This week, in a column for QSR Magazine, Franklin Buchanan laid out what his young Chicago chicken brand, Minnie Bird, is building before it grows. It is a thoughtful list: an operating model that repeats, training that doesn’t depend on the founders, scorecards that flag trouble early. It also contains this sentence: “National growth will not happen because we put pins on a map or sign development agreements.”
Minnie Bird has three company restaurants open, all in the Chicago suburbs. Its first multi-unit deal, announced in July, is for 20 restaurants in Orlando and Tampa, more than 1,000 miles from its flagship in Schaumburg. “We built Minnie Bird to travel,” its cofounder David Sloan said at the time. The column doesn’t mention geography at all.
I don’t think that’s hypocrisy. (A founder’s column is a list of intentions, and these are good ones.) Buchanan’s best line is that a franchise agreement “may create the legal right to grow, but it does not create the operational ability to support growth.” Looked at closely, the Florida deal obeys it. The column just never says why, and the why is what a young franchisor most needs to know before selling a first territory. Most founders are told to cluster near home. That’s a decent habit and the wrong rule. The rule is simpler and stricter: don’t sell a market your support team can’t reach.
Why the First Franchise Units Have to Be Reachable
Consider the choice a new franchisor faces once its paperwork is filed. An experienced operator 1,000 miles away wants 20 units. A first-time buyer two states over wants one. The home market still has room nobody has bought. All three bring in fee money, and a brand whose support team is a handful of people needs every dollar of it.
That money has to go further than most founders think. FRANdata reported last week that a franchise brand’s recurring revenue doesn’t cover its operating costs until it reaches somewhere between 35 and 120 units, about 80 on average. Until then, training, field visits and openings are paid for out of franchise fees and investors’ capital. The first few dozen units are subsidized, and where they open decides how far the subsidy stretches.
A lone store two states away costs little to sell and a great deal to serve. Every visit is a flight and a hotel. Every opening pulls trainers out of the home market. And a first-time owner needs more help than anyone in the system and is the farthest from the people who give it.
Sean Rentchler, who runs development at MassageLuXe, told 1851 Franchise last week that founders get excited when someone wants in. Then, he said, it becomes “We’ll sell to anybody, anywhere.” When he arrived, the brand had three New Jersey spas with little around them. By building near those three, it sold six more New Jersey units in two months.
The Case for Selling Where the Operator Is
The strongest argument against any rule about geography comes from a brand that ignored geography and won. “Our strategy has always been that we’re going to go where the great operator is,” Holly Canady, then Dave’s Hot Chicken’s chief development officer, told Restaurant Dive in 2023. Dave’s went from two restaurants at the start of 2020 to 118 by March 2023. In June 2025, Roark Capital agreed to buy it in a deal valued at $1 billion. A founder told to fill in the home market first would have grown more slowly, and might have lost the best operators in other cities to a competitor.
That is a real record, and I don’t want to wave it away. But look at who Dave’s sold to. “We take no mom-and-pops at Dave’s,” its CEO, Bill Phelps, told Franchise Times in 2022. “We take multi-unit fast food or fast casual operators that have opened and operated those kinds of restaurants in the market.” The bar was five or more quick-service or fast-casual restaurants already running, $5 million in net worth and $2.5 million in cash. Once a deal was signed, the company’s real estate and construction people were on the phone within two days. Its operations team could handle up to six openings a week.
So Dave’s never sold a market it couldn’t reach. It made the franchisee bring the reach: the managers, the back office, the experience of opening restaurants in that city. Headquarters didn’t have to travel, because the support already lived there.
Phelps knew the alternative firsthand. Of the early days at Wetzel’s Pretzels, which he cofounded, he said, “If you could fog a mirror, we’d sell you a franchise in the early days.” At Blaze Pizza, and then at Dave’s, he required franchisees to be multi-unit operators already.
How to Sequence Your First Franchise Markets
Seen that way, Minnie Bird’s Florida deal is closer to a Dave’s deal than to a gamble. The buyer is DiPasqua Brands. The DiPasqua family has run Subway restaurants since 1977 and operates more than 80 of them in Florida. It has its own managers and decades of experience finding sites in that state. (Pete DiPasqua said the brand “feels like a 1,000-unit chain with three locations open,” which is a compliment and also, to my mind, a gentle reminder that three locations is what it has.) Most of the support that deal will need is already in Florida.
The first-time buyer two states over is a different sale. For a brand with three stores, or thirty, the honest answer is “not yet,” because every one of those deals is a promise of help that will have to be kept by people who live somewhere else.
Then there is the home market. Sell it, but sell it small. This summer, an 1851 Franchise piece on Manna Coffee pointed out that new franchisors often hand out large protected territories to close a sale. When the buyer never develops them, those territories block growth. Tie rights to a development schedule and keep the territories small. Clementine’s Ice Cream, the St. Louis brand that began franchising on Thursday, is offering territories in only eight states, a ring around Missouri. Chicken Salad Chick franchised for more than a decade before entering five states outside the Southeast in 2025, and it has more than 330 restaurants today. (Density has its own failure, which is stores eating each other’s sales. The rule is about reach, and reach doesn’t require stacking.)
The first Minnie Bird that someone other than its founders will own is going into a former Freddy’s building at 5500 Northwest Highway in Crystal Lake, Illinois. It is set to open by the end of 2026 as the brand’s first drive-thru, about 25 miles from the Schaumburg flagship.
That distance is the whole argument. It is close enough for a trainer to drive over the morning something goes wrong and be back by dinner. Before a young franchisor sells a territory, it should know how many of those drives its team can make in a week. Every market it sells should be one of those drives, or belong to an operator who doesn’t need one.
