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What CMOs and Marketing Executives Get Wrong About Franchise Growth
I have worked with marketing executives who ran brilliant brand campaigns and watched franchise revenue stay flat. I have also watched operators with minimal brand awareness build wildly profitable multi-unit portfolios through relentless focus on local performance marketing. The gap between those two outcomes is almost always the same thing: a fundamental misunderstanding of what franchise growth actually requires. Mistake 1: Treating Franchise Marketing Like Consumer Brand
Jake Horvat
2 days ago2 min read
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Why Every Franchise Needs a VP of Growth Marketing Mindset
Most franchise brands hire for brand management. They need growth marketing. There is a significant difference, and it is costing them millions in unrealized revenue. I have spent years building growth marketing systems inside franchise environments, most recently across a 53-dealership automotive portfolio based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. What I have seen consistently is that the brands struggling to scale are not lacking great products or strong operators. They are l
Jake Horvat
3 days ago2 min read
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The 5 Questions Every Franchise Buyer Should Ask Before Signing
After working across both the automotive and fitness franchise worlds, I have sat across the table from a lot of prospective franchise buyers. Some made great decisions. Others did not. The difference almost always came down to the quality of questions they asked before they signed. Here are the five questions I wish every buyer asked, and that I now ask on their behalf. 1. What does the Item 19 actually tell you? The Financial Performance Representation (Item 19) in a Franch
Jake Horvat
3 days ago2 min read
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What the Automotive Industry Taught Me About Scaling a Franchise
Most people think franchising is about selling a brand. After years in the automotive industry, I learned it is actually about engineering a repeatable system, one that produces consistent results whether you are running one location or one hundred. The Dealership Model Is a Masterclass in Franchise Operations Automotive dealerships are, at their core, franchise operations. They live and die by standardized processes: how a customer is greeted, how a vehicle is presented, how
Jake Horvat
3 days ago2 min read
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About Jake Horvat | VP of Growth Marketing and Marketing Executive
I am a Growth and Performance Marketing executive with a track record of building revenue engines at scale. I have owned $20M+ P&L budgets, led teams of 12 across paid media, SEO, lifecycle, and creative, and driven over $225M in combined revenue growth across the automotive and fitness industries. This is not a resume. It is a record of what gets built when growth marketing strategy meets real operational discipline. What I Do I build growth systems that tie media, data, and
Jake Horvat
3 days ago3 min read
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