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A missed order, an unanswered lead, or a delayed franchise opening can look like an isolated mistake. It can also be the first visible sign of a process that works only because employees keep rescuing it. Business owners need to know which problem they are facing before they choose a remedy.
IS IT A GLITCH OR A BROKEN PROCESS? THE DECISION EVERY GROWING BUSINESS MUST GET RIGHT
Executive Edition
By Gary Occhiogrosso, Founder and Managing Partner, Franchise Growth Solutions
A franchise prospect fills out an inquiry form on Monday. By Thursday, no one has called. When the issue reaches the sales manager, the explanation is straightforward: the lead was sitting in an unassigned queue. Someone claims it, makes the call, and the prospect agrees to speak the following week.
The immediate problem has been handled. The more consequential question remains unanswered. Was this one record routed incorrectly during a software interruption, or does the company routinely depend on someone noticing unassigned leads before an opportunity goes cold?
I have encountered versions of this question throughout business growth and franchise development. An independent restaurant owner discovers that an online order was missed. A franchisee calls headquarters for the third time to ask which opening checklist is current. A bookkeeper spends every month correcting reports that arrive in different formats. Each incident has an immediate fix. The owner can remake the order, send the checklist, or correct the report. None of those actions establishes whether the underlying process can be trusted tomorrow.
That is the distinction leaders must learn to make. A glitch is a specific failure caused by a particular circumstance in an otherwise workable process. Friction is difficulty embedded in the normal course of doing the work. People encounter it repeatedly, anticipate it, and eventually build habits around it. The business may continue to produce acceptable results, but only because employees, managers, or franchisees spend extra effort compensating for the system.
This is more than an operational vocabulary lesson. Mistaking friction for a glitch allows cost and inconsistency to accumulate. Mistaking a glitch for friction can lead to an expensive redesign that solves little and disrupts work that was functioning well.
The result may look fine because someone rescued it
Business owners usually see outcomes before they see the labor required to produce them. The store opened on schedule. The customer received a refund. The prospect eventually got a call. The financial report was delivered. Each result can give leadership the impression that the process worked.
Ask how it worked.
Perhaps the store opened because a field consultant spent the previous weekend resolving issues that the opening plan should have surfaced a month earlier. Perhaps the prospect got a call because an administrator checks the CRM manually twice a day. Perhaps a restaurant manager keeps online orders moving by watching a tablet that is supposed to provide an audible alert. In each case, a capable person protected the outcome. That person’s effort deserves recognition, but it should also prompt an examination of the process.
This is where many growing companies become vulnerable. The founder and a handful of experienced employees know whom to call, which document is outdated, and which step cannot be left to the software. Their knowledge keeps the business moving. When volume increases or work moves to a new location, those informal corrections do not travel reliably with it.
Quality management offers a useful way to think about the problem. The American Society for Quality distinguishes between variation inherent in a process and variation caused by unusual circumstances. The former calls for improvement to the process; the latter calls for identifying and addressing the unusual cause. The distinction does not diagnose a missed franchise lead by itself, but it cautions against treating every bad outcome as the same kind of problem. (asq.org)
For an owner, the practical question is this: Would the same people, following the same instructions under ordinary conditions, be likely to encounter this difficulty again? If the answer is yes, a reminder to “be more careful” is unlikely to be a durable remedy.
Look beyond the number of complaints
Repetition is evidence of friction, but counting incidents alone can mislead. A process may fail frequently without generating complaints because employees quietly correct it. A new process may have produced only one reported failure because it has been used only once. An unusually serious event may demand action regardless of whether it has happened before.
I would investigate along four lines.
First, consider recurrence. Has the same problem appeared with different employees, customers, shifts, territories, or franchisees? One person struggling with an otherwise clear procedure may need training. Several capable people stumbling at the same handoff suggest that the handoff deserves attention.
Second, find the workaround. Ask the people doing the work what they must do to get the expected result. Are they maintaining their own spreadsheet because the CRM cannot show the information they need? Are franchisees calling one another because the current instruction is hard to find? Are store managers making exceptions to a scheduling procedure every week? A workaround can be an ingenious temporary solution. Once it becomes a routine requirement, it is evidence about the design of the process.
Third, examine exposure. How many times will the organization encounter the same condition? A cumbersome step performed once a year may have a limited cost. A 90-second correction made on every customer order, every lead, or every unit report consumes substantial time as volume rises. The frequency of the task matters alongside the frequency of visible failures.
Fourth, assess consequence. A late internal report and a food safety incident should never wait in the same improvement queue simply because each happened once. Some events require immediate containment and investigation because the potential harm is high. Workplace safety guidance from OSHA, for example, treats incidents and near misses as opportunities to identify underlying causes before a similar event produces further harm. That principle is useful well beyond safety, while the appropriate response must still reflect the particular risk involved. (osha.gov)
None of these questions supplies a universal threshold, such as “three incidents mean the process is broken.” The evidence must be interpreted in context. What matters is whether a leader can explain why the event occurred, what would have to happen for it to recur, and what it costs the business when it does.
Why the wrong fix often makes matters worse
When a problem lands on an owner’s desk, action feels reassuring. Rewrite the manual. Add an approval. Buy software. Hold another training session. Yet activity is not the same as improvement.
Suppose a restaurant’s online orders were missed because a device temporarily lost its connection during one shift. Replacing the entire ordering system might be a costly reaction to a contained event. At the other extreme, suppose managers in several stores routinely check that device by hand because its alerts are unreliable. Telling the manager involved in the latest missed order to be more attentive leaves the operating burden exactly where it was.
There is a third possibility worth considering: the technology may work, but no one has clear responsibility for monitoring it during a shift change. In that case, a software purchase and a lecture about diligence both miss the point. A simple assignment of responsibility, tested during actual handoffs, may do more.
Every proposed fix should therefore answer two questions. What cause is this change intended to address? How will we know whether it worked? Without those answers, businesses tend to accumulate controls. A new form is added after a missed step, then an approval is added because the form is sometimes incomplete. Eventually employees have more steps to manage, while the original failure remains possible.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Model for Improvement begins with a clear aim, a way to measure whether conditions improved, and a proposed change that can be tested. Its testing approach starts small, observes the result in real conditions, and refines the change before broader implementation. Although developed and widely used in health care, the model is applicable to business processes as well. (ihi.org)
I would also measure what the fix might make worse. If a new approval reduces errors but delays every customer response, leadership has traded one problem for another. If more detailed reporting improves headquarters’ visibility but takes franchisees away from serving customers for hours each week, the burden belongs in the evaluation.
When to correct, investigate, and redesign
Owners do not need to choose between ignoring a problem and launching a major project. The response can proceed in stages.
Correct the immediate consequence. Serve the customer, contact the lead, reconcile the payment, or help the franchisee obtain the right instruction. Record the facts while they are available. If safety, security, or another serious risk is involved, contain the exposure promptly.
Investigate when recurrence or severity warrants it. Follow the actual path of the work, not merely the path described in a manual. Who received the information? What were they expected to do? What did the system show them? What competing demands existed at the time? What do successful cases have in common, and how do they differ from the failures? Speak with the people who perform the task before deciding what went wrong.
Redesign at the level the evidence supports. A local training gap may call for coaching and a later check of performance. An unclear handoff may call for one named owner and a reliable notification. A confusing procedure used across the company may require a clearer standard and revised training. Test the change where the problem occurs, observe whether the result improves, and then decide whether to extend it.
The timing follows the risk. A single, low-impact error with an identifiable unusual cause can be corrected and monitored. Recurring workarounds deserve investigation before they become accepted operating practice. A serious incident or credible near miss deserves prompt attention even if the process has an otherwise strong record. Waiting for more failures to establish a pattern would be poor judgment when the consequences could be substantial.
The franchise complication: whose process is failing?
Franchising adds a difficult but essential question. When a franchisee struggles, is the problem in the franchisor’s system, in the franchisee’s execution, or in the connection between the two?
A franchisee may say the training was inadequate. The franchisor may point to a completed training record. Both statements can be true. Completion does not prove that a new owner can perform a task under the pressure of an opening week. On the other hand, one franchisee’s poor results do not prove that the brand’s training is defective. The answer requires a closer look at what was taught, what tools were supplied, what was practiced, and what the franchisee actually implemented.
Consider an opening checklist. Headquarters may believe it has a sound process because most stores open on time. Yet if each opening depends on repeated calls to a particular employee who knows how to resolve missing information, the system has an unmeasured dependency. Conversely, one location may be delayed by a site-specific issue that no standard checklist could reasonably have prevented. A responsible franchisor needs to distinguish those situations before promising a systemwide fix or placing all responsibility on the owner.
Feedback from the field is valuable precisely because franchisees operate the model under different local conditions. Their reports are evidence to examine, rather than verdicts to accept automatically or complaints to dismiss. The International Franchise Association has emphasized consistent support, practical tools, and two-way communication as elements of responsible franchising. Those principles become most useful when the franchisor investigates what owners experience in the course of operating the business. (franchise.org)
An independent business considering franchising should apply the same scrutiny before expanding. If the founder personally resolves every supplier exception, training ambiguity, or customer escalation, the company may be performing well while relying on a process that has not yet been made transferable. Replication requires more than a good outcome at the original location. It requires a workable method that another qualified owner and team can learn, execute, and improve within the system’s standards.
Conclusion
A business owner’s most useful question after an operational failure is not simply, “Who made the mistake?” It is, “What had to happen for the work to succeed, and can we reasonably expect it to happen again?”
Sometimes the answer points to an isolated event. Correct it, learn what is useful, and resist the urge to burden everyone with a new rule. Sometimes the answer reveals employees or franchisees repeatedly bridging a gap between the written process and the work itself. That gap is friction. It consumes time, obscures the true cost of operating the business, and becomes more expensive as the company grows.
The right remedy follows the evidence and the stakes. Address the immediate consequence, investigate credible signs of recurrence, act promptly when potential harm is serious, and test a focused change before spreading it. In my experience, this is one of the disciplines that separates a business that merely gets through the day from one that can deliver consistent results as it scales.
At Franchise Growth Solutions, we examine the systems behind a brand’s growth, including the procedures, training, and support people need to execute them. Consistency is your currency, but it has to be earned in the daily operation of the business, not assumed from the fact that yesterday’s problems were eventually resolved.
Sources
- American Society for Quality, “What Is the Law of Variation?” https://asq.org/quality-resources/variation (asq.org)
- Institute for Healthcare Improvement, “Model for Improvement.” https://www.ihi.org/library/model-for-improvement (ihi.org)
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Incident Investigation.” https://www.osha.gov/incident-investigation (osha.gov)
- A.J. Titus, “Raising the Standard: How Responsible Franchising Looks Today,” International Franchise Association, May 15, 2026. https://www.franchise.org/2026/05/raising-the-standard-how-responsible-franchising-looks-today/ (franchise.org)
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About the Author
Gary Occhiogrosso is the Founder and Managing Partner of Franchise Growth Solutions, a full-service franchise advisory and development firm dedicated to helping emerging and established brands grow responsibly through strategic planning, franchise development, operational excellence, and professional franchise sales. During a career spanning nearly four decades, Gary has worked with hundreds of franchise organizations and has participated in the development and sale of more than 1,000 franchise locations across a broad range of industries.
Recognized as one of the franchise industry’s leading authorities, Gary has been named among the Top 100 Franchise Influencers and the Top 25 Fast Casual Executives. His work focuses on helping entrepreneurs, founders, and franchisors build scalable businesses through disciplined growth strategies, sound unit economics, operational consistency, and responsible franchising.
Gary is a frequent speaker, author, and publisher whose Executive Edition articles are designed to help entrepreneurs make informed business decisions based on experience, research, and practical application rather than industry hype or conventional wisdom.
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This article was researched, developed, written, and professionally edited with the assistance of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Throughout the development of this manuscript, AI served as a research assistant, editorial collaborator, and, where appropriate, a ghostwriting partner to help organize ideas, review publicly available information, improve clarity, strengthen the narrative, and enhance the overall quality of the writing.
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Author’s Note
This article also reflects the author’s professional observations and practical experience accumulated over nearly four decades advising entrepreneurs, franchisors, franchisees, and investors throughout North America. Practical experience has been combined with publicly available research to provide balanced commentary intended for educational purposes.