Ninety days decide a new CEO's priorities. I made sure ours landed first.

Situation

I’d run one of this franchise system’s hundred-plus locations for years by then. Private equity had acquired the system a while back, the founder left, and the company elevated its president to CEO in his place. Three years of flat-to-negative growth followed. Failed product launches, no real marketing investment, a sales-training program that never produced results. The system itself, more than a hundred locations and roughly $100M in system-wide revenue, was stagnating under leadership that wasn’t addressing what was actually broken.

In spring 2025, that CEO announced he was stepping down. A replacement search began, and a new CEO took over that September. It was a reset moment for the entire system. I chose to shape the relationship before he’d even settled into the job.

Task

I was president of the franchise association board at the time, representing forty percent of the system’s markets and more than half its revenue. That title carried influence. It came with no authority, and nothing about it obligated the new CEO to listen to me on any particular timeline. What it did give me was a closing window. The first ninety days were when this new CEO would be most open to outside input, before habits calcified and the org chart started making decisions for him. Wait for the official channel, and corporate would set the agenda without a franchisee voice in it. Show up with a list of grievances, and the board would get filed away as adversaries before the relationship even started. The job was to lead an engagement that did neither, and to do it fast enough that the window was still open when we walked through it.

Action

Building the case. I moved within days of the new CEO’s appointment and convened the association board around two objectives: proactively engage him to establish a cooperative relationship, and compile the issues franchisees had been carrying for three years into a prioritized problem set. Marketing had been running as little more than an SEO campaign with no real brand identity behind it, and franchisees were starting to fragment off into their own local marketing to fill the gap. Product rollouts kept failing because franchisees were never in the loop testing them before launch. National accounts weren’t landing anything. Franchisees got handed a name and a hunting license. No coordinated program stood behind it, no real pricing support.

Validating with the membership. I took that prioritized list to the broader membership before doing anything else with it. That step did two things. It validated the priorities and caught pain points the board had missed. It also signaled to every franchisee in the system that their board had a plan, so by the time I sat down with the new CEO, I was speaking for a system that had already weighed in.

The executive session. I led a half-day session with him directly. I opened with what we wanted: introductions, a cooperative relationship, and a structured, credible picture of what franchisees were carrying. He listened, then set his own findings next to mine, gathered independently through his own interviews across corporate. The overlap between the two lists did more to validate the severity of the problems than either list could have done alone. He asked for time to distill it into a ninety-day plan of his own, and I gave it to him.

The sustained cadence. What started as one meeting became a standing cadence. I worked with him two to three times a month as his plan took shape, the primary channel for surfacing member feedback and carrying his updates back to the board. He presented to the full franchise community once a month; I got the pre-read each time, which let me work the board and membership ahead of the announcement instead of reacting to it cold alongside everyone else. That loop ran both directions. He got real signal before he needed it, and franchisees watched their own input show up in the plan instead of disappearing into corporate.

Result

• The plan created standing working groups for national accounts, operations, and marketing, forums that hadn’t existed under the old regime. The new CEO also replaced most of his own corporate leadership team as part of it, a signal of how structural the problems actually were.
• Within weeks of standing up, the national accounts group closed two new system-wide partnerships, one a national quick-service franchise group, one a national facilities-services brand, and the operations group produced warranty-processing and new-equipment documentation the system had never had. The working groups were shipping real output.
• He collaborated with franchisees and sought their feedback before finalizing pieces of his roadmap, proof that the cadence was changing the plan itself.
• The relationship outlasted me. I resigned the board presidency that November with a clean handoff, ahead of my own business exit becoming public. The working groups and the operating cadence we’d built kept running without me.
• Franchisees who’d spent three years assuming corporate wouldn’t listen were sitting in working groups with them instead, three years of adversarial standoff turned into active participation.

Learning

A new leader’s first ninety days are the highest-leverage window there is, and almost nobody uses it. Most people wait to see what the new regime does first and react once someone else has already set the agenda. I moved before he’d even settled into the job, so the board’s read on the system reached him before corporate’s own narrative did.

The other half of it was who I was speaking for. Taking the board’s list to the full membership before ever sitting down with him meant that when I walked into that room, I represented a coalition, forty percent of the system’s markets and more than half its revenue, validated and priority-stacked before the conversation started. That’s the actual leverage a board seat with no formal authority over the CEO has, a coalition that organized itself before anyone gave it permission to.

No title authorized any of this. I built the relationship on the board seat’s influence, before the new CEO settled into the job.

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