The FranCalc Origin Story: From simple spreadsheet to branded product

Kayvon Bina, Metric Collective’s Co-Founder, recently observed a vexing problem in our industry:

Marketing and sales teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver more, despite ever tightening resources. Companies needed to figure out ways to close more deals, but without increasing their budgets.

So he did what any tech startup founder would do. Built a tool to solve the problem at scale.

Initially, it was a simple spreadsheet to help customers find the cost of sales with and without utilizing two way text messaging:

Grounded in cutting edge industry research and our own proprietary data, this calculator took into account lead costs, lead contact rate, lead conversion numbers, and so on. Ultimately showing customers how they could make smarter tech investments for their business development efforts.

Now, when we first published the calculator on the FranFunnel Blog, customers loved it. Employees raved about it. Our sales manager even started using the calculator during product demos to help potential users visualize our company’s value proposition. Pretty cool, huh?

Fast forward to six months later. That same sales calculator resurfaced during a team meeting. Two colleagues of mine casually mentioned how they built and used their own calculators for completely different aspects of the business.

Both of them were spreadsheets, and both of them helped customers crunch the numbers so they could make smarter investments. At that very moment, an alarm went off inside my head:

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is a pattern. There might be gold here.

My next question was:

What else in our business could use a calculator? Are there other decisions that we could help customers make in a more rational, informed way? Maybe there are other sales and marketing problems that we could help people solve with a tiny bit of math?

Turns out, there were. Between a few of us, there were at least five or six calculators floating around. Probably more. It appeared that we might be able to build a suite of tools to help our clients make thoughtful decisions in a faster, easier and more fun way, and achieve numerous business goals.

We could launch tools that would take seconds to use, and give people precisely the numbers they need to invest their dollars wisely.

Ultimately, what started out as a spreadsheet to scratch our own itch became its own branded product. Francalc, the very first franchise growth marketing calculator, was launched only a few weeks later, aka, this week:

We built a simple tool so franchise brands could plug in their financials and other relevant metrics to calculate which sales and marketing are most appropriate for their growth.

After all, lead generation can be a risk. Who knows if your company will get quality candidates? Sometimes digital marketing feels like buying a lottery ticket. But it doesn’t have to.

Now your franchise can plan for sales and marketing spend success by estimating key metrics, like Franchise Unit Value:

Now, this product isn’t the first online calculator in the world. Companies in almost every industry have been using interactive digital tools like this for at least the past twenty years. Can’t say we were innovators in that respect.

But what our team was excited about was using this technology, along with the mindset behind it, to create value for our customers, colleagues and partners. Not only to disseminate our unique expertise and give people answers to their specific problems, but to offer a call to the industry.

Maybe even build a platform that clients and colleagues could contribute to with their own calculators. Who knows? The possibilities are vast. (Check out our official press release to learn more about our mission!)

The thing is, Metric isa small tech startup. We love to geek out on math. Our mission is to bring continual transformative technology so brands can navigate growth in a hyper focused way.

Francalc is our most current tool for doing so, and we’re stoked to share it with the world.

The moral of the story is, every organization has the equivalent of a spreadsheet. Or a calculator. Or a makeshift solution. Just sitting around in a folder, collecting digital dust. And if it’s proven to be useful, then that asset needs to be celebrated, multiplied, elevated, productized and leveraged.

You can do all of that for pennies on the dollar. The effort to impact ratio of work like this is disproportionately high. And while there’s no guarantee your new thing will earn money, go viral, impact the industry or change the world, at the very least, the process will make you a more valuable company.

When you notice things happening not once, not twice, but three times, what leverage questions are you asking?