FBR Summit 2026 · Austin, TX
What's Working Right Now · Thursday, October 29

Free. Affordable. Worth it.

What you can actually get from your partners this year.

Thanks for coming to our panel! Everything we talked about is on this page, including the full list, the prompts, the case studies, and how to reach each of us.

The panel

Kris Stuart, CFE

President/CEO, Bloomin' Blinds · Moderator

Kris runs Bloomin' Blinds, a window treatment franchise with 60+ locations, and kept the questions on what a franchisor can use right now.

Dave Hansen

CEO, ClientTether

Dave leads ClientTether, a CRM built for franchise systems. He covered speed to lead, follow-up, and total cost of ownership.

Ingrid Schneider

Founder & CEO, Stay In Your Lane and Train In Your Lane

Ingrid runs a franchise marketing agency and its sister AI training company. She also once ran one of the largest comedy clubs in the country.

Shray Mehra

Co-founder & COO, EZee Assist

Shray leads customer and product work at EZee Assist, which connects a franchise's existing systems so every location can act on its data.

Full disclosure: Dave and Ingrid both work with Kris and Bloomin' Blinds.

The list

Twelve things we covered, grouped by what they cost. Most people can do the first four this week.

Free

No budget needed.

  1. Ask every supplier one question

    Put this in your next QBR or vendor check-in: "What are you doing with AI on my account that I'm not seeing?" Kris asked it. He got two real answers and one shrug, which told him a lot.

    CostOne email

  2. Turn on what you already pay for

    Zoom and Google Meet can write your meeting recaps. Canva has Magic Studio. Your CRM probably has a sparkle icon nobody has clicked yet. Every franchisee call can end with a written recap and action items, and nobody has to type it.

    CostAlready in your budget

  3. Build a franchisee FAQ in 20 minutes

    Upload your ops manual and 90 days of support emails into NotebookLM, then ask for the top 20 questions with answers. We did it live on stage in about 90 seconds. Use prompt 3.

    Cost$0 (NotebookLM is free)

  4. Write your brand voice guide from your own emails

    Paste in your 10 best emails and ask for a one-page voice guide, then send it to every franchisee. Local posts and review replies start sounding like your brand. Use prompt 4.

    CostAbout 20 minutes

Affordable

A small monthly spend or a weekend.

  1. Put your team on one company AI plan

    Use Claude or ChatGPT on a company plan instead of personal accounts so your data policy applies. Teams that commit to one tool tend to get further than teams using ten. Nobody pastes franchisee P&Ls into a free account anymore.

    CostAbout $30 per seat a month

  2. Pay for the class your team asks for

    If someone asks for a course or a workshop, say yes. You'll find out quickly who takes you up on it, and that person usually ends up teaching everyone else.

    CostA few hundred dollars

  3. Build small internal tools yourself

    A scorecard, an L10 tracker, or an HQ dashboard is fair game if it's internal, does one job, and never touches customer data. Ingrid replaced a paid EOS platform with one she built. Run the five questions first.

    CostA weekend and a few dollars a month to host

  4. Automate lead handoffs

    When a lead comes in, text the franchisee, log it, and send a nudge if nobody touches it within 24 hours. It costs less than a part-time hire. Use prompt 6.

    Cost$20 to $50 a month, no code

Worth it

Bigger investments with results behind them.

  1. A CRM built for franchising

    One platform for lead response, follow-up, quoting, payments, and reporting across every location. See the Painter1 case study.

  2. Connect the systems you already have

    Link your existing tools so every location can act on its data, with workflows built once and run everywhere. See the EZee Assist case study.

  3. Get the foundation in place first

    Set up the marketing infrastructure and train your team before you buy the next tool. See the Bloomin' Blinds and RR46 case studies.

  4. AI for tier 1 franchisee support

    Train it on your ops manual and past tickets so it answers the easy questions and hands the hard ones to a person.

    CostLess than one support hire

Before you build it yourself

AI makes it easy to build your own tools. Only do it if all five of these are true.

  1. It has one clear job.
  2. It's low risk if it breaks.
  3. It's internal only.
  4. It doesn't touch payments or customer data.
  5. Someone on your staff owns it.

If any of them are false, buy from a partner who has already handled security, permissions, and scale. Building the small connecting pieces yourself is fine, but anything that has to run across hundreds of units should be bought.

Prompts

Paste these into Claude, ChatGPT, or NotebookLM. Swap in your own details wherever you see brackets.

1Ask a supplier about AI

Write a short, friendly email to [supplier name], our [type of vendor]. Ask what they're currently doing with AI on our account that we may not be seeing, what they plan to roll out in the next 6 months, and whether any of it changes our pricing. Keep it under 120 words and make it sound like a partner asking, not an audit.

2Meeting recap

Here is the transcript from our franchisee call. Write a recap with three sections: what we decided, action items with an owner and due date for each, and open questions. Keep it skimmable and write it in plain language a franchisee can forward to their team.

3Franchisee FAQ (NotebookLM)

Using our operations manual and these support emails, list the 20 questions franchisees ask most often. Answer each one in 2 to 3 sentences, cite the manual section it comes from, and flag any question the manual doesn't answer clearly.

4Brand voice guide

Here are 10 emails that sound the most like our brand. Write a one-page voice guide covering how we sound, words we use, words we avoid, how we open and close, and three before-and-after examples. Write it so a franchisee can use it for social posts and review replies.

5Build or buy

I'm thinking about building [describe the tool] myself with AI. Walk me through these five questions one at a time: Does it have one clear job? Is it low risk if it breaks? Is it internal only? Does it avoid payments and customer data? Will someone on staff own it? Then tell me plainly whether I should build it or buy it, and what could go wrong either way.

6Lead handoff automation

Design a simple no-code automation for our franchise system: when a new lead comes in, text the franchisee, log the lead in [CRM], and send a reminder if nobody has touched it in 24 hours. List the steps, the tools that could do each one, and anything I need to set up first.

7Total cost of ownership

I'm comparing [Tool A] and [Tool B] for our franchise system of [number] locations. Help me estimate the total cost of ownership over 3 years, including setup, training time, monthly fees, usage-based AI costs that could rise, and the cost of switching later. Show your math in a simple table.

Case studies

ClientTether and Painter1

Painter1 provides residential and commercial painting services across its franchise system. The brand chose ClientTether to respond to inquiries faster, keep customer engagement consistent, and give owners more time to grow their businesses.

The challenge

  • Handling high lead volume and responding before competitors
  • Following up consistently and turning more inquiries into jobs
  • Getting more repeat business and referrals
  • Cutting manual work across follow-up, quoting, and payments
  • Seeing performance across locations from the franchisor side
  • Spotting gaps where owners need coaching

What they did

ClientTether responds to Painter1 leads within seconds, automates follow-up, and asks for repeat business and referrals. Dashboards show the franchisor team how every location is performing, and franchise business coaches now coach straight from that data, pairing owners with peers who are strong where they're struggling.

65 to 80%Lead close rates reported by Painter1 franchise owners
5 jobsBooked in one day by one owner, all from repeat business and referrals

"With the lead response automation tools, our franchisees can schedule appointments with almost all of their leads before our competitors even call them!"

Jason Leber, Director of Franchise Operations, Painter1

EZee Assist and a 600+ location health and wellness franchise

As this membership brand grew, it added a separate system for nearly every part of the business: booking and POS (which doubled as the CRM), texting and marketing, a knowledge base, team chat, training, and about seven more. The brand built a data warehouse and dashboards so leadership could see across all of it, but studio teams still had to log into each system to act on what the reports showed.

What they did

EZee Assist connected the existing systems and the warehouse so the data could be used in daily work. That meant standard integrations where they existed, custom connections where they didn't, and a lot of behind-the-scenes work matching guest records, keeping data current, and setting permissions by role and location. Nothing was replaced.

Two workflows

Daily membership brief. Each morning, the workflow checks the schedule for non-members. For each guest it pulls visit history, preferences, current offers, and the brand's membership sales training, then gives the studio manager talking points before the guest walks in.

30-minute gap fill. Two days out, it finds the 30-minute gaps between hour-long appointments, texts the guest on either side who is most likely to book along with a current promo, and tries the other guest if the slot is still open by a set time. This one is built and rolling out now.

$2.3MAnnual membership revenue opportunity identified at one studio, using that studio's own booking and visit data

That's potential revenue the workflow surfaced, not revenue collected, and it came from one location out of more than 600.

Stay In Your Lane and Bloomin' Blinds

Bloomin' Blinds was growing faster than its marketing could keep up. Nobody owned marketing day to day, franchisees were mostly doing local marketing on their own, and there was no shared playbook or benchmark. Trust between franchisees and HQ was slipping.

What they did

For eight months, Stay In Your Lane worked as the brand's marketing department:

  1. Wrote a franchisee marketing manual covering brand standards, channels, local execution, vendors, and metrics
  2. Ran a recurring live webinar series for training and Q&A
  3. Coordinated a website rollout across 60+ locations
  4. Built ready-to-use social content, campaign playbooks, and templates
  5. Set local market strategy and reviewed every franchisee, vendor, and creative deliverable for brand standards

The team used Claude, Canva, Lindy, Claude Cowork, OpenAI Codex, and a live HTML dashboard built in a week. People made the strategic calls, and AI helped them move faster.

Read the full case study →

+41%Median franchisee revenue, year over year
+28%Average revenue per location, year over year
+16%System-wide revenue, year over year

April 2026 was the best sales month in Bloomin' Blinds history. Median revenue grew 13 points faster than the average, so the middle of the roster grew faster than the top.

Train In Your Lane and RR46

RR46 is a family of marketing, media, and insights companies that includes Flint Group. Its 16 senior leaders were all using AI differently. Some used it every day, some weren't sure what was safe to share, and some had outdated ideas about how it works.

What they did

Ingrid led a four-hour, in-person session for the leadership team in Fargo, North Dakota. It covered how AI works, what's safe to share with AI tools, meta-prompting, and automation with tools like Lindy.

RR46 has since brought Train In Your Lane back to run AI cohorts for its Creative and Client Services teams.

Read the full case study →

100%Rated their clarity on data safety a 4 or 5
81%Had already put something to use, mostly Lindy automations and meta-prompting
+50Net Promoter Score with zero detractors. 94% rated the session a 4 or 5 out of 5.

"The first time I felt true alignment across the leadership team on how we move forward together."

VP, RR46

Contact

Window treatment franchise with 60+ locally owned locations across the U.S. Franchisees handle custom blinds, shades, shutters, draperies, motorization, outdoor shading, commercial work, and repair.

Kristopher Stuart, CFE, President/CEO

kris.stuart@bloominblinds.com
972-510-3110
5360 Legacy Dr, Ste 155, Plano, TX 75024

Schedule a call with Kris · bloominblinds.com

This is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy a franchise. For those individuals who qualify, an offer to sell the franchise will only be made in conjunction with the delivery of a Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD).

Franchise CRM built by franchisors. Texting, calling, email, lead routing, quoting, invoicing, payments, review requests, and franchise reporting in one system, with unlimited users. Used for FranDev, onboarding, and unit operations.

Dave Hansen, CEO

dave@clienttether.com
Sales: sales@clienttether.com
(385) 332-8144
105 N Main St, Spanish Fork, UT 84660

clienttether.com

Connects a franchise's playbooks, performance data, and existing systems so every location gets answers, workflows, and coaching support. Anything that reaches customers or money needs human approval. Used by 70+ franchise brands across 5,000+ locations.

Shray Mehra, Co-founder & COO

shray@ezeeassist.com
Sales: sales@ezeeassist.com
855-777-3933

Talk to their team · ezeeassist.com

Stay In Your Lane is a franchise marketing agency that works as an embedded marketing team: brand strategy, FranDev marketing, franchisee manuals and playbooks, local marketing, websites, and social. Train In Your Lane is its AI training company, offering keynotes, team training, cohorts, and Fractional Chief AI Officer support.

Ingrid Schneider, Founder & CEO

ingrid@stayinyourlaneco.com

Book a 30-minute call · stayinyourlaneco.com · traininyourlane.com · Free AI calculators

Thanks for coming, and thank you to FBR for having us! Questions we didn't get to? Reach out to any of us above.