The Best Damn Franchise Report Volume 2

What is The Best Damn Franchise Report?

The Best Damn Franchise Report is Franchise Sidekick’s annual franchise data study, one of the most complete, multi-year look at franchise buyer behavior any advisory company has published. Volume 2 combines three full years (2023–2025) of data from nearly 7,000 completed Fit Surveys, Sidekick’s matching process, and more than 270,000 prospective buyers, giving franchise brands a year-by-year view of how buyer behavior is shifting.

Key takeaways

The top-closing buyer segment flipped. Buyers looking to leave full-time employment overtook seasoned, investor-minded buyers as the top-closing group in 2025 (32.7% vs. 29.3%), a shift that should change how franchise brands market, train advisors and build their pitch.
Financing has moved to the front of the conversation. Now, 82.2% of buyers now plan to borrow to fund their purchase, up from 73.8% just two years ago, even as buyer cash on hand thinned.
Buyers say one thing and buy another. Format preference is a prime example. Buyers claim format doesn’t matter, then purchase brick-and-mortar locations 68% of the time.
Leadership in the development channel changed hands. Independent brands out-closed franchise sales organizations and portfolio groups combined in 2025, a reversal from the previous two years.
Speed is now a competitive advantage. FSOs cut territory-check response time by 77% over three years.
This only scratches the surface. The Best Damn Franchise Report, Volume 2 breaks all of this down by buyer segment, state, group type and year. Franchise brands are already using this data to rework their playbooks for 2026.

Are you a franchise brand looking to grow? Read this

If your sales team is still pitching to the buyer from two years ago, there’s a good chance they’re missing the one in front of them.

That’s the real headline buried inside the newest franchise report from Sidekick. Ryan Zink, founder and CEO, put it best: “The franchise industry deserves more than opinions dressed up as facts.” So, instead of another report built on anecdotes, The Best Damn Franchise Report pulled from three full years of real buyer behavior – Fit Survey responses, sales funnel numbers, closed deals – and let the franchise data tell its own story.

What it found is that the story has changed. Not slightly. Significantly. And if you’re a franchise brand relying on last year’s buyer profile to build this year’s development strategy, you’re going to want to see what shifted.

How has the franchise buyer changed?

For two straight years, the seasoned, investor-minded buyer – hunting for territory and unit economics, often already running a business or two – was the buyer every franchise brand chased. In 2025, that changed. Buyers looking to leave a 9-to-5 behind overtook that group as the top-closing segment (32.7% versus 29.3%), while buyers pursuing franchise ownership as a side business nearly doubled their share of closed deals to 20.3%.

The investor-minded buyer didn’t disappear. Their actual number of closed deals barely moved. What changed is that the other two groups grew around them, fast enough to push them out of the top spot entirely.

That’s a marketing and training problem hiding inside a franchise data trend. A buyer leaving their job for the first time needs a different pitch than an experienced investor evaluating their next acquisition. A buyer balancing a day job needs a different one still. Brands that haven’t adjusted their intake scripts, advisor training or marketing spend to reflect this shift are likely still leading with a pitch built for the buyer type that’s losing the most ground.

The full report breaks down exactly how each buyer segment’s share of leads versus closed deals moved year over year, along with what keeps each one up at night.

How has the financial conversation shifted?

Buyer financing behavior is one of the sharpest trends in the entire three-year dataset. In 2023, 73.8% of buyers planned to borrow money to fund their franchise purchase. By 2025, that number climbed to 82.2%, even as buyers’ own cash on hand has thinned considerably.

At the same time, worry about financing grew faster than any other concern tracked in the report, rising from 40.8% to 49.3% over three years. Buyers aren’t waiting until underwriting to think about money. They’re thinking about it from the very first call.

For franchise brands and development teams, that’s a signal worth acting on. The financing conversation can’t live in the back half of the sales process anymore, and the brands getting ahead of it are seeing it pay off.

Volume 2 includes a full breakdown of buyer net worth, liquid capital and retirement fund trends with the specific financing talking points top-performing development teams are using earlier in the funnel.

Why is there a gap between what buyers say they want and what they buy?

One of the more surprising findings in this franchise report is what the report calls the “say-do gap,” the space between what buyers say they want and what they purchase.

Format is the clearest example. Buyers consistently say format doesn’t matter much to their decision. Then they go buy brick-and-mortar locations 68% of the time. It’s a reminder that buyer surveys alone – without matching them against actual closed-deal behavior – can lead a franchise brand to build an entire growth strategy around a preference that doesn’t hold up once money is on the table.

This is exactly why Sidekick built this report around three years of behavior, not just stated preference. It’s the difference between knowing what buyers say in a Fit Survey and knowing what they do when it’s time to sign.

How is the development landscape shifting?

The development landscape itself shifted in 2025. FSOs, or outsourced group that manages franchise development, led the pack in both 2023 and 2024. In 2025, independent brands closed more deals than FSOs and portfolio groups, or multi-brand operators, combined.

Response time tells a similar story. FSOs cut their territory-check response time by 77% over three years, bringing it down to 8.5 hours, a number that’s quickly becoming the industry’s new benchmark. Buyers who are more cautious and more deliberate than they used to be are rewarding the brands that answer fastest, not just the ones with the biggest name.

Add in geography – Sun Belt states now capture 44.3% of franchise interest, up from 36.8% in 2023 – and a clear picture emerges. Where you sell, how fast you respond and who’s running your development process all matter more than they did two years ago.

Full group-type performance comparisons – FSO vs. portfolio groups vs. independent brands – are laid out deal by deal in the complete report.

What does this mean for your brand?

Pull these threads together and the message for franchisors is clear: the franchise buyer of 2025 thinks, spends and decides differently than the buyer of 2023. Franchise brands that are still building development strategy, marketing spend and advisor training around outdated assumptions are optimizing for a buyer who’s already moved on.

The brands pulling ahead right now are the ones treating franchise data as a working tool, not an annual curiosity. They review buyer-segment shifts the way they'd review sales numbers and adjust their pitch, their financing conversation and their response times accordingly.

Download The Best Damn Franchise Report, Volume 2

Everything above is just a preview. The complete Best Damn Franchise Report, Volume 2 includes the full year-by-year breakdown behind every stat in this post, plus buyer segment deep dives, state-level demand data, group-type performance comparisons and a playbook section built specifically to help franchise brands turn these findings into action.

Download The Best Damn Franchise Report, Volume 2 to see where your brand’s buyer sits in this data.

As Ryan said, “When brands grow, franchising wins.” This report exists to help make sure that growth is built on real franchise data, not guesswork.

That same philosophy is what led us to build Sidekick SeeThrough, our research platform that gives buyers an unfiltered view of franchise brands. But the value runs in both directions. As buyers engage with SeeThrough, their behavior creates a new layer of franchise data – what brands they’re drawn to, what questions they’re asking, where their interest stalls – giving you a clearer picture of what today’s buyers are looking for.

We’ve spent years as a leading franchise advisor in the industry precisely because we treat data as something to act on. Our free buyer advisory services pair franchise brands and prospective owners alike with real insight because better information makes for better decisions on both sides of the table.

Frequently asked questions about The Best Damn Franchise Report, Volume 2

What is The Best Damn Franchise Report?

The Best Damn Franchise Report is Franchise Sidekick's annual, multi-year study of franchise buyer behavior based on real Fit Survey responses and closed-deal data, rather than opinion or anecdote.

What does Volume 2 cover that Volume 1 didn’t?

Volume 1 combined 2023 and 2024 data into a single two-year average. Volume 2 breaks every metric out by individual year (2023, 2024 and 2025), making it possible to see clear year-over-year trends rather than a blended snapshot.

Who is The Best Damn Franchise Report for?

The report is built for franchise brands, franchise leaders and industry experts who want to understand how franchise buyer behavior, financing habits and financial performance expectations are shifting in real time.

What’s the biggest shift franchisors should know about?

The top-closing buyer segment changed in 2025. Buyers looking to leave full-time employment overtook seasoned, investor-minded buyers for the first time in the report’s history, while financing has become buyers’ fastest-growing concern.

How is the data in this franchise report collected?

It’s drawn from nearly 7,000 completed Fit Surveys and internal sales and deal analytics collected across 2023, 2024 and 2025, pulled from a database of more than 270,000 prospective franchise buyers.

How can I get the full report?

You can download the complete Best Damn Franchise Report, Volume 2 directly from Franchise Sidekick’s website. It includes full buyer segment breakdowns, financial trends and group-type performance data not covered in this post.