Designing a Franchise System That Could Grow Without Breaking
Fishbowl
Turning an early F&B concept into a scalable business
The brand started with a clear idea, strong early traction, and an ambitious founding team. Customers liked the product. The first locations performed well. Growth felt inevitable. But beneath that momentum was a familiar risk: "what worked for a few stores would not automatically work for dozens."
As expansion accelerated, questions began to surface:
How do we maintain consistency as more people touch the brand?
How do we grow quickly without losing quality or control?
How do we make the business easier to run—not harder—at scale?
The challenge wasn’t growth itself.
It was designing a system that could absorb growth without breaking.
Our Role
HashtagOne partnered with the founders not as external advisors, but as system designers.
Our role was to help the organization move from a founder-led operation to a repeatable franchise system—one that balanced brand integrity, operational clarity, and commercial discipline.
Rather than optimizing individual parts, we focused on how the whole system worked together.
Outcome
Over time, the business transformed:
The brand scaled from an early-stage concept to 50+ locations
Customer experience remained consistent across the network
Franchise partners operated with greater clarity and confidence
Leadership shifted from firefighting to guiding growth
Expansion became a managed process, not a leap of faith
Growth stopped feeling chaotic—and started feeling intentional.
What we did
Designing the brand as an operating logic
We began by clarifying the brand—not as a logo or marketing idea, but as a set of decisions.
Together with the founders, we defined what the brand stood for in practice:
What had to feel the same in every location
What could flex without harming the experience
What the brand promised to customers—and what it should never promise
This clarity became the foundation for every operational and commercial choice that followed.
Building operations that reduced friction, not added it
With the brand logic clear, we turned to the day-to-day reality of running stores. We redesigned kitchen workflows, menus, service flows, and staffing models with one question in mind:
Can this be executed, every day, by different teams, in different places?
Complexity was removed wherever it didn’t add value. Standards were created where consistency mattered most. Instead of thick manuals, the system was designed to be learnable, teachable, and enforceable.
Making franchising a support system, not a risk
Franchising introduced a new layer of complexity: people running the brand who were not the founders.
To support this, we helped design the franchise system as a partnership model, not just a commercial arrangement.
Roles were clarified. Expectations were made explicit. Governance, training, and performance frameworks were put in place to protect both the brand and the franchisees.
The system was designed so that:
Good operators could succeed
Problems surfaced early
Growth didn’t rely on constant intervention from the founders
Allowing the system to scale with confidence
As the brand expanded, the system was tested—again and again. New locations, new partners, and new markets introduced pressure.
But instead of breaking, the system adapted. Because decisions, standards, and behaviours were aligned, the organization could grow without constantly reinventing itself.