[Perspective Series] Streamlining Franchise Success and Operations With Matt Goebel

Matt Goebel is the Founder and CEO of Woven, an all‑in‑one workplace management platform created in 2017 to help multiunit franchises streamline operations, manage people, facilities, and locations from a single system. With over 15 years of experience as a franchisor, consultant, and multiunit franchisee, Matt has gained firsthand insight into the operational gaps that challenge modern operators. Before Woven, he founded several tech ventures, including a wedding‑planning startup and a software agency specializing in franchising needs. A 2005 Purdue University graduate in computer information technology, Matt also holds Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) credentials.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:44] Matt Goebel discusses why he founded Woven to support multiunit franchise operations

• [7:18] Why consolidating tools is critical for scaling consistent brand experiences

• [11:18] Key operational components standardized by Woven across people, operations, and facilities

• [13:38] How Woven segments its users into frontline, leadership, and corporate personas

• [16:46] Matt shares strategies for prioritizing product development across multiple user roles

• [20:17] Balancing AI innovation with real-world franchise operations needs

• [30:42] Success story of helping a fast-growing franchise scale with training and knowledge sharing
  

In this episode…

Managing a business with multiple locations and frontline employees comes with a unique set of challenges. Communication silos, inconsistent operations, and disengaged deskless workers can quickly erode a brand’s consistency and customer experience. How can business leaders create streamlined systems that keep all teams aligned while supporting long-term growth?

Matt Goebel, a seasoned expert in franchising and operations strategy, shares actionable insights for solving these common pain points. He emphasizes the importance of consolidating tools and systems so that frontline teams — especially those without corporate emails or consistent access to technology — can stay informed and engaged. He advocates for designing mobile-first solutions that are simple, intuitive, and tailored to support workers. Matt also highlights the power of listening to feedback from multiple user groups and iteratively improving systems to reduce burnout and increase accountability, particularly for frontline leadership.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Matt Goebel, Founder and CEO of Woven, about streamlining operations for multilocation businesses. Matt shares how simplifying technology for deskless teams improves consistency and scalability. He also discusses prioritizing product features, balancing innovation with real needs, and why proactive customer listening is a key part of long-term success.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Matt Goebel on LinkedIn

• Woven

• "Building Client-Centric Portfolios With AI With Cameron Howe" on The Customer Wins

• "[AI Series] Revolutionizing Financial Meetings With AI With Parker Ence" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] Boosting B2B Relationships and Revenue Through Podcasting With John Corcoran" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] Secrets to Retention and Revenue Boosting With Joseph Loria" on The Customer Wins

• Joseph Loria on LinkedIn

• RetentionCX

Quotable Moments:

• “Operators are fantastic at operating, but they are terrible at adopting technology at scale across organizations.”

• “Every login you give them, you greatly diminish their engagement in those systems.”

• “Changing gears into the world we serve; they don’t have time to go through organizational change.”

• “Consolidation is foundational to this world, and that’s what Woven brings.”

• “We are meeting with that upper tier to listen to what they're hearing from their field.”

  
  

Action Steps:

1. Consolidate fragmented tools into a single operational platform: Multiple logins lower engagement and create inconsistency, so streamlining systems increases adoption and efficiency.

2. Design mobile-first tools for deskless employees: Frontline workers often lack computer access, making mobile-friendly platforms essential for communication and alignment.

3. Engage frontline leaders in product feedback: These users face operational challenges daily, offering critical insights that lead to more effective product improvements.

4. Maintain biweekly communication with enterprise clients: Frequent check-ins uncover issues early and help the product evolve alongside customer needs.

5. Balance customer requests with forward-thinking innovation: Listening to users while anticipating future trends ensures long-term product relevance and value.

Sponsor for this episode...

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Cameron Howe of Investipal, Parker Ence of Jump, and John Corcoran of Rise25. This is a special episode in my perspective series, where I talk with leaders outside of financial services who bring different views and experiences to the show. Today, I'm speaking with Matt Goebel, the CEO of Woven. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing.

When your business relies upon processing forms. Don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean. Context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions.

Visit. Quickforms.com to get started. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Joseph Lauria, who has been on the show as well. Go check out his website which is called retentioncx.com.

He specializes in helping companies maximize their revenue retention. Man, we all need that. All right. I'm excited to talk to Matt. Matt Goebel, CEO of Woven, has leveraged over 15 years of franchising experience as a franchisor, franchisee and supplier to address significant industry challenges, including disjointed communication, fragmented operations and underperforming software solutions.

In 2017, he founded Woven to streamline operations, empower frontline employees, and enhance collaboration across the franchising ecosystem. Motivated by the struggles of mom and pop franchisees everywhere. Sorry. Overwhelmed by daily operations, Matt aimed to create a solution that alleviates these burdens, enabling franchisees and franchisors to focus on their core passions and business goals. Matt, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Matt Goebel: 02:22

Thanks, Rich. Thanks for having me.

Richard Walker: 02:24

Oh, it's my pleasure, man. I'm excited to get your perspective today. For those who haven't heard this podcast before, I'd love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges they've had growing their own company. So, Matt, let's understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?

Matt Goebel: 02:44

Yeah. Absolutely. Rich. So Logan was actually built to help multi-unit franchisees, right. And so after a decade or so in the consulting world, helping different multi-unit business owners solve various problems through custom projects kind of became apparent to me that they all had the same problems, and it kind of stems from the nature of their business.

They are in a unique situation where they have many geographically dispersed teams, and specifically these dispersed teams are hourly. Traditionally, deskless workers that are hard to connect with, that are hard to get all on the same page. And in this industry, what you find is a lot of siloed, almost tribal knowledge forms. Location to location. And that really hurts when you're trying to scale an organization that's running consistently, delivering the same brand experience.

So forth. So when you think of franchising, although this doesn't always happen exclusively in franchising, it's just most commonly found in franchising. You walk into a business and when you walk into that planet fitness, right, like you expect it to be roughly the same as every other planet fitness experience that you have. Now all those planet Fitness's is the 2600 or so across the country, all owned by different franchisees. And it is difficult for those franchisees, even within their own organization, to keep everybody on the same page.

So through my consulting career, I just saw the same problems occurring over and over, and I wanted to bring a solution to this unique group of business owners that allows them to keep all of their people, their operations and their facility management. It's kind of all that unsexy back office stuff. Keeping it all in one place instead of all over the place with a bunch of different platforms and tools. And at the same time, having spent over a decade on the consultative side, fractional CIO and advisory strategic type roles, I was a little sick of the tech industry abusing the franchise, always overselling Underdelivering not supporting. It's kind of a joke, but at the same time it's blunt.

But operators are fantastic at operating their some of the the hardest working people I've ever met in any industry segment. They are terrible at adopting technology, especially terrible at adopting technology at scale across the complex organization. So one of the other things I wanted to do was lean into that, like be a partner, figure out that, yes, we can build a great tool, we can build great technology, but marry it up and meet them where they are. Understanding that in the operations world, they're putting out a fire every day or every hour of every day, they don't have time to go through organizational change and to do all that is required. So that was the other second half of how we help or why Woven is we wanted to bring an actual partnership to this.

It says, yes, here's a tool, but we're going to teach you how to use the tool. We're going to lean in and invest how you're going to get value out of this, and then train your people proactively, follow up continuously and make sure that they're seeing that. So ultimately, it's just about helping these organizations grow, scale and be more profitable in doing so.

Richard Walker: 06:01

Man, I love it. There's there's a lot to talk about here. I gotta share something, though, with you. I think the only people who adopt technology well are technologists and people who love technology in general, and they've seen something that is going to change their lives like that. One thing that their friend was using that has given them all their time back, they're like, okay, I'm going to do that too.

But in general, people don't like change. That's the bottom line. Like tech requires change, and being uncomfortable in a bad process is still more comfortable than changing.

Matt Goebel: 06:33

Is 100% true? That's true.

Richard Walker: 06:39

Yeah. So there's a lot of things in what you're doing that I think play across the financial services world. Because financial services, they'll build offices in all these different locations. Like I know a team where they're more focused on one geography, like the West Coast, for example. But I also know companies that are nationwide international, so I think they have similar problems.

How is it that by standardising on the technology, it actually makes it work better at the different locations and how you get to train people? Why is the technology the footprint and not the policy manual or the brand or something else?

Matt Goebel: 07:18

Yeah, and I think that's so, so one unique distinction within the industry we serve, which is that Multi-location kind of again, deskless hourly worker, right, is that they don't have a company email address. They're not connected to their company. They don't have a computer or a laptop that they can sit in front of at their desk all day. I mean, you and I as information workers or, you know, your traditional office worker. I don't know if you're like me, but I mean, I at any given time, I'll have 30 plus tabs open on my browser and I'm logged into a dozen or more different SaaS products that we use at Woven.

And that is honestly the way that tech VC fueled tech company kind of thing has come up for like, office workers, right? Is we are almost subconsciously trained to have all these different tools that do different things. And sure, there's integrations that will automate some data. And obviously AI is changing a lot of this right now. We won't get down that slippery slope.

But the point is, is that that works for us somewhat. It's still annoying if my password manager isn't fully logged in and it can't just log me into the next next system, I have to type something. The end of the day, it's not that burdensome. Changing gears into the the world we serve right is when you ask an hourly college person that's maybe engaged, maybe not engaged in their, you know, job, that they're just earning some beer money for whatever.

Richard Walker: 08:47

It's not their passion.

Matt Goebel: 08:49

Not exactly a career most of these times, right? Every login you give them, every time, you're like, hey, remember this username and this password, this username and this password. Every time you add another login to do their job, to perform their job duties, you greatly diminish their engagement in those systems. And what ends up happening is that location. A might have a manager that's really diligent about getting everybody to log in.

Location B is a little more lax than some of the tools are used. Location C's, not at all, because they just had manager turnover and on down the line. And by the time you scale this past 2050 locations, a lot of our works in like enterprise scale sizes, like 50 units and above, right. It's game over. Like you're not getting your front line to log in to 4 to 6 different places to do their job.

You're just not you're going to get lucky to get to log into 1 or 2 places. That's always going to be their schedule and clock in, and maybe the point of sale to do transactions. And that's about it. That's the extent you're going to get their eyeballs. And so these companies will push out your policies, your SOPs.

The hey this is coming up, this promotion announcements, communications. And it largely goes unread. It goes unnoticed because they're not engaging in all these various different systems that you and I are second hand. No problem. But to that segment of the workforce, it's it's just different, right.

And so consolidation is foundational to this world. And that's what Woven brings. It brings consolidation to up to like 34 different components spanning that people operations and facilities. So these frontline employees, those that are actually running the business day to day in the, you know, in the field, interacting with your customers, keeping the lights on, those frontline leaders, juggling all the fires and, you know, all that stuff. They're the ones that are getting the benefit of lower burnout, better efficiency, productivity, better passive accountability for the higher ups.

They're just getting everything in one place, and it really is a game changer for these organizations.

Richard Walker: 10:54

Man, you just reminded me to stay in my lane. If I wanted to own a car wash and I couldn't slack the person what I want them to do, I have to physically walk out and go talk to them. That changes everything. You're right. I hadn't thought about that man.

So what are what are some of the most common components that your system is standardizing? You said 34. I don't know if I want a whole list, but like.

Matt Goebel: 11:18

It's it's yeah, it's just it's just across through people. So how do you communicate with and disseminate information to your people, keeping them all on the same page. Kind of like that operational air. How do they do their job communicating with them, scheduling them. They show up to work time and attendance, things like that.

Operations is their call. This the drumbeat of the organization? It is. What is your morning checklist and your closing checklist and your every Wednesday checklist. And when you hire somebody or terminate somebody, like at scale, right.

You need to have these standard, these standard operational drum beats in everything that you do. And then how are you auditing that. How are you going into these various locations and confirming through objective scoring that they are staying to the standards. And then, you know, managing that through SOPs, policies, etc.. And then on the third pillar, it is around facilities.

So each one of these organizations also has the unique you mentioned car washes. We do quite a bit of business with car washes is they have very expensive, very complex facilities. Right. A lot of equipment.

Richard Walker: 12:24

Right.

Matt Goebel: 12:25

Both in the tunnel and outside the tunnel in their grounds. And all of that needs to be maintained because guess what? If that vacuum has no suck, that customer is likely not coming back, right? I mean, so it's down to little things like that within each industry segment or in the gym space, right? That treadmill, that's your favorite treadmill in that spot or whatever.

If that's broken for an extended period of time, you likely are canceling your membership and moving to another gym. And so it's these it's this ability to maintain your facilities again at scale, geographically dispersed across many states in most cases. That really becomes critical to maintaining that that customer experience and doing so consistently.

Richard Walker: 13:06

Yeah. So that might explain the QR codes I see at the gym on all the machines they're scanning. Right.

Matt Goebel: 13:12

Yeah.

Richard Walker: 13:13

Okay. So look, in financial services, when I talk to people, oftentimes they have multiple customer segments they have to think about. So if they're the enterprise they're thinking about their advisors as the customer who's then thinking about the investor as their customer. And they're also thinking about the back office as their customer because they're using the systems. So how do you look at customers?

How do you decide whose experience you're trying to optimize for?

Matt Goebel: 13:38

Yeah, we similar to your example right there like we have we have a number of different customers. We generally try to group them into three buckets. Our biggest customer base is the frontline. So about 8,085% of our users are hourly workers frontline. We are optimizing for them.

And the fact that Woven has both an iOS and an Android app, that is, it leans very heavy onto like almost a consumer app. Again, the the demographic in the segment of the workforce that is in these roles is very transactional in nature, right? I think the last I saw was like roughly six weeks was the average span before turnover. And so if information it is you want to engage them. It has to be clean, simple, easy.

So we have a whole persona worked up where that base of our customer is really just about like, how do we get them in and out as quickly as possible, get them what they need, and make it a enjoyable experience? You then have the middle segment, which is the frontline leadership. So these are the ones that honestly Woven is built for. They're taking the most weight off their shoulders reducing the most amount of burnout. And this is the this is the customer segment that is in both our native apps from time to time, but also starting to use our desktop experience, our web version, which is allowing them to do management functionalities, reporting, managing large lists of things, updating SOPs, policies, things like that.

And then you get into the corporate and you know, this is like the top 2%. So a lot of these large enterprise organizations have corporate office teams. And these are more again, traditional office workers at this point. They're not using day to day basis, but they are getting a lot of data and value out of Woven from, from the product that we can produce for them. So they're definitely in it.

More for reporting dashboards. Ironically, this also happens to be our decision maker. So we do a lot for them because while they don't use our product, they're the ones that make the decisions and sign the checks. So a lot of our efforts focus in that middle tier of keeping that that frontline leadership team happy and also the top. Of course, most businesses in the enterprise space are like that.

You got to keep your stakeholders happy, even if they're not exactly using your product all the time.

Richard Walker: 15:58

But but it's a hard balance because. So you've got the top, top level, like you said, the 2%. And it's same with my business, right? There's a small group of users who want to administer controls and decide configurations, and if they don't have those capabilities, they're leaning hard on our customer service team to make it happen. Or they're very vocal about it because you're right, they're decision makers.

But then you've got all the way out to the front line where users are complaining, it can't do this, it can't do that, and it got this wrong. Or why can't these two things just talk to each other? And we're in this constant battle here at quick. Who do we serve first? Which idea gets the most precedence or the most effort put into it?

How do you guys prioritize? How do you figure out where to put your resources to make your product better?

Matt Goebel: 16:46

Yeah, I mean, we we give a lot of weight to that middle group. We give a lot of weight because again, in our world, to our customers, we serve. Right. It is making taking a bit of burden or reducing burnout. Increasing the longevity of that frontline leader is probably one of the biggest impacts Woven can make on like a long term, longitudinal basis for our customers.

And what I mean by that is when you're in a say, you're an organization that has 50 locations of a gym or a car wash, right? Losing and replacing a specific location manager is highly disruptive, right? The culture of that location changes the the operational execution of that location changes. You have to either promote from within. If you have somebody or drop somebody new in.

And it's a very difficult, very disruptive thing. I would almost liken it in the financial world to like the head advisor at an office, just like quits. And that office becomes a little disrupted for temporarily, right? My wife was a recruiter at Northwestern Mutual for a number of years and, you know, had her, like the head office guy that was, you know, calling the shots and running in. And when he left and was replaced, it was disruptive for a number of months.

And it's it's exacerbated when you're at that deskless employee level. Right. So the longer we can keep those people happy, it does percolate up to the fact that they're not complaining. They're actually loving Woven because it's saving them time. And as long as we get enough of that to percolate up to the to the upper echelons, we are typically winning.

The other thing I will say is that while we do enhancements and listen to product kind of direction from that group, most frequently we're proactive in the sense that most of our enterprise accounts we're talking to biweekly or monthly, and we are meeting with that upper tier to listen to what they're hearing from their field. So we don't allow a year or a quarter to go by before we're hearing from our customer that, like their their field team hates something or wants something new, like, I mean, we're we're getting that almost in real time and we're responding almost in real time. We do releases every two weeks to address certain key critical things, and they're always dripping out new enhancements that people are requesting. So that's part of that, just leaning into the customer and making sure that they feel heard. It's actually one of our promises that we make to them at the very beginning.

Richard Walker: 19:10

Man. Honestly, it's inspiring, Matt, because I, I never feel like we listen enough. We try hard, but I don't know that we ever can listen enough to our customers. And part of it is, in my world, oftentimes a customer will implement our solution from the back end like it's an API solution. They build the front end themselves and now it's really their front end.

It's not us. So they only come to us when they're designing something on the front end that needs something on the back end to support it. And man, I had a customer for ten years who only talked to me once a year. And that conversation always went the same. We're happy.

No changes. Nothing to tell you. Okay, but I love the customers who are very vocal and will say, hey, what about this? And what about that? And this is our friction.

And those conversations are just pure gold. So I'm kind of curious on another level then if you're how do I ask this exactly? You're listening to all this feedback. You're obviously getting new ideas from customers. How do you, as a product owner and leader, innovate beyond those questions and see the future, beyond what customers are asking for?

Matt Goebel: 20:17

Yeah, it's that's a great one. So I mean, we obviously have tools and prioritization lists that we're not exactly, you know, has it the analogy where, you know, everybody gets an equal vote. I mean obviously our biggest customers revenue speaks. I mean, they do get the most attention. So that probably accounts for, I would say between 30 to 40% of our development effort is spent in just continuously addressing request.

We do about 160 to 180 enhancements that are customer requested every year. And so some are some are tiny, some are bigger. But at the end of the day, it is our promise to continuously be tweaking and refining to help really dial in the solution to meet the needs of what our customers and their their employees are experiencing. As business changes as as the the employment workforce changes and as needs change. Right.

The other 60 to 70% is spent in actual product. So I'm a technical founder and it is a blessing and a curse in a technology company because, you know, we have probably an excessive amount of product. And at the same time, it's also great because we solve a lot of problems. That's kind of falls on me right now. I mean, it kind of falls on me to be Forward looking.

I think there's a famous quote by Henry Ford that was like, if you ask somebody what they want, they would have said a faster horse or something like that, not a car. I probably butchered that quote, but it's something along those lines, right? And so I think right now this question is very applicable because there's a lot going on with AI right now. I mean, I'm sure you've heard of AI at this point, the AI agent to agent stuff and blah blah, blah. It's all over the place.

The hype is extreme. What I will say though, is that it definitely swept over the office working world, right? The information worker first, our industries that we serve weren't as affected by it, right? Dustless workers that are physically still doing things were less affected by the initial wave of hype. But we are starting to see now as the technologies are standardized, we have all these ideas about what we want to do with this new technology in our product.

And we have been bringing it to our customers, asking them, hey, you know, like, what about this? And and they just didn't know enough yet to give us valuable feedback. Right. It was like, that sounds cool. Unsure if it would add value or if they would pay for it.

And now we're finally reaching that crossroads with our industry segment, where they're starting to understand it better to give us valuable feedback. So to answer your question right. How do we do this? It's all through the relationships, the partnerships that we have in the sense that like we're doing this together with them. Right.

We don't have a crystal ball. I'm not trying to genie this behind the magic curtain. It really is about. Here are some ideas. Here are some things we are thinking about doing.

And you know, being collaborative with our customer base to understand like they're the ones actually in the trenches. They're the ones actually using our tool day to day and understanding, like how much would it save them? How much would it help them. And then we take that feedback and progress and just kind of incremental.

Richard Walker: 23:32

Yeah. You said that you didn't say something that I think is an important ingredient in what you said. You implied it. You have a keen interest in their world, and you therefore are thinking ahead. Plus, you have an interest in technology and AI and what's developing.

And you're putting those two things together to even present back to the customer. Because the way I see it is, you can talk to 100 customers and hear a hundred different things, but in that 100 things are patterns. And you as the technologist, see those patterns and then you combine them with other things going on like AI, and figure out a way to solve it. And now it becomes a totally innovative and unique idea. Is that a fair assessment?

Do you think you're. That's a.

Matt Goebel: 24:13

Assessment. I would just emphasize the fact that the the the customer collaboration there is what's key, right. Because as a technologist or in technology, right, it is so easy for us to get trapped in our own insular groupthink of like, look at this really cool hammer that just came out, I. I need to go find nails. The whole world becomes a nail that you just want to start going around swinging this hammer on.

And the reality is, your customer doesn't think the same way, right? The customer doesn't really care about that hammer because maybe they need a screwdriver or something else, right? Like they they have a different problem that the hammer isn't going to solve. And so I think that that's part of it is that that is overlooked by technology companies, is there. And it's it's rampant right now where they're like we have I if they do or not is arbitrary.

It's mostly marketing, right. But at the end of the day, right. Like they're swinging hammers all over the place. And there's been a lot of recent studies. I don't have any to quote off the top of my head, but there's I've been fascinated by these studies coming out that are showing that globally, eyes had very little actual impact on work so far, just kind of validating that while the technology will impact, it's just not mature enough yet to be having the impact that that the hype is building it up to.

Right? It will level back out. The hype will come down a little bit. Its actual value will come up to meet it. Just like any technology, this one's just happening very violently in at least my experience in my career in technology, more so than previous technology waves.

But it is it is interesting when you just see the the AI hammer applied indiscriminately to problems. But yes, the customer always has the answer. If you just listen to enough of them, they will tell you.

Richard Walker: 26:04

All right, I want to ask you a totally different set of questions briefly here. And you don't have to name names, by the way. But considering you work with franchises, have you had a personal, really bad experience with a franchise? Not your customer per se. Is there one?

Is there a customer experience that stands out to you that you'd be like, oh man, that needs to be fixed? That's terrible. I'm I was curious to hear.

Matt Goebel: 26:28

I mean, as a consumer, as in business.

Richard Walker: 26:32

As a consumer or a business. I mean, whichever way you consumed their service that you got.

Matt Goebel: 26:37

For, for sure. I mean, I think everybody at one point or another has walked in. By the way, franchising is everywhere. You would be shocked that the franchise business model is across some 300 different industry verticals, and it is in everything. The stuff you frequent on a daily, weekly basis just to go about your life, most likely 6,070% of it is is a franchise, right?

Even to the home services that come out to your house or anything. But. So yes, of course, as a consumer you have poor experiences. And I and I don't reflect that on the brand as a consumer. I don't reflect that on the brand.

It is to the point of why Woven exists. It is incredibly difficult to get all of your front line employees that are actually implementing the brand experience to get them on the same page to get, I mean, they're human. They're, they're they're going to have bad days. They're going to do things differently. And so, you know, in franchising, it's exacerbated by the fact that you have the franchisor that's like McDonald's.

We typically think about McDonald's, like McDonald's is the franchisor, and they have franchisees underneath them that actually own, you know, the individual locations or they don't own the license. And and basically the way it works is that if it's just your sandwich shop, right, you get to call all the shots. You, you know, you're tightly connected to yourself all the way down to the front line because it's your sandwich shop. In franchising. It's the Zor, the franchisor that is sending stuff down to franchisees.

Franchisees have to repackage that into whatever cobbled together tools and systems they're using to then hopefully get in the hands of this disconnected, disengaged, frontline employee to then hopefully do what the franchise owner wanted them to do to begin with. The number of steps is incredible, and the number of different systems in use is crazy. So Woven solves all that, right? Like we connected franchise to franchisee all the way down the front line. Employee joint employer way makes it nice and simple.

The problem is, is that the traditional way of thinking about this allows for a lot of consumer issues. So of course I've had bad brand experiences, but that's not the brand necessarily so much as maybe a poor franchisee runs that individual location, or just that employees have a bad day. On the supplier being in the industry. Inside the industry segment, just like any industry, you have really great actors and then you have the middle of the road. Then you have bad actors, right?

Like, I mean, franchising and unfortunately has earned some of its bad marks through, through, through various bad actors. And there are very few. But, you know, they they've done poor things in terms of selling licenses to people that shouldn't have bought them. And it does hurt people. And franchising in general.

The IFA is the International franchise Association is really weeding that out. There's a lot of good stuff I won't get into right now with it, but ultimately the industry as a whole, I will tell you, is amazing. There's a thing called franchise family that when you're coming into the franchise world, you're like, this is stupid. What is this about? And then you realize you go to a couple conferences, you meet enough people, and you realize that the franchising world, the vast majority, is there to help each other.

They're there to build America's small business and lift everybody up. Right. And do those do so through a repeatable process, a brand that the consumer recognizes. And it's a beautiful thing. So with that being said, I don't I don't have anybody to dog on on a professional sense.

There is definitely some bad actors that get pushed out.

Richard Walker: 30:12

I like how you've answered this because you brought it back to the human element. Most bad experiences we have actually result with a bad actor at that moment. They might be having a bad day, they may have the worst day of their life, and you're the guy who called them next. And that sucks that you just had a bad experience. So I'm wondering just briefly, do you have a favorite customer story that you've seen their success flourish and skyrocket because they started working with Woven?

Matt Goebel: 30:42

Oh, gosh. Yeah, I mean, so so on the franchise side, we are working with a brand right now for spire. They're probably about 100 open locations. They have about another 200 plus sold licenses that they're planning to open. We started working them around, working with them around 50 locations, and it's been a fantastic relationship.

So we actually help them standardize all of their learning, training, knowledge sharing, operational stuff all the way down to the franchisee and frontline level. I think they would have grown without Woven to be just perfectly honest like we are, but an enabler of their great team. On their side. They have a they have a great group of people at their corporate office. They they lean their their great franchisor in the sense that they lean into their franchisee success.

They invest in their franchisees success, which ultimately helps them be successful. Right? Successful franchisees open more locations, increases royalties, franchise or wins. So that's been one example recently over the last year and a half. This particularly stands out.

They're growing. They're growing really quickly. They're actually opening locations and selling licenses. It's a fantastic story. A lot of our customer base is also just in the multi-unit operations world.

Right. And what I love to do is we go to a lot of these brand conferences. So you'll go to, like I already mentioned, Planet Fitness is a big customer of ours. We'll go to the Planet Fitness conference or we'll go to, you know, like the hand and Stone conference. A lot of these like name brand, franchise kind of concepts.

And I love hearing. The people we don't get to talk to on a day to day basis, which is like the manager. The store manager that's just behind the scenes, that's just grinding away and having them come up to be like, I love Woven like, oh my God, you saved me so much time, and you do this and that. It's like to have that impact, right? Even though we probably never directly talked to that person, like we work with their district managers or their regionals or the corporate office or whatever, right to to roll out training and stuff.

It's fantastic to hear that. Like what we've done actually has impacted a life. It's it's always good to impact the bottom line in the PNL. Like we're all in business for a reason, right? But it's like to actually hear those stories from the people that it's touching on a day to day basis that's using it six times or more per day to do their job.

That's really cool. That's super fulfilling for us to hear that unprompted, unscripted, like they walk by the booth and they're like, oh my God, like, I use you every day. That's, you know, that's that's fantastic.

Richard Walker: 33:13

So yeah, I could be having the worst week day, whatever. And if I meet one of those people and they're like, you've changed my life, or I couldn't live without quick, I'm I'm on top of the world again. I'm like, yes, this is why I'm in business. This is why I started my company, man. This is why I ask these questions.

I mean to hear that because I think we all forget that that feedback is so just enriching to us and our teams. And it's amazing when customers take the time to do that. Look, I have to wrap this up, and before I get to my last question, I want to ask, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you, Matt?

Matt Goebel: 33:48

Yeah, absolutely. Probably get started at our website. So start Woven. Com or you can hit me up at com. I'd be happy to have a conversation if you're you're in the franchising or multi-location operations world.

Richard Walker: 34:06

Awesome. All right. So here comes one of my favorite questions to ask. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?

Matt Goebel: 34:18

Yeah, I would have to go all the way back to my very first job out of college. I worked for a consulting company called Crowe. Mindy Herman was the partner that was over our group at the time, and she happened to also be over the caterpillar account that I worked on right out of college. And so we would spend a lot of time driving back and forth from Indianapolis to Peoria, Illinois, to the most boring job in the world. And Mindy during those drives would just mentor me.

She would just give me knowledge nuggets that, you know, 21, 22 year old Matt probably wasn't fully appreciating at that time. But little things that you know that in those first four years, working closely with her has influenced everything I do. It's every business I've ever run. It's everything I approach from a customer standpoint. It's it's been profound.

So yeah, I would have to say Mindy for sure.

Richard Walker: 35:14

I love hearing these stories. It's honestly it's my favorite question because people are just what we're all about. That's why we're here. And to have those people who impact us in the best ways I love hearing about. So thank you for sharing.

All right. I want to give a big thank you to Matt Goebel, CEO of Woven, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Matt's website at Woven. We'll link to it in the episode notes. And don't forget to check out quick at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easier.

I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today.

Matt Goebel: 35:54

Yeah, thanks. Appreciate you having me.

Outro: 35:57

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