Bring Me Your Problems, Not Solutions

"Don't bring me problems. Bring me solutions." If you run a team, you've probably said it. If you're a franchise leader who came up through the ranks, you've definitely heard it. It's common management advice.

It's not the best approach to working with an expert partner.

I work with franchise leaders on improving HubSpot and the systems around it so they can accelerate by using AI. But they’re struggling because they have never worked with a well-executed system; they’ve never seen up close “what good looks like”.

So a request like “We need a drop down property for choosing leads’ net worth” seems simple and straightforward, but requesting a solution instead of a problem, especially if you’ve never seen an effective system, causes a mismatch between what you’re trying to accomplish and the system you build.

The system ends up all "duct tape and baling wire" instead of an AI-ready, well-tuned machine.

The Generalist-Agency Model Taught You to Pre-Scope Everything

There's a reason this expectation feels normal. The leaders I work with are almost always coming from years of working with generalist agencies or freelance admins who required it and a desire to get exact quotes and timelines.

A generalist HubSpot agency can execute against a defined ask. Configure a Workflow, build a Report, add a Pipeline stage. Or if you tell them you need something, they’ll tell you the 7 ways you can do it.

What they aren't equipped for is diagnosing franchise-specific dysfunction and implementing franchise-specific systems. You've probably experienced it; you know why. They don't know franchising.

Asking an agency that doesn't know what an FDD is and doesn’t know about the Cooling Off period to build or modify your sales automations is a recipe for confusion that forces you to teach the whole team about franchising just to get basic help.

You brought in expert help so you could focus on franchise growth, not moonlight as a solutions architect and project manager for an outside partner.

With a Specialist, the Diagnosis Is Part of the Work

Here's the frame that helps clients: With a specialist, the most valuable thing you can hand over is the problem itself, not the solution.

When the partner already knows franchise development and HubSpot deeply, the patterns repeat. Managing Broker relationships, handling FDD blackout, collecting a PFS, reporting projected units and FA revenue. And on and on.

So you don't need a polished ask with a tight scope. Bring the frustration. Bring the data you don't trust. Bring the part of your franchise sales process you haven’t started automating yet.

Here's just a few problems clients have brought that I already have solutions for:

• We need to know why we lose Deals.
• Deals just slow down in our pipeline and we lose track. There’s hundreds of old Deals.
• We aren’t tracking what states our Candidates are in.
• We don’t have projections on how many territories we expect to close this month.
• It takes a lot of work to keep Brokers updated on progress so we end up not doing it.
• We don’t know who our best Brokers or Broker networks are.

All of them are real. If any of them were a request for something like “Add State to the lead form” it would have taken a lot more iterations to get them what they need.

What This Changes

Your job isn't to be the technical expert in the systems that run your franchise. It's to deliver on your highest leverage work. This frees you up from stopping your actual work to try and define and scope a technical solution to your problems. You can redirect that time and energy to your highest leverage work. With 10 minutes of discussion we can identify 10x the solution.

And you don’t have to worry about knowing the answer before you can ask the question. With a real specialist, the question is enough.