The data your owners
won't tell you directly.
Independent franchisee and customer research for franchise systems — from the team that already publishes the filings
Your franchise disclosure document tells a prospective buyer what it costs to open and how many units closed last year. It cannot tell you whether the owners still in your system would sign again, why one location outperforms another three miles away, or which of the investments you made last year your franchisees actually noticed.
That is what we measure. Every owner and every location, asked the same questions, in a way that gets an honest answer — and reported back to you as something you can take into an operations meeting, a board pack, or a private-equity data room.
We built the outside view first. This is the inside one.
Franchise Factbook started as a reader's tool. Someone thinking about buying a franchise could find plenty of brochures and very little fact, so we began publishing what franchise disclosure documents actually say — fees, total investment, litigation, and the openings-and-closures table most directories quietly skip. Today that runs to 1,768 brands, every figure linked to its source.
Building it taught us something we did not expect: franchisors wanted the data as badly as buyers did. Operations leaders would ask how their closure rate compared to their category. Development teams wanted to know what prospects were reading before a discovery call. And more than one executive admitted that the honest answer to “how do your franchisees feel?” was a shrug and a story about the last convention.
A filing cannot answer that. It is a snapshot of a legal obligation, filed once a year, and it says nothing about experience. So we are extending the same discipline we applied to the public record — ask precisely, report honestly, show your working — to the things only your own franchisees and customers can tell you.
We are deliberately starting narrow. Two services, priced in public, done properly, rather than a catalogue of everything a franchise system might conceivably buy. The rest of the roadmap is on this page marked as planned, because we would rather show you where we are going than imply we are already there.
Every franchisor believes they know how their owners feel. Almost none of them have measured it. We give operations and leadership teams a straight, unflattering-where-necessary read on franchisee satisfaction and customer experience — the two things that predict renewals, resales and closures long before those show up in a filing.
The rest of this site exists so that someone considering a franchise can read what the filings say without a broker in the middle. That only works if we stay independent of the brands we cover. It is why our research and our rankings are separated by a wall, and why we will keep saying so in public.
Measuring what a filing can't show
Franchisee satisfaction is the single best early indicator of the things that eventually appear in your Item 20 table. Owners who feel unsupported do not close overnight — they stop reinvesting, stop recruiting, stop recommending you to the next candidate, and then eventually sell or walk. By the time it reaches a filing, it has been true for two years.
Customer satisfaction works the same way one level down: it explains the gap between your strongest and weakest locations long before that gap shows up in a sales report. Both are measurable. Neither is guesswork.
Four things that are genuinely different
We already have the outside view
We hold 1,768 brand profiles built from franchise disclosure documents — fees, investment ranges, litigation, and 4,692 outlet-years of Item 20 openings and closures. When your survey results come back, they land next to the filed record rather than in a vacuum. Nobody else measuring franchisee satisfaction is also maintaining the filings.
We are not selling you an award
Much of this industry runs on research that arrives conveniently attached to a ranking you can license a badge for. We publish rankings, and they are computed from filings under a formula anyone can read. Your research cannot touch them. That is a harder business model and it is the entire point.
Your owners will actually answer
Responses come to us, not to head office, and every franchisee is told so plainly in the invitation. That is the difference between a survey that tells you what owners think and one that tells you what owners are willing to say to their franchisor's face.
Published prices, no discovery call to get one
Every price on this page is on this page. You will not be routed through a qualification call to find out what something costs, and nothing here is priced by how much we think you can pay.
Reaching buyers who have already done the reading
People arrive at a brand profile here having looked at the investment range, the royalty, the litigation history and the closure numbers. The ones who then ask to speak to you are, by construction, further along and better informed than a lead bought from a portal. Everything below is published at a fixed price, always labelled where it appears, and none of it touches editorial coverage or rank.
The same data, different desks
A franchisee satisfaction study is a culture document to a CEO, a territory-by-territory problem list to a field operations director, and a diligence input to an investor. Here is where each of them usually starts.
| Role | What they need | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| CEO / C-suite | Evidence for the board on system health, beyond same-store sales. | Franchisee SatisfactionCustomer Satisfaction |
| Operations | Which units are struggling, and specifically at what. | Customer SatisfactionFranchisee Satisfaction |
| Franchise development | Candid validation for prospects, and buyers who arrive already informed. | Franchisee IntroductionsEnhanced Profile |
| Marketing / PR | Third-party data you can cite, and a profile that is accurate. | Profile ClaimResearch Report Sponsorship |
| Private equity / investors | Diligence on a system's owner satisfaction before and after acquisition. | Franchisee SatisfactionCustom Industry |
Four steps, no discovery-call theatre
A short call about your system
Twenty minutes on what you already measure, what you suspect, and what decision the data has to support. If a survey is not the right instrument for the question, we will say so rather than sell you one.
Scope and a written price
We come back with the question set, timing, and a number. Standard instruments keep results comparable across brands; you can add up to ten questions of your own.
We field it
We invite your franchisees or your customers directly, chase non-responders, and handle the awkward part — being the neutral party that responses can safely be given to.
Read-out and the full report
A call with your team walking through what moved and why, plus the complete data and every verbatim comment for you to keep and use internally however you like.
The questions franchisors actually ask
Can we pay to improve our Factbook Score or ranking?
No, and this is the one question we want asked directly. The Factbook Score is computed only from regulatory filings, under a formula published on our methodology page. There is no input, override, or manual adjustment that money reaches. Commissioning research does not raise it. Declining to commission research does not lower it. Cancelling a sponsorship does not lower it. If that were not true, none of the rest of this site would be worth anything.
Will our survey results be published?
Not unless you ask us to in writing. The default is that everything we collect for you is private to you. If you later decide you want a figure quoted publicly — in your own marketing or ours — that is a separate, explicit decision, and anything published carries a label saying it is brand-commissioned research rather than filed data.
How is this different from Franchise Business Review or similar firms?
The main structural difference is that our public rankings are computed from regulatory filings and are firewalled from anything a brand buys, so there is no award to purchase and no list to buy into. The practical difference is that we already maintain the filed record for 1,768 brands, so your internal results are read against your own disclosed numbers. We are also newer at satisfaction research specifically, which is why our benchmark claims are deliberately modest — see the next answer.
Do you have industry benchmarks yet?
Partly, and we would rather be straight about it than imply a panel we do not have. From your first survey you get your own system measured in full, and measured against itself each year after. Category benchmarking switches on once enough brands in your category have fielded the same instrument, and we will tell you exactly how many that is rather than presenting a thin sample as an industry standard.
What does it cost?
Franchisee satisfaction starts at $2,500 per system per year; customer satisfaction starts at $400 per location per month. Final scope depends on system size and how much you customise. Prices for the profile and placement options are published on the sponsorship policy page.
We think our franchisee satisfaction is poor. Should we still do this?
Those are the systems where it is worth the most, and where the results stay private to you. You cannot fix a support problem you have only heard about anecdotally from the three loudest owners, and you cannot show a board that an investment worked without a baseline taken before it.
Ready to talk?
Tell us about your system and what you are trying to find out. If research is not the right answer to your question, we will tell you that instead of quoting for it.
Franchise Factbook is independent and is not owned by brokers, franchisors, or lead-generation networks. Research commissioned here is private to the commissioning brand and is never an input to any published score or ranking. See how we make money · how the Score is computed