Metric Collective and Franchising, a Love Story

How we fell head over heels for the Franchise industry

Back when Metric Collective was first emerging, we had three portfolio companies: FranchiseHelp, Address Report, and Small Business Post.

FranchiseHelp, a tech-driven franchise lead generation company, remains our flagship. If you know Metric today you likely haven’t heard of the other two. Address Report is a data-driven property report service for renters and buyers, and Small Business Post was a business resale listing website. What these three companies had in common was their underlying tech philosophy, and the small team of 9 that worked on them. What they didn’t have in common was basically anything about their industries or how they worked.

Through the years we acquired and built numerous other companies that were just as unrelated. A table linens e-com company, a small ad buying service, a full scale digital marketing agency (that grew bigger than any other Metric company ever has), a perfume company, and others. These companies were a lot of fun to work on, but ultimately we moved on from all of them. It became clear as time went on that the projects we care about the most and have the most success working on have all been in the Franchise space.

FranchiseHelp was our first profitable business, and it remains the largest Metric Collective business. As other companies and projects came and went, FranchiseHelp kept growing. As we innovated on FranchiseHelp, we created FranFunnel to enable automated lead followup via text message. Eventually FranFunnel split off as its own business with its own dedicated team. This business was created to solve a problem we saw in Franchising that we were in a unique position to solve. Oakscale, too, began as a FranchiseHelp project that quickly took on a life of its own, becoming the franchise development company it is today.

Most of the Metric Collective team didn’t have a lot of franchising experience when we arrived here. But we brought our expertises in technology, marketing, and business to Metric, and found that we could make a real impact by applying them to the Franchise space. The more we know of Franchising, the more opportunities and challenges we see. We could spend the rest of our lives working in this industry and never run out of interesting problems to solve.

So did we know, starting out, that Franchising would be core to the Metric mission? No. But after a decade in the industry (a blink in the franchise world, we know!) we can’t see ourselves working on anything else.

We’re not here because we’ve always been here. We’re here because we tried everything else, and it didn’t matter. Franchising has our hearts and our minds, and it always will.

Anna Flowers is the President of FranchiseHelp. She has also worked on several other Metric Collective companies including Union Square Linens and Dandelion.