Golden Chick Case Study: Faster Franchise Assessments with MeazureUp
For this case study, the MeazureUp team met with Bobby Brannon, Franchise District Director at Golden Chick.
How was Golden Chick running franchise assessments before MeazureUp?
Golden Chick is a chicken restaurant chain based in Texas with 165 locations across multiple states, known for using the whole chicken tenderloin, or as they call it, the filet mignon of chicken. The brand dates back to 1967 and opened its first franchised location more than thirty years ago, and has consistently been a leader in food safety and product compliance.
Before MeazureUp, Golden Chick managed operational assessments on a paper form. Bobby Brannon, Franchise District Director, would complete an audit on paper, find somewhere to scan it, and email the scan to head office. An office administrator then spent several hours transcribing the information from paper into an Excel spreadsheet before emailing the finished report to the relevant stakeholders.
That process created three problems. It was slow, with transcription alone taking hours depending on the audit. The data quality was poor, because aggregating organization-wide information from individual Excel files was strenuous and vulnerable to human error. And the functionality was limited: on paper, Brannon could only describe what he found in writing, with no images or action plans attached to the specific task.
What did Golden Chick want a digital assessment tool to do?
The team set three goals: create a more streamlined assessment approach that increased efficiency for District Directors and reduced overhead costs, improve accountability with a more detailed assessment report for each location, and add newer, more complex assessment criteria that paper and Excel could not track.
How much faster are Golden Chick’s store assessments with MeazureUp?
Brannon estimates he can now complete a regular assessment in less than half the time it took previously, going from roughly 2.5 hours for a store visit to about 1 hour.
That time goes back into the business. More assessments can be completed, which increases productivity while reducing overhead from travel time, working hours, and paper and printing costs. Franchise Operations team members can now give franchisees, owners, and other stakeholders real-time data reports, and each assessment carries more detailed reporting including pictures, comments, and action plans assigned to specific team members.
The reporting step disappeared entirely. Once Brannon submits an assessment on the tablet, it goes automatically to other Franchise Directors, the VP of Operations, or the COO. Analysis and data aggregation happen automatically, where previously gathering and preparing reports consumed a significant part of both his role and the office administrator’s.
Why does assessment speed matter for multi-unit franchise operations?
For a franchise organization, the cost of a slow assessment process is not just the hours spent transcribing. It is the assessments that never happen because there was not time for them. Halving the time a store visit takes means the same team can cover more locations more often, and the accountability improves as a side effect: the system documents where each assessment was completed and how long it took, from start to finish.
