You're staring at a full pipeline and want to be intentional about build-out — what should you actually be prepared for?

Katherine LeBlanc and James Vitrano sit down with Charlie Guzzetta, founding partner of Depot and former President & Chief Development Officer of BurgerFi (9 to 135 locations and public on the NASDAQ). Charlie now builds and designs kitchens for some of the hottest restaurant brands around, and he lays out how to scale without blowing your budget or your brand: why you should design a business instead of a restaurant, the three Ps of build-out (pre-planning, prototypes, post-mortem), how a "family of prototypes" keeps you flexible, and where restaurant tech is finally getting affordable for emerging brands.

A practical playbook for any franchisor heading into a growth phase.

About the hosts: Katherine LeBlanc and James Vitrano have a combined 40+ years in franchising — across marketing, operations, legal, and franchise development. Katherine is the founder of Apollo CMO, helping franchise brands grow.

Go deeper:
🌐 apollocmo.com | ▶️ @KatherineLeBlanc_Franchise on YouTube | 🔗 linkedin.com/in/katherineleblanc | 📩 katherine@apollocmo.com

You're ready to grow your franchise — so where do you actually start? In this episode of Dear Frannie, Katherine LeBlanc and James Vitrano tackle the question every emerging franchisor is asking: where do I start my franchise development process, especially when budgets are tight?

Their answer is the one most brands skip: start inside your own four walls. Before you spend a dollar on external lead generation, your fans, employees, and customers are your warmest and most likely franchisees. Katherine and James unpack why "marketing is momentum," why cheap external leads are often the most expensive path, why passive income is a dangerous sales pitch, and why growing slow is a feature, not a failure.

Whether you're an emerging brand launching franchising or a seasoned operator over-indexed on external spend, this episode will change where you put your next dollar.

Katherine LeBlanc is a franchise growth and marketing advisor and founder of Apollo CMO, helping brands build franchise sales programs that convert. Reach her at katherine@apollocmo.com.

About the hosts: Katherine LeBlanc and James Vitrano have spent a combined 40+ years in the trenches of franchising — across marketing, operations, legal, and franchise development. They've sat in the rooms where the hard calls get made, and they share what they've seen work and what they've watched blow up.

🌐 apollocmo.com
▶️ @KatherineLeBlanc_Franchise on YouTube
🔗 linkedin.com/in/katherineleblanc
📩 katherine@apollocmo.com

Even the most experienced franchise leaders get stuck on this one: you have owners who could scale — they have the territory, the model, the support — and they still won't move. In this episode, Katherine and James sit down with Sean Fitzgerald, President of TruBlue Home Service Ally, to dig into exactly that problem.

Sean joined TruBlue when they had 20 locations. They're now at 120+ territories. He's not guessing about the messy middle — he's in it. They cover franchisee selection (hint: passion and team-building matter more than financials), the owner-operator ceiling that quietly kills growth, and what TruBlue built to address it: a dedicated scaling coach, a prescriptive revenue roadmap, and a required BDR role baked into the system.

The networking vs. LSM debate is also one for the books — and worth your full attention whether you're a franchisor or a franchisee.

Got a question you're wrestling with? We want to hear it.
📩 katherine@apollocmo.com
🌐 apollocmo.com
🔗 linkedin.com/in/katherineleblanc
▶️ Watch on YouTube: @KatherineLeBlanc_Franchise