We ran a franchise’s entire marketing department for 8 months. Here’s what actually happened.

The numbers up front:

• +41% — Median franchisee revenue, year-over-year
• +28% — Average revenue per location, year-over-year
• +16% — System-wide revenue, year-over-year

Let’s skip the part where we tell you marketing matters. You know that. What you might not know is what it actually looks like when a franchise system gets serious about it, not in theory, not in a PowerPoint, but in the daily reality of 60+ locations trying to close jobs and grow their businesses.

This is the Bloomin’ Blinds story. And our favorite number in it isn’t the one you’d expect.

First, some honest context

When SIYL came on board with Bloomin’ Blinds, a window covering franchise with 60+ locations nationwide, the brand was growing. Real locations. Real sales. A CEO, Kristopher Stuart, who genuinely believed in where the system was headed. But the marketing infrastructure hadn’t kept pace with the growth, and the gap was starting to show.

The internal marketing capacity was stretched thin. Franchisees were largely figuring out their local marketing on their own which sounds fine until you realize it meant some locations were crushing it while others were spinning their wheels with no idea why. And underneath all of it, something more structural was eroding: franchisee trust.

The uncomfortable truth Kris understood before we did: The gap between what HQ was communicating and what franchisees actually needed on the ground had been getting wider for a while. Emails felt like they were written for a different audience. Franchisees felt like they were being spoken at rather than supported. Rebuilding that trust and building the marketing infrastructure weren’t two separate projects. They were the same project.

What was actually broken

Before we built anything, we listened. And what we heard was a system with five very specific problems hiding inside one general one:

• No one owned the marketing function day-to-day
• Franchisees had no shared playbook meaning every location making different assumptions with different levels of capability
• No shared definition of what “good marketing” even looked like, which meant no one could benchmark against anything
• The franchisee-HQ trust gap was real and growing
• The middle of the roster was guessing and when the middle of a franchise roster guesses, the whole system feels it

So we stopped the guessing.

Eight months, five workstreams, one goal

01 — The marketing manual

The first thing a franchisee needs is a document that travels. Bloomin’ Blinds didn’t have one. We built it. A comprehensive franchisee marketing manual covering brand standards, channel strategy, local marketing execution, vendor relationships, and the metrics that matter. Designed, production-ready, and built to make the average franchisee, not the exceptional one capable of running a real marketing program in their market.

02 — The webinar series

Live education is not replaceable by asynchronous content. We ran a recurring franchisee sales and marketing webinar series, a direct line into the network for training, Q&A, and trust-building. These sessions became the most important communication touchpoint in the system. You also learn more from thirty minutes of live Q&A than from any survey ever written.

03 — The website rollout

We managed a coordinated franchisee website rollout across 60+ locations in partnership with Netsertive. Tight timelines, proactive communication, and the kind of careful project management that keeps a multi-location rollout from becoming a multi-location disaster. A website rollout that creates confusion is worse than no rollout at all.

04 — Social media, playbooks and ongoing support

Franchisees needed content they could actually use on Monday morning. We built social media content, campaign playbooks, and templated resources designed around the Bloomin’ Blinds brand voice, not generic posts they’d ignore, but material built to work at the local level. And when things weren’t performing, they had somewhere to turn.

05 — Localized strategy and brand standards enforcement

National brand standards only go so far. We worked with franchisees on localized strategies built around their specific markets including seasonality, local competition and customer demographics. And across every franchisee, every vendor, every piece of creative that went out the door, SIYL reviewed it, approved it, and kept it on brand. When you have 60+ locations producing marketing simultaneously, that oversight is what keeps a franchise system from quietly becoming 60+ different brands.

The AI stack that made it possible

Here’s something we don’t hide: we used AI heavily on this engagement. Not as a shortcut, but as the thing that made a small, senior team capable of delivering the output of a much larger department. Every strategic call was made by a human. The AI closed the gap between decision and finished work faster than any production process we’d had before.

Claude — Primary writing partner throughout franchisee communications, manual content, webinar scripts, and campaign messaging without the lag of a traditional copywriting cycle.

Canva — Absorbed the design volume that a team this size couldn’t have managed manually. Emails, social content, training materials, and webinar visuals were created at a pace that previously required a much larger creative department.

Lindy — Ran the automations that kept operational overhead from piling up. Repeatable workflow tasks handled without eating into strategic bandwidth.

Claude Cowork + OpenAI Codex — Handled file organization and asset processing, including sorting and renaming hundreds of marketing assets with inconsistent formatting across the entire batch.

HTML Dashboard (built in Claude) — Used by both the SIYL team and the Bloomin’ Blinds client to track campaign components in real time. Built the same week it was scoped, not weeks later waiting on a developer.

Bloomin’ Blinds worked with a small, senior team and got the output of a much larger department.

Now. The numbers.

In April 2026, Bloomin’ Blinds had their best sales month ever. CEO Kristopher Stuart messaged our team to say he credited SIYL with a meaningful part of that result. We’re proud of that. But the number that actually tells the story of this engagement isn’t the top-line one. It’s the median.

Median franchisee revenue grew 41% year-over-year. Average revenue per location grew 28%.

The median outpaced the average by 13 percentage points, meaning the franchisees in the middle of the roster grew faster than the ones at the top. The whole floor rose. The locations with the most room to grow took the most ground. That’s not a great campaign result. That’s a system getting stronger.

“SIYL operated as our embedded marketing department, not as a vendor executing tasks, but as the function itself. I truly feel that this team wears a significant part of the responsibility for this success.” — Kristopher Stuart, CEO · Bloomin’ Blinds

What actually made it work

1. Infrastructure before campaigns. The work that moved the median wasn’t a single campaign; it was building the foundation that made consistent execution possible across 60+ locations.
2. Trust and marketing are the same project. Rebuilding franchisee confidence in HQ wasn’t separate from the marketing work. It was the prerequisite for any of it landing.
3. The middle of the roster is the whole story. Median grew faster than the average. That gap tells you the system got stronger across the board, not just at the top.
4. A small, senior team can execute at scale. With the right AI and automation stack, SIYL delivered the output of a much larger department at a fraction of the cost.
5. Someone has to hold the brand standard. Across every franchisee, every vendor, every piece of creative, SIYL was the consistent set of eyes keeping 60+ locations from becoming 60+ different brands.

What this means if you run a franchise system

Bloomin’ Blinds understood something a lot of franchisors are still working out: the distance between where your median franchisee is and where they could be often comes down to things a franchisor can actually control. A clear picture of what good looks like. A real marketing system franchisees can actually run. Communication from HQ that connects to their daily reality. Brand standards that someone is actually holding.

Bloomin’ Blinds made the decision to fix those things and gave SIYL the latitude to do it. That combination, a franchisor willing to invest and a team willing to actually run the function, produced a 41% jump in median franchisee revenue in a single year. Not because the market got easier. Because the people already in the system finally got the tools and support they should have had all along.

That’s replicable. It requires the same two ingredients every time.

By the time you’re reading a case study, you’ve already done the math. You either recognized your system in this story — or you didn’t. If you saw yourself in it, let’s talk.

So. Are you next?

SIYL doesn’t send monthly reports and call it strategy. We run the function –  embedded, accountable, and built to move the numbers that actually matter for your system.

If you’re ready to stop guessing and start building, we’d love to hear from you. And if you’re not quite there yet, save this and come back when you are.

👉 Work with SIYL →