Franchise analytics positions use statistics and analytics for franchise business intelligence in a fun, informal, engaging way. You’ll learn how to use data to drive sales up and costs down. You’ll measure customer satisfaction, revenue and profitability margins, retention rate, and market share.

Why use franchise analytics?

Franchise analytics is a technique for observing how people behave in a particular environment and then predicting the future. Franchise analytics sounds like magic: it puts you in the same room with people, observes them, and then tells you what franchise analytics will do next. But it’s not magic. It’s a method developed by economists who study business.

Franchise analytics is a kind of quick numbers crunching. Based on the answers to one or two questions, they try to predict how long a business will last. They might sound simple and often are, but they may be misleading.

Suppose you want to figure out whether you should open your muffin shop. You look up the city’s top-grossing muffin shops and ask how long they have been in business, how much each earns, etc. The answer turns out to be: two years, $2 million per year.

It could mean: “Muffin shops are a good idea; one more muffin shop would make no difference.” It could mean: “Muffins don’t sell well in this city; we’re lucky if you can turn a profit at this rate.” It could mean: “You can make $2 million a year selling muffins in places where it is not illegal for kids to drink alcohol.”

Franchise analytics is not just for predicting the future. The best franchise analysts go way beyond that: they can identify which things make a particular franchise successful and give advice on those things. If you want to know the secret of how Starbucks became so successful, franchise analysts can tell you all about it.