Growth with Discipline and Heart with Heather Harris

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

Stephen Sakach (0:18)

Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and we've got a special guest who we'll introduce in a moment. So growth is one of the most energizing forces in business. It brings momentum, opportunity, and possibility, but growth also tests a company's discipline. It reveals whether the team is aligned, whether systems are ready, and especially whether the culture is strong, and in franchising, that responsibility is even greater with scale.

So today, we're going to dive into that. We are exploring growth with discipline and heart. Tullio, introduce our special guest.

Tullio Siragusa (0:59)

My pleasure. Our guest today is Heather Harris. She is the CEO of Franchise Fast Lane. Heather brings nearly three decades of leadership experience across franchising, retail, and consumer businesses. Her career has included leadership roles with brands such as Calvin Klein Jeans, Donna Karen Intimates, CycleBar, Intelligent Office, and Uni K Wax.

At Franchise Fast Lane, Heather is focused on helping franchise brands scale with the right strategy, people, systems, and discipline behind them. She brings an operator's perspective shaped by growth, transformation, repositioning, turnarounds, acquisition, and working closely with founders, franchisees, and teams.

Heather, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

Heather Harris (1:48)

Well, I feel like I need to work on my voice. You guys have great, I mean, not only radio voices, but you've got great television faces, so.

Tullio Siragusa (1:56)

Oh, thank you.

Stephen Sakach (1:59)

Nice. It's all the glasses.

Heather Harris (2:01)

I know, I had to take mine off because it was too much glare.

Stephen Sakach (2:05)

That's especially a compliment for me because I came from the print journalism side and it's usually like, oh, you're in print for a reason.

Heather Harris (2:12)

No, no, no, no. When I was in college, I was a DJ on the radio and I just loved, I was not very good at picking the music. I just listened to what I liked to listen, but I loved talking, but it's very difficult to talk without having anybody respond to you sometimes. I'm sure you guys like the podcast situation.

Stephen Sakach (2:32)

Yeah. We like to have a good conversation.

Tullio Siragusa (2:37)

I just heard that song, Last Night at DJ saved my life in my head. It's playing.

Heather Harris (2:40)

Oh, nice. Now non-stop.

Stephen Sakach (2:45)

So Heather.

Heather Harris (2:45)

Nice to be here. Thank you.

Stephen Sakach (2:47)

Thank you.

Great to have you here. You've said that Growth should be ambitious, but it also has to be intentional. From your perspective, what separates healthy franchise growth from growth that simply moves too fast?

Heather Harris (3:00)

Well, I think number one, I think the job of the franchisor is to make sure that growth is manageable. Because you're only as good as your AUVs, you're only as good as your last year's FDDs. So when I was running brands and I was fortunate enough to run a lot of great brands throughout my career, whether they were in franchising or not, but in franchising, your job is to make sure that you influence, positively influence and change that FDD every year.

That really shows the health of the business. So what I always like to see is growth within AUVs. If you're looking at a membership model, increasing that penetration of membership model year over year. Then you like to see the scalability of the business, because you always look at the business through the number of units that they have in total. But where those units fall in terms of revenue, in terms of profitability, and you just want to make sure that you're watching that.

You know, I think it's hard. I think new founders and I think brands, you know, it's kind of like writing in your car. You want the accelerator. You want to push the gas pedal at such a place. And then you just want to make sure you take your foot off that gas for a minute and kind of hit the brake, not to throw things in a spiral, but just to kind of pause, to make sure that your operations, your marketing efforts are all continuing to align with whether that new growth is in new regions or whether that new growth is in new categories of business. You just want to make sure you always have a level set. So you just always put a little of a pause.

Tullio Siragusa (4:41)

Now you've led brands through growth, transformation, repositioning and change. What has that taught you about the moments when leaders need to pause or simply refocus?