Franchise Development Basics
What Franchise Development is
The organisation-level pipeline for selling franchise units: candidates, deals, stages with gates, and where it sits next to the CRM your tribes use.
Last updated September 7, 2026
Franchise Development is the part of Gorilla Dash a franchisor uses to sell franchise units. Its records are candidates — the people considering buying a franchise — rather than the customers who buy from your tribes (a tribe is one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation), and its stages are the ones a franchise sale actually passes through: enquiry, qualification, application, discovery, disclosure, discovery day and validation, financing and approval, agreement and signature. When a deal is signed the candidate becomes a franchisee who can own one or more tribes.
Where it lives
Franchise Development is an organisation-level application. It opens from your organisation, never from a tribe, because a tribe must never see who is buying the territory next door. If you cannot see it, ask your Gorilla Dash team to enable it for your organisation and grant you a Franchise Development permission.
What is in it
- Dashboard. Open deals, candidates, deals signed in the last 30 days, candidates still waiting for a first response, the pipeline by stage, deals that have sat in a stage past its target, recent activity and today's tasks.
- Deals. A board of every open deal by stage, or the same deals as a table. Drag a card to move it, and the stage's exit gates decide whether it can go.
- Franchisees. Every candidate, signed franchisee and former owner, with their deals, tasks, activity and the tribes they own.
- Tasks. Everything the development team has promised to do, across all candidates.
- Development Settings. Your pipeline stages and their gates, your lost reasons, and the module settings such as the first-response target and the approval committee.
How it differs from the CRM
The CRM every tribe uses is for customers. Franchise Development is for the people buying a franchise, and it keeps them completely apart: a candidate is never a CRM contact, never appears in a People list, an export, a mailing list or a marketing automation, and cannot be seen from any tribe. The two share the same look and the same building blocks — lists, cards, a board, tasks and an activity timeline — so a team that knows the CRM knows this module.
What is coming next
This first release covers candidates, deals, the gated pipeline, tasks and activity. The qualification profile, documents and disclosure receipts, the territory map and reservations, approvals, agreement upload and the step that turns a signed franchisee into a new tribe are being added on top of the same records, so nothing you enter now is re-keyed later.