Eric Oliver (00:00.178)

All right. Well, welcome everyone to the inaugural episode of Expansion Engine. I am Eric Oliver, Expansion Architect, President of Angelsmith. Glad to have you here. And I am really excited to welcome to the show Jessica Yarmey Welcome, Jessica.

Jessica Yarmey (00:19.276)
Thank you so much for having me. I love the title of Expansion Architect. I might have to swipe that from you.

Eric Oliver (00:26.701)
Please do. Let’s make the whole expansion engineering thing a thing, a movement.

Jessica Yarmey (00:35.202)
Well, you obviously run the expansion play on the tech side. I run it on the franchising side and somehow our powers overlap into a Venn diagram of growth in the boutique fitness space.

Eric Oliver (00:48.22)
Yeah, exactly. Venn diagram or Power Rangers combining all that good stuff. Yeah, I’m here for it. Well, I’ve had the pleasure of working with you for over eight years now. And realistically, you’ve probably forgotten more about franchising and health and fitness and branding, marketing, expansion, and growth than I will probably ever know. So.

Jessica Yarmey (00:56.151)
I love it.

Eric Oliver (01:15.932)
I’m super stoked to have you on and I love, you’re the client that I and my team are always looking forward to having the calls with. So I’m really psyched to have you on. Let’s dive in. So as I was looking at your LinkedIn, I think you have over 25 years experience in franchising now and you’ve worked with a ton of huge brands. So I would just love for you to tell me a bit of…

What has been your journey? How did you get into this? have you done and where are you now?

Jessica Yarmey (01:52.078)
I started in franchising in 2008, so I don’t think it’s technically 25 years, though it probably feels like 35 years, realistically. Franchising years are like dog years, you know, they’re longer than a traditional year. I didn’t entirely realize I was entering the franchising world in working with Burger King. I just felt like I was jumping in to work on a cool brand at an agency. It’s not until

Eric Oliver (01:57.361)
I got it.

Jessica Yarmey (02:20.576)
you’re in it where you kind of realize the environment that franchising creates from a marketing perspective. We were in DMA meetings. We were in pitch calls, like constant quarterly pitching of marketing calendars. And it was just a fascinating deep dive into the franchising space. The Burger King system’s huge, like a regional franchising structure. And once you’re

in franchising, it really is this unique business model that has unique marketing needs, has unique website needs, as you know, and it just really functions in this way that no other business really functions as. So here I am so many years later playing in the same space, but now playing in the fitness space of franchising. So I now have the double niche of franchising plus in fitness.

And I just, love it so much and I can’t really imagine not being in, this kind of world.

Eric Oliver (03:26.97)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s there’s there is a ton of a ton of fun in it. I was just at at the HFA.

webinar for wineries in terms of like things that we learned, I learned from the HFA that they might be able to learn from. And it’s insane how much stuff is going on in fitness and in marketing and with multi-location marketing and all this kind of stuff. It’s like wineries are light years behind. So it is like a really exciting dynamic space. I should say feeling.

Jessica Yarmey (04:10.36)
Well, coming from restaurant and then into fitness, I feel like fitness is behind restaurant. And so then you have the perspective of wineries are behind fitness. I think there’s always things you can learn from looking at other spaces and whether you’re just trying to learn about them from a marketing perspective or whether you’re trying to learn from a social media perspective, there’s always ways that you can look left, look right, and learn from what other people are doing.

Eric Oliver (04:10.725)
Yeah.

Eric Oliver (04:40.228)
Yeah. Do you feel like that’s actually one of your skills? I know that, I mean, you know, Carin, my wife and the other partner in the agency, she, I think one of her superpowers is being able to look at things which are seemingly not the same thing, but then draw parallels between them and, and, and see where in one thing you can apply to another. Do you feel like that’s something that is one of your strong suits?

Jessica Yarmey (05:11.064)
I think one of my superpowers is the ability to look at all of the different pieces that are on the board, whether it’s like resources we have at our disposal, whether it’s connections we have in different spaces and figure out a way to put them together so that it moves the needle for the business. I always look at marketing as if you have a huge budget,

If you have like huge investment already on the board, it’s pretty easy to move the needle with media spend. It’s harder to move the needle when you kind of have to creatively use minimal dollars. And that’s what a lot of franchises are set up to execute on, especially early on, like before they have enough scale of locations. You have to be creative. You have to leverage every single thing you have on the table.

And I consistently say this to my team of like, what do we have that we’re not leveraging? Like, what are the pieces that we need to like uncover that we have access to that we haven’t like actually leaned into?

Eric Oliver (06:17.391)
That’s awesome. do share. Like what are some of the learnings? mean, again, like over time here, what are some of the things that you’ve done, I guess, in that realm really kind of getting scrappy and leveraging or maybe just finding insight into what you maybe hadn’t been leveraging and leveraging it? Do you have any anecdotes on that?

Jessica Yarmey (06:41.984)
Yeah, you’ll probably remember this one. This was two years into being CMO of Club Pilates. And we had this playbook that we would run pretty consistently that was called Join and Get 30. And the whole premise of a Join and Get 30 flash sale is you don’t want to discount something like a Club Pilates experience because it’s a high value experience. So we had these playbooks that would add value in to keep

Eric Oliver (06:44.142)
You

Jessica Yarmey (07:10.478)
the brand proposition high value and not have it be price sensitive. Like we wanted it to always be upper end. And one December, were in need of a big push for December to close out the year strong. And I looked at the marketing budget, talked with the sales team and we were like, what else could we do that would like have a join and get 30 kind of execution to it, but would be a different promotion. And we ended up pulling like,

discounted gift cards from Nordstrom. Like we worked with the Nordstrom team to like get a $50 gift card, but we paid $30 for it. It was one of those kinds of exchanges because we’re buying 10,000 Nordstrom gift cards that were $50 and we’re putting them into a join and get 30 kind of structure. we’re able, because we connected directly with Nordstrom, we were able to use the Nordstrom name and say, join and get $50 at Nordstrom. Do you remember building this?

Eric Oliver (08:10.585)
Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah.

Jessica Yarmey (08:13.352)
And the president of Club Pilates one day, you know, we all had like glass, he had a glass wall around his office and I was just in this like cube farm and he like looks out and he’s like, Jessica, are we paying $50,000 to Nordstrom for something? And I was like, yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.

Eric Oliver (08:29.54)
You

Jessica Yarmey (08:35.118)
But it ended up being great because it was like, what do we have on the table? And what we had was an existing like playbook and structure. And we had a connection at Nordstrom and we were like, okay, like let’s build this and put this thing together. And it got the whole team, like the whole family was excited about it because the Nordstrom name is such a strong name. So sometimes it’s just like looking at like, what do we have that’s on the table and like, how can we

use it to make something new and different. And then of course it goes on the website, it goes on social media, and you tag Nordstrom and you kind of make as big of a deal of it as possible. But it was like a five-day flash sale, but it was probably one of the most memorable things that we built just because of how it came to life and because of the president basically losing his mind that I spent so much money.

Eric Oliver (09:33.379)
I’m picturing him like imagining that a bunch of boxes or shoes are going to show up at the corporate offices.

Jessica Yarmey (09:42.646)
Yeah. Luckily, luckily I had been there for about two years and we had like a level of trust. And so to his credit, he didn’t, he didn’t flip out right away. He kind of gave me the opportunity to, to answer what we were doing and what we were building. And, yeah, it ended up going, it ended up going really well, but it, but it was because we had this, this history of this, this flash sale structure that we were even able to like pull that off. So.

In marketing, there’s just so many different things that you can do and there’s so many different channels that you have to play with. And I think sometimes marketers love to be so creative, but then every time you’re so creative in a franchise structure, you have to realize the trickle down of training pain that that can create for your teams. So in a franchise world, from a marketing side, I almost tell my team, we need to be…

less creative. You know, like we need to be like smart in how we’re building things so that it’s reskinning the same things. So we’re not asking our teams to totally learn something brand new every time we have like a crazy like shower idea.

Eric Oliver (10:51.459)
Right. Or maybe even when I’m hearing you say like maybe even the encouragement is to be creative within a structure, within an established structure. So the creativity isn’t necessarily in the structure or in some brand new shiny toy, but more in like, okay, how can we leverage what we’ve got in a way that we haven’t before in a way that’s going to be new and exciting.

Jessica Yarmey (11:18.818)
Yeah, and I think you can see that kind of play coming to life with like a liquid death where their playbook right now is very much like partnership driven. And they’ll spin up different things because it’s a partnership with this other brand, you know, and they’re kind of consistently running this other people’s, you know, social clout kind of play. But then what that creates is it is just like a rinse and repeat. Like we know the things that are going to change when we do this. We know we’re going to have

the need for a long video edit. We know we’re going to have the need for a short video edit. We know we’re going to have the website changes that need to happen. And it does kind of follow the same general model. And I think, again, brick and mortar businesses in the franchising world, it’s even more important because you’re not just impacting the flow of business to an e-commerce store, which hopefully an e-commerce store can hold and capture whatever you throw at it.

you’re throwing these things to your teams. So whether you’re a Burger King, know, frontline worker, or whether you’re a fitness studio front desk person, it’s the same kind of feeling of like, wait, what is this? This is a new SOP. I have new buttons I need to push. I have new promo codes I need to attach to things. I have a new like way to sell this post-class. And like all of that is more difficult to learn than you think it is when you’re dealing with

frontline staff that’s entry level, young frontline staff that probably haven’t run something like this before. Maybe they’re two months into the role and you just throw the kitchen sink at them and then you expect them to be able to execute it, know, versus like having it affect the frontline very simply.

Eric Oliver (13:09.666)
Yeah, and I imagine that the challenges of that just get more challenging. Like the trickle down is even more impactful the more locations you get, the more you expand. As you scale, that problem probably scales exponentially.

Jessica Yarmey (13:24.898)
Yeah, absolutely.

Eric Oliver (13:26.722)
Wow. Well, guess on that, so I hear, mean, what I’m hearing you say is that it sounds like one of the big things is for you in terms of like successfully expanding brands, successfully encouraging growth is making sure it is really sort of coming up with the structure for the marketing that is going to support that, that sort of scaling and growth. mean,

How do you approach that challenge of like, what is the right structure? What’s gonna be the right structure for this company? What’s gonna be the right structure for growth?

Jessica Yarmey (14:04.138)
In a franchising world, I think a lot of it is empathy and a lot of it is listening. And you know me well enough to know that those two things aren’t like my strong suits. But When you roll something out and your franchisee feedback is, hey, this is going to negatively impact my frontline, so I’m going to opt out of it. You start to kind of quickly realize that like in order to get

full franchisee participation or at least a significant number of the franchisees participating, you need to build something that is easy for them and their teams to execute. So it comes back to like collaborating with franchise owners to build things that make sense. And then when you build it and you’ve built it together and it works, then that gives you permission to build something similar going forward.

and maybe build it a little bit bigger the next time. You kind of take your baby wins as a little bit of credibility, and then that gives you permission to build the next thing on the calendar and go a little bit more crazy with it because you’ve done it once. Now, like, okay, let’s twist that same promotion a little bit because you know you’ve run it successfully before.

Eric Oliver (15:25.984)
Yeah. So as part of that, that sort of empathy, that listening, are you a big believer in kind of the franchise advisory groups, the way a lot of them will self-organize or that the parent franchisor might organize for them? Do you see those as effective tools?

Jessica Yarmey (15:47.412)
Yeah. And you’ve seen this evolution even in how like I’ve done things. Cause at Club Pilates where we had 400 owners in the mix, you have your certain owners that you’re always going to go to for marketing advice, whether it’s through an official committee structure or whether it’s just through like a text message, like, Hey, I’m thinking about this. Like, does this make sense? In building KickHouse where I was building from zero, I was a little bit hesitant to like have

a franchise advisory council or even like a marketing committee, like very early on, because I kind of felt like I need to have all of this locked in. And then I just need their like check mark, check mark. Yes, approval. And, and really what we, what we learned from building KickHouse was most franchise partners want to build with you because they want the business to be successful.

most franchise owners come into franchising with significant business experience, significant business success, and they want to apply what they know to what you’re trying to build. And so the more I asked for help, the more I received help and the faster we were able to grow. So I definitely am a believer in formalized committees, but I’m also a believer in knowing your franchise owners and knowing

who’s good at what, like what business background do they bring to the table and tagging them in, or at least asking them to tag in whenever you’re hitting like an obstacle.

Eric Oliver (17:24.256)
Yeah, that’s great. You know, it’s cool hearing that because, you know, there’s definitely some people on the franchisor side, you know, you can bump into them and there’s a sort of sort of a there can be a sense of superiority that like, okay, well, we’re the franchisor. You’re the franchisees. You guys all think you know how to run the company and you don’t. From you, I’m kind of hearing I’m hearing the opposite of like, I want to hear it. What do you what’s your input? Let’s you know, let’s go.

Jessica Yarmey (17:53.926)
I think you get to that point of a shut down mentality when you’ve been yelled at so many times by franchisees and you’re just like, okay, I’m going to put up the wall because I’m tired of getting yelled at. But that’s why it’s important to build together so that they don’t yell at you because they were part of building it. You’ve made the collective decision to go in a certain direction and

Eric Oliver (18:00.967)
You

Jessica Yarmey (18:19.712)
And therefore, if it fails, like, okay, we went in knowing it had the chance to fail. And if it does fail, it’s not just like, this is on Jessica solely, but this is on like all of us. Like we all collectively failed at this. What did we miss? What were we not thinking through? What went wrong? How do we dial it in and like do it better the next time? And if you look at a marketing calendar, there’s so many moments in a marketing calendar. You’re going to get another at that three weeks from now. So.

you have to have a culture of this, have a crazy idea, it might not work. And build it the best you can, build it collaboratively, get the best possible thinking, the devil’s advocate thinking. And if it fails, it fails. And then three weeks later, do something completely different. That’s maybe something that’s proven, get everybody back to feeling good about what you’re executing, and then move forward with more creativity down the line from there.

Eric Oliver (19:17.375)
Yeah, that’s cool. you know, it’s interesting, we’re kind of moving into mindset, you know, mindset as a CEO mindset as an entrepreneur. And I know that that’s, you know, on your podcast, you touch a lot on that. And you’ve talked with like a variety of different people with a variety of different perspectives. And you yourself, you know, you’ve been CMO, CEO, entrepreneur, you know, consultant in like in so many different ways. So I guess,

You

Based on your experience, in your vocational experiences, what you’re learning from your podcast, et cetera, let’s talk a little bit about mindset. What are the aspects of mindset that you think allow people to be successful in scaling, to be an entrepreneur, et cetera?

Jessica Yarmey (20:08.96)
Mindset is huge. And I’ve definitely evolved in this also, like in KickHouse where we started it first year of the pandemic where everybody was leaving boutique fitness, everybody was leaving brick and mortar. And I had to be the one that was like, we love it, we’re here to stay. I think as the leader, you don’t realize the power that you have until

until you go a little bit negative and then you see how fast your whole team goes negative. And it really like does start to get, like mood can swing so fast in an organization depending on the vibe of the leader. And unfortunately, like the leader is responsible for like being the believer and carrying it all forward. And that’s really hard to do, especially when

there’s so many unknowns, especially when you’re taking like loss after loss after loss, like you still have to like continue to show up with that. Yeah, we got this kind of attitude. so I think the ability to like function in a unknown kind of environment, the ability to like keep your head when everything is negative around you and keep your eyes focused on the bigger.

vision of what you’re trying to build. and that is totally, it’s just a mind game and the, the, resilience that’s needed when you’re trying to build something. And when you’re trying to build something in difficult times or in difficult spaces, it’s all just like what, what’s going to get you out of bed? What’s going to get you like hyped up to be able to like be the champion.

of this on days when you don’t feel like you’re winning at all.

Eric Oliver (22:13.286)
Yeah, so.

Eric Oliver (22:20.177)
The on the so so that’s mindset. I guess what are other? What are other tools that you you’ve found effective? In. You know, scaling brands and in growing brands, I guess. Are there are there any martech tools? Are there any marketing strategies you feel like have been particularly successful?

Yeah, what are, is there anything that you found indispensable for scale?

Jessica Yarmey (22:54.914)
I’ll give you like one fluffy example and one technology example, just because I know you’re in the technology world and like technology is always foundational to everything. But especially when you’re building a young brand, having really strong core values is so important to scale. Because if you have strong core values, strong meaning like they have personality to them, they actually

Eric Oliver (23:01.925)
Yeah.

Jessica Yarmey (23:23.246)
like mean something with how you choose to do business. If you put those up, they do kind of act as guardrails for your team, for franchise owners, where if you’re playing in between these guardrails, if you’re playing through the lens of our core values, you really can’t make like a mistake that’s not repairable. So you can kind of free your team to run faster where you’re able to tell them,

In between these guardrails, full sprint ahead. If there’s something a little bit outside of these guardrails, like check in with me, like let’s make an informed decision and like slow down where you kind of like start to hit those edges. But if it’s right in the heart of what we do, just do it, like just go. And ideally that is what your core values set for you as a baby brand is like, here’s how we do business. So that’s, that’s aspect number one. Like aspect number two.

Eric Oliver (24:21.628)
Before you move on to aspect number two, the aspect number one, that sounds so key. So many times core values are just kind of written on a piece of paper and stuck on the wall and people don’t really, it’s not really that, not really core, that’s lip service. So, I mean, you do a lot in the way of branding.

Jessica Yarmey (24:22.797)
Go ahead.

Eric Oliver (24:45.495)
Is that part of what you do when you get into branding and start working with the company? Is that one of the places that you start as to what are the core values? How do we dial these in, et cetera?

Jessica Yarmey (24:52.696)
Yeah.

For sure. And let’s take a core value of excellence. Like how many companies have you seen that has a core value of excellence? That’s like a nothing core value. Whereas you can use, UFIT has a core value of like raise the bar because it’s a gym and like we’re always pursuing excellence. It’s like what words are you using to describe

how you pursue excellence. Like sometimes companies will approach excellence more from like a growth mindset, but you need to have words around it that have a little bit of heart to them or a little bit of personality to them. Like our kickhouse brand values, we’re not even brand values, we call them kickhouse convictions because to me even just the name of it being like an alliteration, like we’re gonna do everything

brand forward and we’re going to do everything so that it makes sense from a look and feel and sound perspective. And like some of our brand values were like, there’s fight in this family, you know, and like the, the explanation of it is like attached to like, there’s no drama in our house. Like we’re a team, we’re a family that like fights together, like that kind of brand value as opposed to community.

You know, like it doesn’t mean anything. so like looking at your core values and is it just words or is it like, should read like a manifesto, like take your, take your core values, put them next to like what you use as manifesto language. And a lot of brands don’t even have manifesto language. It’s a myth. Cause you can like really like rah rah your whole community around your brand. If you have strong.

Eric Oliver (26:16.175)
Right, right, right.

Jessica Yarmey (26:43.886)
tagline, manifesto, core values internally. Like you want to give your team something to rally around. And if it’s not strong enough to rally around, why would they act around it? You know, and I think that’s something that we definitely believe in the teams that we build. It’s like, we have to have strong core values. We have to have a vibe. So even as we’re hiring, we’re not just hiring people who like,

Work hard. How many places have hard work as a core value? No, the core value is fire through chaos, things that are tied to how we do business. We build in flames every single day. It’s not just hard work, it’s difficult work, and it’s chaotic, and it’s going to feel more difficult than anything that you’ve done. But when you’re

done with it, you’re going to feel like the phoenix rising from the ashes, like that kind of core value. So then as you’re hiring, you’re like, do I get that vibe from that person? Or are they just saying lip service, like, I’m a hard worker. No, we want people that are next level, crazy, comfortable in chaos, kind of startup environment kind of people.

Eric Oliver (28:06.168)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re totally right. It’s nailing that flavor because there’s there’s hard workers in the form of like, put your head down and barrel forward. There’s hard workers in terms of like, yeah, I want to I want to be in the trenches with you. know, there’s different flavors of it. And you’re right. I can totally see how having that clearly enunciated would really could drive so many different parts of it.

Jessica Yarmey (28:28.546)
Yeah.

Eric Oliver (28:31.261)
It’s funny you mentioned that you mentioned the manifesto because I’ve seen a couple of your brand documents now and I see the manifestos in there. So now I know I know the thinking behind them.

Jessica Yarmey (28:38.894)
It’s built before the first door is opened. You build your manifesto before you build your four walls. But it’s true because it gives you something to unite around. You use the word flavor. Flavor is a great word. And too many brands have no flavor.

Eric Oliver (29:03.479)
Yeah, totally. Okay. Well, I guess we can’t do a podcast without looking to the future somewhat. the HFA just went to, we didn’t get to the, didn’t. Yeah. Give me, give me the tech. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah.

Jessica Yarmey (29:17.228)
Wait, feel like, no, wait, feel like I need to, I need to give you the second thing. I need to give you the technology thing. Okay. Because, because we are working through this with two different, two different scenarios, right? Like you and I collectively, you have to build a brand, like when you’re starting out. So like you have your core values. That was point number one. Point number two is like, you have to build things correctly from the start. Like there are so many brands that, that I ended up consulting with that get to

15 locations, get to 20 locations, get to 30 locations. And they’ve built things incorrectly from a tech perspective. you and I have worked together on these kind of scenarios where either they have like over tech where every vendor that emailed them, they said yes to because they sold a lot of territory. So they have cash on hand and they’re like, yes, we need this. And then yes, we also need this. And then your tech stack is

inefficient and overlapped with same vendors offering same services. And none of it is, none of it is efficient and budget, budget friendly. And we’ve also worked on brands where like the tech is upside down from a franchising perspective. And like you’re, if you’re not set up correctly from a digital infrastructure perspective on a franchise brand, it is so hard to, to fix that.

And so I just sent you a brand that’s starting from zero. And so like from zero, I’m like, this brand has one location, but I want it built. it’s like, it will have two locations fast, then it will have three locations fast. And so like, if you set it up like that from location one, and if you work together with who’s building your website, hopefully Angelsmith, but like if you’re building it correctly from the start, it’s just so much easier to add.

Eric Oliver (31:08.011)
Yeah.

Jessica Yarmey (31:13.536)
as you grow, as opposed to realize at 15 locations, realize at 30 locations that you’ve built it wrong. And the fix when you’re at 30 locations is substantial. And the adjustment to your franchisees when it’s at 30 and you need to fix something technology wise is substantial. You end up having to change a lot of your SOPs when like information just flows differently when you move your technology around. So…

I think there’s so much emphasis on from the start, structuring it correctly. If you know your goal is franchising, and most people, know it. They know that they want to franchise, and for whatever reason, they’ll build their tech stack to not be franchisee friendly. Then when you decide to franchise, it’s this realization of, it requires different technology. Franchising requires different tech setup

than a corporate owned setup. So if you have in your mind that you want this to franchise, like do it from day one, like structure it that way. And maybe it’s a little bit more expensive to build it that way from day one, but then you’re not having that shift or that edit that you’re gonna need when it is 15 locations, when it is 30 locations. It’s just so difficult to like unravel things once you’re so far down the line with that many locations.

Eric Oliver (32:40.824)
Yeah, well, you’re totally speaking my language here. I think one of the interesting things is like, you’re saying like a lot of people, they don’t build it to work with a franchise from the beginning. And I think it’s because a lot of people don’t know how to structure things to work that way. And I know that us, we as an agency, we first got into working with franchises, there was like a learning process of like,

yeah, they need to do this. Like, yeah, this needs to be really standardized, but there needs to be the ability to make the exception for the one squeaky wheel franchise. you know, like there needs to be, it’s such an interesting mix of structure and definition, but also needing the flexibility to make exceptions, to pivot, to evolve in a certain way. It’s, yeah, it’s wild. It is a really exciting.

That’s one of the things I find most exciting.

Jessica Yarmey (33:40.398)
Well, and here’s the easiest example. Like franchise is not having good location pages. Franchisees realizing their location pages suck, building their own individual franchise pages. And then the cat is out of the bag. Like you’ve to, you’ve to like undo that if you’re a franchisor. And how do you undo that once it’s, once it’s done? Once you’ve told, I have two different clients that I work with. They tell their franchise owners to buy

their own local domains so they can have their own emails on their local domains. Why would you do that? Keep everything on the same domain. You don’t want franchise owners to have emails on different domains, let alone websites on different domains. But the way you get around that is to build the best possible mousetrap. So you’re not inspiring owners to go and

They’ll get solicitations from local website builders and the local website builder is going to go onto their local page. They’re going to say, hey, Club Pilates, Dalton Corners, your website is crappy. You should build your location page with me and I’ll link it to your Google My Business listing and we’ll run leads through this website that I build for you. And to a franchisee, that’s going to sound great, especially if they’re not getting leads through

website. So as a marketer, you need to be like ahead of all of that. And you need to have thought through all of that. So you know the answers when those vendor questions come in. And then you know the website that you’ve built is the best possible mousetrap. And then you can show the franchise owner, like, here’s why, here’s how many leads you’re getting through the website. And it’s not, I’m enforcing this through the FDD because you can’t per your technology agreement.

you’re enforcing it from a like, I know exactly how to do this. Like, don’t go rogue. Don’t go and build your own thing. Like I’ve built you the best possible thing, but you don’t always see that until it’s too late until the cat’s out of the bag. And then you can’t get the cat back into the bag. Like that’s just like an impossible, impossible ask for a marketer or a CEO. It’s impossible.

Eric Oliver (35:54.805)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and it’s funny too, because we’ve experienced, like any sort of local agency is always going to tell you that your local pages suck, which is not always the case. But yeah, I reflect on what you’re talking about too. It’s not necessarily that complicated in terms of the technological build. You just need to know what you’re doing. You need to know that

hey, this does need to be connected to Google Business Profile. It does need to be connected to this. They are going to need to be able to do at least control aspects of their page that are for local SEO. What can we do on a corporate side to support keyword-specific things? Can we anticipate that for them, take it off their plate at a minimal of cost? And that becomes a bonus to them. To your point, think it’s sort of like the Declaration of Independence.

will suffer things while sufferable. when it becomes unsufferable, they’ll go rogue, to your point. And if you give people a good enough mousetrap, they’d be happy to use it. So yeah, I agree.

Jessica Yarmey (37:11.714)
Yeah, it just has to work for what they are trying to do as business owners. Like they are business owners. And so if you think about how you would run a business as a business owner, if you think about the kind of information you would want on your local website, if you think about how you would want your local website to rank, if you think about like all of those kinds of things, like you do have to put yourself in the mind of the franchisee.

and also be able to put yourself in the mind of the franchisor. And you need to be able to bridge those two perspectives together to say like this web environment, this social environment, like whatever you’re building technology wise, it needs to work for both sides of that equation.

Eric Oliver (37:58.713)
All right. So now let’s talk future. you see what do you see if anything coming down the pike that is going to be affecting the future of health and fitness franchising multi-location growth, those kinds of things.

Jessica Yarmey (38:17.112)
Well, just like everybody’s watching AI, like the AI layer to marketing is huge. And I think it will have implications on the operation side eventually, you know, on like some of those aspects of the business, but right out of the gate, AI, chat, GPT, like all of that impacts marketing so much. The ability to run personalized automations, the ability to have content.

for days on your pages, the ability to have localized content for days on your pages. All of that is so on trend from a marketing side, and you have scrappy small agencies who are going to be out there, not just pitching you as the CMO of their business, but they’re going to be out there pitching your franchise owners individually. And so you have to be ahead

of what this offering is, and you have to show your franchise owners that you have an action plan for how to utilize it going forward. And where you can’t show that you’re in it and learning it and know how to best leverage it for maximizing success for your franchise owners, you’re losing respect with your franchise owners because they’re expecting you to be their marketing resource.

And so where scrappy, small AI resource is coming in and telling them things like you need to be ahead of that. So a lot of it is, and you and I have these conversations all the time of like, how do we evolve? What’s the next step? Yes, we’re fine right here. What’s, what’s the next layer and, and, and show maybe we can’t get to this.

in the next six months, but we can at least show the leadership team that we’re thinking about it and that we know like it’s on the roadmap somewhere. We have a plan around it. We’re not just turning a blind eye, especially to AI things. Like you can’t ignore AI from a marketing perspective right now.

Eric Oliver (40:24.915)
Yeah, 100%. I’ve been impressed because you know, MarTech is my thing, and I keep getting impressed by how quickly things are evolving. I I was telling my son the other day, we’re not far away from the Star Trek days where we’ll just, computer, tell me this. I’m hearing AI voice, voice.

chats with prospects that are, mean, is not only just, they’re not trying to masquerade as a human. are identifying that they are AI and then they’re helping. And it’s like for the first time, I’m actually seeing that stuff, not just be a gimmick, but actually be a value to the people that, I can get done what I need to get done.

after hours. can get all my questions answered. I gave a call and you’re actually surprised and delighted that someone that this bot picked up and can handle everything for you that your team and you didn’t, as a customer you’re like, actually that was really painless. That was great. It’s pretty amazing the way things are evolving.

Jessica Yarmey (41:42.466)
Yeah, and it goes back to like the traditional marketers playbook of like, you have to test things, you have to test small and then roll out big. So like the first step is education and staying like ahead of what’s happening. The best way that I’ve found to stay ahead of what’s happening is to like have good vendor partners in my pocket, like working with you guys and like asking those questions and challenging your vendors to

to give you the answer to that test, to say like, what do I need to be like looking for that’s down the road? And then when you see like, okay, I think it’s going to be X, Y, Z. I think I can put a smart chat onto the website and regardless of time of day, I think I can get like fast feedback to lead. And I think that will drive my booking rates high, or I think that will drive my conversion rates higher. Test.

connect it to your traditional KPIs that you’re watching anyway, and then roll it out. I think there is this thought around AI. think maybe because it’s just like intimidating of like how powerful it is and you have this thought as a marketer, like I need to dive in. You don’t need to dive in. You need to like dip your toe in. You need to test things just like you would any other promotion that you’re running. If you’re in restaurant, like you test an LTO, like test it.

learn and then roll it out. You know, there’s not the pressure to do it right now. There’s not the pressure to do it across all of your locations. There is the pressure to play in it and learn it and be ready to roll it out across all. It doesn’t need to be across all tomorrow.

Eric Oliver (43:29.916)
Yeah, totally. And I love always, you do toss those challenges out. That’s always one of the fun things that we get to do when we work with you, because you do toss out like, OK, well, what’s next? What about this? Where do we go from here?

Jessica Yarmey (43:44.524)
Well, and as a marketer who has vendor partners on the phone, like, why wouldn’t you try to tap into the brain power? Like where you are in your slice of the equation all day long, like I’m in your slice of the equation 5 % of the time. Like, so you’re going to know it better than me. So like, I think we end up hiring all of these people sometimes with like overlapping skills and we have a tech stack that’s like a

a deep tech stack, because we think the more tech we have, the better our tech is going to be. And that’s not always the case, but then you hire these vendors and you don’t, you don’t hold up your part of it, which is asking smart questions of those people. and so I think like that’s where we’re having like a good working relationship is important. It’s not just like, we truly do work together on it. Like, I think we come with like, here’s what we think. And then we also.

keep the conversation open to say like, what do you see from your side?

Eric Oliver (44:46.693)
love that. All right, well, I want to be respectful of your time here. Quickly, what’s next for you? Flex society, society beyond.

Jessica Yarmey (44:57.71)
These are difficult questions that you’re asking, Eric. You just know we’re always up to no good. We’re always in brands that are expanding. We’re always interested in helping brands that are looking to expand. And apart from that, we keep all of our options open.

Eric Oliver (45:01.751)
hahahaha

Yeah.

Eric Oliver (45:19.737)
Love it. All right. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Where can listeners connect with you?

Jessica Yarmey (45:25.774)
The easiest place is LinkedIn. I’m Jessica Yarmey on all social media platforms.

Eric Oliver (45:32.177)
All right, cool. And we should plug the podcast. You got your own podcast where you talk with a bunch of great people in the industry, entrepreneurship, health specific.

Jessica Yarmey (45:41.164)
That’s true. That’s true. My podcast is called The Society Pod and maybe I’ll just copy paste this over to my podcast. see. We use all content everywhere, marketing style.

Eric Oliver (45:49.425)
There we go. Go for it. It’s syndicate the content. love it. Exactly. Perfect. All right. Well, I appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much, Jessica. And yeah, I look forward to the next conversation.

Jessica Yarmey (46:07.256)
Thank you so much for having me.

Eric Oliver (46:09.361)
Alright, take care.

Bye.