Don't Let the Word 'Franchise' Fool You
By Tam Goldsmith
Shook Shakery isn't a franchise, but its founder has lessons every franchisor should study.
If we want to understand where tomorrow's great franchise brands will come from, we should spend less time analysing systems and more time studying the people who create them.
The franchise industry has never been short of benchmarks. We compare royalty models, study unit economics, analyse growth strategies and debate the merits of different operating systems. Conferences are filled with discussions about recruitment, technology, compliance and expansion because these are the disciplines that determine whether a business can grow beyond a single location.
All of those conversations are valuable, but they only become relevant after someone has created a business worth replicating. Before there are franchise agreements, operations manuals or training programmes, there is an entrepreneur who has recognised an opportunity that almost everyone else overlooked. That ability cannot be measured in the same way as average unit volumes or franchisee retention, yet without it there is no franchise system to analyse in the first place.
Perhaps we have become so interested in understanding successful franchise systems that we have forgotten to study the people who build them.
That is one of the reasons the launch of Shook Shakery deserves attention, even though it is not a franchise and there have been no announcements that it intends to franchise. The concept has been created by Dena Tripp, the co-founder of Nothing Bundt Cakes, the bakery business that grew from a home kitchen into one of America's most successful franchise brands. Having already achieved what many entrepreneurs spend a lifetime pursuing, Tripp has chosen to begin again, opening a new business built around premium milkshakes inspired by cake flavours.
At first glance, this looks like another food-and-beverage launch. In reality, it tells us something far more interesting about entrepreneurship. One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that successful founders eventually stop building because they no longer need to. Financially, that may well be true. Entrepreneurially, however, many seem unable to ignore opportunities that others dismiss as ordinary.
Nothing Bundt Cakes did not invent cake, and Shook Shakery has not invented milkshakes. The opportunity was never the product itself. It was recognising that familiar products could be presented, positioned and experienced in a way that customers considered different enough to justify choosing one brand over another. That ability to see value where everyone else sees an everyday product is remarkably consistent among successful founders.
The same pattern appears throughout franchising. Many of the industry's strongest brands were built in markets that were already crowded. Home services, restoration, pet care, tutoring, fitness and commercial cleaning were all well-established industries before leading franchise brands entered them. Their founders did not discover entirely new markets. They discovered better ways to serve existing ones, often by improving convenience, simplifying the customer experience or creating a stronger brand around a familiar product or service.
This is where entrepreneurship and franchising begin to diverge. Franchising is an extraordinary model for replicating a successful business. It provides the systems, processes and support that allow a proven concept to scale consistently across multiple locations. What it cannot do is create the original insight that made the business worth franchising in the first place.
That distinction is easy to overlook because the franchise industry naturally focuses on businesses that have already succeeded. We celebrate expansion, recognise franchise milestones and analyse mature systems because they provide measurable evidence of success. Far less attention is paid to the founders who are once again searching for opportunities in markets that everyone else assumes are already fully developed.
Perhaps that is why entrepreneurs like Dena Tripp are worth watching, regardless of whether their latest ventures ever become franchise brands. Their greatest competitive advantage is not their experience with franchise systems or operations manuals. It is their ability to recognise commercial opportunities before they become obvious to everyone else. That instinct is what created their first successful business, and it is often what drives them to build another.
Whether Shook Shakery eventually franchises is almost beside the point. It may remain a company-owned business, or it may one day decide that franchising is the right path for expansion. Either outcome is secondary to the lesson its founder provides. The franchise industry rightly spends a great deal of time studying successful systems, but if it wants to understand where tomorrow's franchise opportunities are likely to emerge, it should spend just as much time studying the entrepreneurs who continue to build long after they have already succeeded.
What We Can Learn From This
Franchise systems explain how successful businesses scale, but they rarely explain how those businesses came to exist in the first place. Operators, investors and franchisors should spend more time observing experienced founders who continue to build after achieving success, because their greatest skill is not replication. It is recognising opportunities that other people overlook. That insight exists long before the first franchise agreement is ever signed.
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