By Matt Wampler, CEO of ClearCOGS
An operations leader at a franchise brand with roughly 150 locations walked us through the system she is buying, and the conversation was unlike most software evaluations we sit in. Her brand is choosing its first real back office platform. The current one, in her words, is a spreadsheet. She has a formal RFP, a shortlist, and a timeline. And here is the striking part: almost none of what she cared about was features.
What she cared about was whether anyone would actually use the thing.
The Constraint That Changes Everything
Her situation makes the problem unusually honest. The brand is almost entirely franchised, mostly single-unit owners. The franchise agreements stagger in a way that means some stores will sit on the current point of sale for another three years, so a rip-and-replace platform is off the table; whatever she buys has to work around what exists. Her franchisees are, as she put it, tech savvy but tech averse. Many of the legacy stores are comfortably profitable and run on feel: money is in the account, so things must be fine. Which means corporate cannot help them find the margin they are leaving behind, because corporate has no visibility, and it cannot simply mandate its way to visibility either.
A corporate-owned chain can decree a rollout and measure compliance. A franchisor has to win a hundred and fifty separate elections, one owner at a time, every single day the tool exists. That constraint sounds like a weakness. Watching this operator work, we would argue it is the opposite: it forces a discipline that most technology buyers skip.
How She Engineers Adoption
Every requirement on her list is an adoption mechanism dressed up as a spec.
One system, one login. She was explicit that even if piecing together best-of-breed tools were cheaper, a bundle wins, because her owners judge value as what you get divided by what it costs, and effort is part of the cost. A second login is a price increase. A third system to learn is a price increase. Vendors quote in dollars; franchisees pay in attention.
Language is table stakes. A large share of her workforce does not speak English as a first language, so a tool that only works in English is, for a meaningful fraction of her system, a tool that does not work.
The fee that disappears. Her pricing plan for franchisees is the cleverest piece: charge a monthly fee for the platform, then waive it for any owner who uses it correctly and consistently. Pay in cash or pay in time. The tool literally becomes cheaper the more you adopt it, which converts the habit-building period, the exact stretch where most rollouts die, into the money-saving move.
The tenth rule. Her most quotable insight was a piece of humility most software buyers never voice: however much vendors want to believe labor and inventory occupy half of a franchisee’s mind, it is realistically a tenth. Her own team runs a version of this discipline internally: if a process cannot be explained in about 90 seconds, it goes back to be simplified. Any tool that demands more attention than a tenth of a mind can give will simply not get used, no matter what it can do.
The Industry Pays for the Opposite Approach
If this sounds like overkill, consider what happens when organizations buy on features and hope adoption sorts itself out. Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, built on an analysis of more than 40 million software licenses, found that organizations leave an average of 36 percent of their licenses unused. That figure comes largely from corporate environments, places where leadership can mandate tools and still watches a third of the spend produce nothing. Unused software is not a discount version of a tool. It is a fee.
Franchising just makes this truth impossible to hide. When adoption is voluntary, a tool that does not get used does not get quietly absorbed into overhead; it gets loudly rejected, and the operator hears about it at the next franchisee meeting. Her evaluation method, judging every candidate system by the physics of whether a busy, skeptical, single-unit owner will reach for it daily, is the method every operator should use, franchised or not.
The Question That Sorts Every Tool
We think about this constantly, because it is the half of our work that has nothing to do with math. A forecast can be exactly right and still worthless if it arrives in a dashboard nobody opens. The number has to show up where the team already looks, in the language they speak, in a format that takes seconds to act on, or the accuracy never touches the food cost. That is why the second half of ClearCOGS, alongside the data science, is people from restaurant operations whose entire job is making the answer easy to use.
The exercise worth stealing from this operator takes one afternoon. List every system your operation pays for. Next to each, write not what it can do, but what your teams actually use it for, daily, without being chased. Anything with a blank next to it is not a capability. It is a line item wearing a costume. Her spreadsheet, for all its limitations, passed the only test that matters: people used it. The system that replaces it will have to earn that the same way, and she is one of the few buyers we have met who is negotiating for exactly that.
Sources
- Zylo. 2026 SaaS Management Index. January 2026. zylo.com
