Dan Rowe, Founder and CEO of Fransmart, founded the business over 20 years ago thanks to his passion for turning small franchises into household names. He developed the franchising programs for the most dominant fresh burger fast casual chain, the second-most successful fresh Mexican brand, and the largest Middle Eastern chain in the country. His expertise in developing category-leading brands led to the development of Fransmart and its portfolio of hospitality and retail brands.
Dan has grown 10 small concepts into 100+ location chains, many internationally. Rowe specializes in targeting emerging brands that show potential through their sales, ROI, creativity, and uniqueness. To date, Fransmart has launched over 5,000 franchise locations worldwide. When working to franchise businesses, Rowe’s goal is to help his clients bring their passions and creativity into their businesses, which Rowe uses to set them apart from other competitors in the industry.
When working with portfolio brands, Rowe and the team at Fransmart take each portfolio brand through a thorough onboarding process, share best practices, and walk each brand through all the business and legal paperwork, as well as every step of the process in becoming a highly successful franchise. Rowe has also worked with large name celebrities that have wanted to build franchises as well as some of the top chefs in the world.
After years of developing restaurants into large franchises, Rowe is bringing his expertise in franchising to different sectors of the business marketplace. He decided to branch out his services to other types of business after the Covid-19 Pandemic took a heavy toll on the restaurant industry. Although the restaurant industry has bounced back after the pandemic, the effects have shown the value of diversifying one's portfolio, leading Rowe to explore retail franchise options.
Rowe has found that many business owners who start out franchising restaurants eventually start to look at other business models they want to pursue. As a result, Rowe has added two non hospitality franchises to his Fransmart portfolio, giving his network of potential franchisees options outside of the sector.
The opportunity to grow a business quickly is what attracted Rowe to franchising initially. In his early franchising career, Rowe focused on blitzscaling - using profits from early locations to fund future locations to accelerate growth. When identifying new brands to work with, he looks for this potential. Emerging brands are his bread and butter because they’re typically hungrier than established brands, less expensive to invest in initially, and offer a quicker path to ROI. When investigating retail brands to partner with, he discovered that some retail and service brands featured even better numbers and easier models to scale than restaurants.
“I’ll always be in the restaurant franchise space but there are also some very interesting non-food brands with much lower start up costs, higher profits, faster return on investment,, and way easier to scale,” says Rowe. “In fact, our restaurant portfolio business models will become more like some of these non-food franchise brands with more volume in less space, more volume with fewer employees and lower opening costs. The goal is to be faster to ROI for franchisees.”
Rowe has been able to turn a small 1-unit electronics retailer that buys and sells used electronics into a large national franchise. Fransmart has also been working with a facial spa that is a subscription based business model, which enables the company to grow quickly without having to constantly attract new customers. This has made it easy to turn the spa into a franchise because the business doesn’t constantly fluctuate like a restaurant.
Rowe has no intention of slowing down anytime soon, as he aims to find another 10 brands to take to 100+ international locations. Later this year, Rowe will be working with Latin brands to bring authentic concepts with traditional foods to the masses. Rowe will work with the restaurateurs to keep everything running to their standards and cultural traditions while showing a history of the business through its development into a large franchise.
“We want every franchisor and their franchisees to get wealthy through franchising. We have a comprehensive strategy and financial models showing our brands and their franchisees how to compound their returns by reinvesting free cash into more locations so it's critical we dial in the most successful unit economics. We have a great deal of experience and contacts we share with our brands and their franchisees, making the process easier,” says Rowe. “At the end of the day we are most interested in growing highly successful franchises and without the right strategy and people in place this is an impossible feat.”
Media Contact:
Name: Dan Sweatt
Email: [email protected]
