Why The Best Franchise Development Leaders Don't Think Of Themselves As Salespeople
- Katherine LeBlanc
- Mar 7
- 3 min read
There's a word that gets thrown around a lot in franchise development. Closing. Closing ratio, closing timeline, closing the deal. The whole language of the discipline is built around sales.
Paul Pickett has been CDO and EVP of Franchising at Wild Birds Unlimited for nearly 37 years. He's grown the system to over 360 locations. And he will tell you directly that he has never thought of himself as a salesperson.
"We're stewards. Stewards of our candidates and stewards of our brand."
That's not semantics. That framing changes everything about how you build a development team, how you qualify candidates, and what success actually looks like on the other side of an award.
The Shoebox Problem
Paul started as the first full time employee at Wild Birds Unlimited's franchise support center. Employee number two, behind a part time bookkeeper. His first job was to put his desk together, order himself a phone, and start calling prospects from a literal shoebox of unanswered inquiry cards that had been sitting there untouched.
He had no business background. No franchise experience. He'd gone to school to become an ornithologist. What he had was genuine curiosity about people and a belief that the candidate in front of him deserved a real conversation, not a pitch.
That instinct turned out to be the thing that built one of the most admired franchise development cultures in the industry.
You Are Always Selling The Initiative
One of the most important things Paul said — and something I think every franchisor needs to hear — is that franchising is an industry of influence. When his coaching team came in from corporate retail backgrounds, the first thing they had to unlearn was the assumption that if something comes down from above, it gets done.
It doesn't work that way in franchising. You are always selling the initiative. Every rollout, every program, every new tool requires you to understand where each franchisee is — intellectually, emotionally, in terms of time and bandwidth and money — before you can move them forward.
That's not a sales skill. That's a stewardship skill. And it's the reason Paul's team doesn't just know their franchisees. They know them individually.
What The Numbers Actually Reflect
Wild Birds Unlimited doesn't sell territory packs. They don't award a second location until the first one is genuinely running well. Their Item 20 is clean. Their Item 19 reflects a system where franchisee profitability is the actual goal, not the talking point.
None of that happens by accident. It happens because the development team is asking a different question at every stage of the process. Not can we close this candidate, but should we award this candidate, and are we the right fit for each other.
Paul's coaching team has institutional authority to say no to any award. And they use it.
The Legacy Question
When I asked Paul what he hopes is still true in five years, he didn't talk about unit growth or development targets. He said he wants to leave a legacy of franchisees who are going to miss him when he's gone.
That answer tells you everything about why stewardship works where selling doesn't. Selling is transactional. Stewardship is relational. And in a business where your franchisees are betting their savings, their time, and in a lot of cases their family's future on a brand, the relationship is the whole thing.
If you're building a franchise development team right now, the question worth asking isn't who has the best closing ratio. It's who genuinely cares whether the people they bring into the system succeed.
Check out more conversations with franchise leaders on the Franchise Leader Spotlight Podcast — part of the Franchise Podcast Network.
This conversation was brought to you by My Podcast Host.
