Nova for Franchises
Open on time. Run every location to your standard.
Nova turns how you open and run locations into guided processes that corporate, franchisees, partners and AI coworkers move through together, from the first site visit to every monthly report, audit and quarterly review after the doors open.
Every step reaches the right person at the right moment, expensive steps stay locked until someone approves them, and every recurring cycle runs on schedule without anyone chasing it.
We install your first process with you · Set up in under an hour · 200+ teams run on Nova
What a late opening costs
Every week a location sits closed is revenue you never get back.
While the opening date slides, you’re paying rent on an empty building, your franchisee is burning working capital before the first sale, and the royalties you planned for this quarter have quietly moved to the next one.
in lost revenue, on average, when a quick-service opening slips by three months.
IBISWorld, cited by ms consultantsis a common span from signing the franchise agreement to opening the doors of a brick-and-mortar unit.
1851 Franchise; brand-reported timelinesfranchise units entered 2026 already sold but not yet opened, each one a fee collected and a royalty still waiting.
FranConnect, 2025 Franchise Sales IndexWhy openings slip
Opening a location should feel like a celebration. Instead it feels like air-traffic control.
You’re coordinating corporate ops, the franchisee, the landlord, the architect, the general contractor and a dozen equipment vendors, and most of it still runs through spreadsheets, email chains and weekly status calls. When the work lives there, the same six things go wrong on almost every opening.
Steps get missed
A permit, an inspection or a signage approval falls between two people who each assumed the other one had it, and you find out when the inspector does.
Approvals sit in an inbox
The lease or the plan set waits days for one signature, and the contractor, the landlord and the franchisee all wait with it.
Work happens out of order
A franchisee orders $50,000 of kitchen equipment before corporate has certified the site, and the redesign costs more than the equipment did.
Every opening starts from scratch
What you learned on the last location lives in someone’s head, so the next team pays full price to learn it again.
Training isn’t finished on day one
New hires learn on the line during the busiest week of the year, and in their first 90 days they’re five times more likely to quit over miscommunication and lack of training.HourWork, QSR Trends and Wage Report
Problems surface in week three
By the time an issue at the new store reaches your field team, the first customer reviews have already been written.
Generic task managers track to-dos. A franchise opening is dozens of people across several companies deciding and handing work to each other in the right order, and that’s exactly what Nova runs.
How an opening runs in Nova
From site visit to grand opening, the next step is always obvious.
Here is one location going from a list of candidate sites to its first week of trading. Your team doesn’t have to guess what comes next, because they follow the guided process and Nova keeps everyone moving.
Score every site from your phone, standing on the sidewalk.
Open the site evaluation while you’re walking the space and rate frontage, layout, delivery access and ceiling height in a few taps. Every evaluator’s answers stay private until they submit, so nobody quietly anchors on the most senior opinion in the room.
Three sites scored in a morning, not three weeks of back-and-forth emails.
Evaluate whether this format works for our restaurant operations: clear customer flow, suitable frontage and a standard kitchen layout. Pick everything that applies.
Try it: tap what applies to this site.
Ask Nova AI to compare the sites and write the report.
Each candidate site gets its own evaluation form, filled out by everyone who walked it. Once they’re in, ask Nova AI in the chat to compare them, and it reads every answer and note and writes the comparison report for your real-estate committee, with the reasoning and the risks spelled out.
The best site, chosen on evidence, in one review.
Compare the three site evaluations and write a recommendation for the real-estate committee.
I read 9 evaluations across the three sites. Lamar Crossing (002) is the strongest choice.
- Lamar Crossing. Endcap with the best street frontage, a rectangular plate that fits the standard kitchen line without redesign, and a rear delivery corridor. All three evaluators rated it highest.
- Riverside Plaza. Workable layout, but the inline unit has weak frontage and shared delivery access.
- North Loop Center. The second-floor plan splits service flow and the ceiling is below the 10 ft hood clearance.
Watch: the asking rent at Lamar Crossing is 11% above the portfolio average. Negotiate a rent-free buildout period before signing.
Nova AI writes the report from the forms your team filled out.
One approval unlocks the next steps, so nothing runs ahead of a decision.
Put an approval gate on the steps where a mistake is expensive. Until corporate approves the lease and the plan set, the franchisee can’t release plans to contractors or order the kitchen package, and the moment the approval lands, those steps open with clear instructions for everyone involved.
No $50,000 orders placed on an uncertified site.
Approve the lease terms and the architectural plan set. Your decision clears the franchisee to sign the lease and release plans to general contractors for bidding.
Try it: approve the decision and watch the next steps open.
The buildout follows your brand standards, not someone’s memory.
Construction milestones, brand-compliance checks and audits run as one guided process, with the general contractor, the franchisee and your field team each seeing exactly what’s theirs. Nova AI follows up on anything that’s slipping, so your development team stops spending its week chasing updates.
Every location built to the same spec, with the audit trail to prove it.
New hires train before their first shift, not on the line.
Training lives in a portal every new hire can open from their phone, with videos, station guides and a quick check-in that tells the manager who feels confident and who needs a demonstration before live prep. Hire someone in month three and they get the same onboarding as the opening crew.
A crew that knows the standard on day one, at every location.
After the video: how close are you to what’s expected at the station?
Launch day runs off a live checklist everyone can see.
Every detail for opening day, from POS test orders to the final walkthrough, sits in one live checklist that the store manager, the field consultant and corporate tick off together. When someone asks “are we ready?” at 7am, there’s a real answer.
Doors open on the date you announced.
A team pulse in week one catches problems while they’re still small.
At the end of the first week, Nova sends the new crew a short anonymous pulse. Nova AI flags anything that keeps coming up, like ticket times or a supply that keeps running out, and adds a follow-up session for the right people before it turns into a pattern or a review.
Hiccups fixed in days, not discovered in the quarterly review.
Nova AI: 5 of 11 people mention drive-thru tickets running past three minutes at lunch, usually when one person covers both the window and the fryer. I added a drive-thru flow review for Ana and Pablo on Wednesday.
Drive-thru flow review · Due this weekYour next location is one launch away.
Once your first opening is set up, every location after it starts from the same template, including what you improved last time. Add the address, the franchisee and the target date, and Nova AI assigns each step to the right people and plans backwards from the opening day.
Opening number twenty runs as smoothly as number two.
Try it: launch the location and watch Nova AI assign the plan.
After opening day
The way you open a location is the way you run all of them.
Once the doors open, the work turns into cycles: sales and royalty figures every month, an audit on every field visit, local marketing to approve and a business review every quarter. Nova runs each one as a process your franchisees and field team move through together, on schedule, with Nova AI writing the summaries.
of chain operators say procedures not being adopted correctly at store level makes consistency across locations hard to keep.
Zenput operator survey, via Restaurant Divesay they can easily catch irregularities at individual stores. The rest find out later, usually from a customer.
Zenput operator survey, via Restaurant DiveFinancial performance and royalty tracking, without the chase.
On the 5th of every month, every location gets the same short form to report gross sales and the royalty due. Answers stay private to each location, someone on your finance team verifies the figures, and once every location is verified, Nova AI writes the network royalty report and flags anything that looks off.
Month-end numbers you didn’t have to chase, with outliers flagged before anyone asks.
Finance confirms the numbers before they count toward the network report.
Opens when all six locations are verified. Nova AI writes the report for finance and flags any outliers.
Brand standards audits that end with the fix, not the report.
Every location has its own audit form, set to repeat each quarter, so the next visit is already scheduled before the consultant leaves. They fill it out from their phone during the visit, note anything that needs fixing, and assign each corrective step to the store manager with a due date.
Findings that actually get fixed, with a record of every one.
Check hot and cold holding, date labels and the handwashing log. Pick everything you see.
Local marketing that still looks like your brand.
When a franchisee wants to run a local ad, they submit it for approval and your marketing team approves it, requests changes or declines it, with the reason on record. Once a month, every location also confirms its menu boards, signage and in-store materials are current, with photos attached.
No more last year’s logo on this year’s promotion.
Maya · Brand marketingUse the 2026 logo lockup and add “At participating locations” under the price. Resubmit and I’ll approve it today.
Quarterly business reviews that start with the numbers, not a slide deck.
Each quarter, every location gets a review form to submit its numbers and answer a few questions before the meeting, privately, so the conversation starts from what actually happened. Nova AI drafts the review pack from the quarter’s reports and audits, and every commitment you agree on lands in the decision log with an owner and a date.
Reviews ready before the meeting, and commitments nobody forgets.
Nova AI drafted the review pack from this quarter’s reports and audits.
And any other process you run more than once
For your operations team
See every location, opening or open, and what just happened.
Your ops team sees every location in the network, whether it’s opening or already trading, with its status, due date and leads, and the last three decisions or updates right beside it, so a bottleneck shows up while it’s still cheap to fix.
Try it: pick a location to see its latest decisions and updates.
Everyone who touches an opening
Each party sees their part. Nobody waits on an email.
Franchisees, vendors and contractors join as guests on the steps they own and sign off on deliverables right where the work happens, while every decision lands in the decision log with an owner and a date.
Sees the whole pipeline, owns the approval gates and stops running the weekly status call.
Knows exactly what to do this week and what’s coming next, without waiting for someone at corporate to reply.
Get their own steps with clear instructions and dates, and sign off on deliverables where the work happens.
Takes its own steps, writes the reports, follows up on what’s slipping and keeps the plan moving between people.
What changes
Stop running your franchise network on spreadsheets and email.
Talk to our team
Bring us the process that hurts most. We’ll install it with you.
Your opening checklist, your audit form or your monthly reporting spreadsheet: a Business Operations Expert maps it with you, shows it running in Nova and installs it with your team, at no cost.
Nova already runs franchise networks in healthcare and mental health, where several specialists work the same case together, and 200+ teams across Europe, Canada and the US run their operations on it.
- Your opening process, mapped stage by stageFrom site selection to week one, built around how your brand actually opens.
- Approval gates where mistakes are expensiveLease, plan set, equipment orders and anything else you never want done out of order.
- Your recurring cycles on scheduleSales and royalty reports, audits, brand asset checks and quarterly reviews, opened for the right people at the right time.
Questions, answered.
Yes. Share your current checklist, spreadsheet or manual and Nova AI turns it into a guided opening process with stages, owners and approval steps. A Business Operations Expert reviews it with you, installs it with your team and uses Nova AI to get it set up faster.
External partners are invited as guests to the steps they own. They see what’s theirs, sign off on deliverables where the work happens and get reminded when it’s their turn, so there’s very little to learn. Nova creates their own agenda and can sync it with their calendar automatically.
Nova AI is assigned to steps like any teammate. It compares site evaluations and drafts the recommendation, writes summaries and reports, follows up on steps that are slipping, flags issues from the week-one pulse and assigns the steps of a new location when you launch it from the template. Its work is signed as Nova AI, so everyone knows who did what.
Yes. Recurring processes run as rituals on the schedule you set, such as the 5th of every month for sales and royalty figures or once a quarter for business reviews. Nova opens the session, invites the right people and reminds anyone who hasn’t done their part.
No. Responses can be private for each collaborator, so each franchisee sees only their own submission while finance and leaders see the whole network, and steps such as approval decisions can be visible to leaders only.
Nova can be set up in less than an hour, and our team sets it up with you.
Nova for Franchises starts with a setup package designed with one of our experts and scoped to the size of your franchise network, so your processes are mapped and installed with your team from day one. After that, software and ongoing support are billed monthly based on the size of your franchisor’s headquarters team, so a corporate team of 20 people, for example, is $400 a month. You’ll find every monthly package on our pricing page.
Open the next location on time, and run every one to your standard.
Tell us how you open and run your locations today, and we’ll show you how it would run in Nova, with your stages, your partners and your standards.
Free setup of your first process · No credit card · 200+ teamsTell us about your network.
A franchise specialist will reply by email, map the process you want to start with and install it with your team, at no cost.
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