owner support program.

We know, we know and we’ve heard it before… “Your team looks pretty young.”

Don’t be deceived. That’s just the benefit of the Colorado mountain air and Mike Edwards’ great genes!

The truth is, we now have over 125 years of collective franchise sales experience.

Raintree has been recognized as a Top Supplier by Entrepreneur Magazine for the last 5 years. The franchise brands we’ve owned, Kidcreate Studio and Voodoo Brewing Co., both ranked #1 in their category by Entrepreneur Magazine in 2021.

We’ve grown some of the most successful franchise concepts in the United States to stardom, but our experience goes well beyond being really good at franchise sales and franchise marketing. Raintree is a team of Franchisors, Franchise Owners, Presidents, board members, suppliers and more.

But before anything else, we just try to be really good humans. Raintree is a team of authentic, down-to-earth folks who genuinely love what we do. We have set the highest goals for ourselves as individuals, for our collective team, and for our partner brands, while maintaining “HAVE FUN” as a key core value.

We absolutely do, and consider franchise consultants as a critical part in our omni-channel marketing strategy for successful brand growth.

For over 15 years, the Raintree team has worked hard to build a reputation with the most elite franchise consultants in the industry. We leverage that reputation to kick-start our emerging brands with qualified leads and new Franchise Owners in key markets.

Consultants know that if the brand is working with Raintree, it has been highly vetted for the Raintree ownership team to ensure it qualifies as an elite emerging franchise business model. And therefore you will gain instant credibility and traction with certain consultant networks.

The top franchise consultants have this level of trust in Raintree because they also know:

  1. We recruit and train the top talent in the franchise sales space.
  2. The Raintree representative will practice clear and frequent communication with them
  3. The Raintree representative has a higher conversion rate than the average brand, and therefore they are more likely to see an ROI on their lead referral

And just like we spend a great deal of time working on Dream Owner profiles and the proper targeting of leads in the digital space, you’ll have a representative whose entire role is to spend their day educating consultants on exactly who we are looking for.

Ensuring we work closely with consultants to only bring in the right fit to your brand is a critical step in ensuring long-term, sustainable franchise growth.

Don’t be shy – reach out! We’ll schedule a brief 30-minute call so that we can get to know each other and quickly ascertain whether we think we can make you the nation’s newest franchise success story.
We find that our franchise development program works best if we handle all components, from design to franchise lead generation and sales. Breaking the program up in any way could result in poorer results for you, as well as for us. We just want to make sure we both win!
We’ve had many, including nine brand acquisitions as a direct result of the growth we provided and our stewardship of the brands. Working directly with Founders/Executive Teams and getting them to an endpoint where they achieve their “happily ever after” in the form of strong acquisitions is always a success story for us.

We partner with franchise companies whom we are confident we can grow rapidly, across all industries — from restaurants to services, retail, pets and more.

We’ve partnered with brands who initially had only two open locations, and with brands who came to us with 800 locations under their belts.

It’s not so much the type or size of the franchise we look for most, but the quality of the unit-level economics, strength of the support team and comparative brand advantages.

To find out what our brand partner criteria list is, click HERE.

Here at Raintree, we are not into long-term contracts. We believe in pure performance. If at any time you feel that the business partnership isn’t working out, we require a 60-day heads up so that we can professionally transition all aspects of the franchise development program back to you.

Before you start thinking about advertising on Facebook, Google Ads, or portals, or working with franchise consultants, you need to do this one thing, as everything else will be an extreme uphill battle if you do not nail this:

YOU MUST KNOW YOUR IDEAL FRANCHISE OWNER INTIMATELY.

When it comes to attracting the right Franchise Owners to your system, the first step should always be in taking the time to understand who you are targeting.

Many Franchisors fail here, in that they acquire rudimentary data such as gender, age and perhaps a common occupation. This level of understanding or targeting will simply not produce results in today’s marketing climate.

As a society, we are more protective of our time than ever before. But our appetite for information and content is higher than ever. The result of this dichotomy is that we are beginning to favor video over written content as the preferred method of communication.

While there is certainly a place for raw, loosely edited mobile phone video edits, we believe the majority of your video arsenal should be very professionally created. Too many franchise brands rely on low-quality video edits created by marketing semi-professionals.

The problem with “cheap” videos is that you are selling the quality of your support services to potential franchise buyers, and low-quality or unprofessional video can mentally equate to “low-quality marketing department” or an “undercapitalized young brand”.

To avoid making this fatal error by sending such a message to all your franchise prospects, ensure you invest in a team that can create professionally-edited, emotionally driven, and engaging videos that provide value to your viewers.

Exactly like this:

Lead Qual Process

 You’ll have a dedicated Lead Qualifier assigned to your franchise brand to ensure you are quickly responding to your excited inquiries, before your competitors get the chance to.

Learn more about our approach here:

More questions? Let's Chat.

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The most innovative and effective franchise sales organization in North America.


1040 S Gaylord St.
Denver CO 80209
[email protected]

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