Summa Franchise Consulting is providing unbeatable guidance to countless franchising professionals
Content Partnership*
Summa Franchise Consulting is an award-winning franchise consulting company based in Arizona. Robert Stidham is the founder and CEO of Summa Franchise Consulting (“Summa” is the Latin word for “total”), which advises franchising companies in all industries at every step along the process. Global Franchise previously named Summa Franchise Consulting as a 2020 “Highly Commended” consulting firm in the Global Consulting category. A few examples of Summa Franchise Consulting’s many expertise areas include the following: franchise business formation services, franchise marketing and branding, operations and management consulting, and franchise sales and development.
“Summa Franchise Consulting’s main operating principle is to provide customized and complete solutions for its clients”
A WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE
Robert Stidham has been an accomplished and proven franchise industry leader and executive for more than 30 years. He has been personally involved with over 2,000 franchised business start-ups, multi-unit, and area development agreements in 47 countries.
In his corporate career and through our companies, Stidham has a tremendous global track record of driving franchise unit sales, franchise system revenue, and franchisor profitability for clients, while also helping them gain market share and expand brand awareness; whether for new franchise concepts, or already established brands, worldwide.
He has held a variety of positions in the franchise industry in franchise company leadership, development, operations, consulting, and as a U.S. publicly traded franchise company president. He continues to be active in the International Franchise Association (IFA), serving as an International Committee member.
SUPERIOR CLIENT SERVICE
Mr. Stidham uses his extensive experience to advise clients. For example, during his career, he built two of the 25 largest service franchise companies in the industry at the time he was with them, worked in and with private equity, and has been president of a U.S. publicly traded, international franchise company. Leveraging that experience and our collective experience and our resources allows us to provide ‘best in class’ recommendations to our clients.
Summa Franchise Consulting’s main operating principle is to provide customized and complete solutions for its clients. This scope of services covers the client’s potential entire range of needs, from forming new concepts and solving company-wide problems, to helping clients of all sizes create profitable franchise system growth, high franchisee and customer satisfaction, and team success.
Moreover, Summa Franchise Consulting provides a “franchisor life cycle consulting partnership” to create, grow, and help its clients and their stakeholders prosper. The result has been an enviable client list made up of many happy contacts.
The goal of the company is to assist a prospective franchisor to go from formation to creating the infrastructure to support growth, to managing the client company’s franchise sales on an outsourced basis.
“We enjoy working with all of our franchise clients,” Stidham said. “We are active in the franchising community, and our professionals have real and significant direct experience working in a variety of franchise businesses.” The secret to the success of Summa’s clients has been in part from its success in attracting best of class talent, and in the leadership team it has put into place in support of its client’s franchise business.
FIRST-HAND FRANCHISING EXPERIENCE
Summa Franchise Consulting’s senior team members have considerable first-hand experience in franchising. In addition, our executive leadership team of Thomas M. Rocca, who serves as the chief experience officer (CXO) and executive vice president, Chrissy Eblin serving as the vice president of marketing, and Aaron McMartin who is the vice president of development make a meaningful contribution to our client’s business and to our own.
Tom Rocca has over 30 years of experience in consumer and business marketing, customer experience, and franchising. He also is the founder and president of KPI Group.
Tom helps Summa Franchise Consultants’ clients keep their omnichannel customer experience seamless and consistent, thus maximizing customer return and loyalty. His experience with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is particularly helpful to smaller or start-up organizations.
Tom focuses on enterprise-level customer strategies while also overseeing tactical execution. He regularly helps clients develop acquisition programs and optimize key customer segments.
He has extensive experience with restaurant brands and is a Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PCQI), and is trained on the preparation of a Food Safety Plan for clients following FDA standards and recall & risk support best practices.
Chrissy Eblin has more than a decade of direct experience in the franchising industry. She creates, implements, manages, and coordinates franchise marketing plans and operations for Summa Franchise Consultants’ clients.
She also oversees and advises clients on online, social media, video, and print marketing. Chrissy has extensive experience in domestic and international franchise marketing, sales, and operations.
She has overseen the design and production of hundreds of major digital, video, print, and direct mail marketing and advertising campaigns, and created and developed comprehensive marketing plans, marketing presentations, market research reports, and sales/marketing reporting tools. She also has created, edited, and translated corporate franchise operations and training manuals.
Prior to joining Summa Franchise Consulting, Chrissy served as chief marketing officer and then chief operating officer of one of America’s first frozen yogurt companies, where she was responsible for business efficiencies and processes, meeting target goals, establishing corporate culture and vision, franchisor/franchisee operations, and planning, developing, and executing all corporate marketing and advertising initiatives.
Aaron McMartin has more than 15 years of experience in the United States and international franchising industry and has experience working in more than 60 countries. He helps Summa Franchise Consultants’ franchise industry clients expand and plays a key role in designing and implementing appropriate growth strategies for them.
He also helps companies develop their franchise support systems and is well-known as an effective coach for franchisees in sales, launch strategies, and lead generation.
Prior to joining Summa Franchise Consulting, Aaron worked with franchise concepts in several industries, including the health and beauty space, food and beverage, early childhood education, executive training, and professional services.
As a group, the company has worked with over 50 per cent of the franchise companies listed in the Entrepreneur Magazine Franchise 500 rankings through its collective history.
“Summa Franchise Consulting provides a ‘franchisor life cycle consulting partnership’ to create, grow, and help its clients and their stakeholders prosper”
DYNAMIC APPROACH
Summa Franchise Consulting works closely with its affiliated company, Franchise Dynamics, which Robert Stidham also founded. Franchise Dynamics helped create the franchise sales outsourcing (FSO) services category and is an Inc. 500|5000 award-winning company.
It is the FSO development services leader worldwide. Companies that retain Franchise Dynamics can focus on operations and growth, with Summa Franchise Consulting’s advice and guidance, while Franchise Dynamics handles franchise sales services and the accompanying paperwork headaches.
Franchise Dynamics provides clients with start-to-finish franchise development. Each client’s Franchise Dynamics team looks, feels, and operates like a member of the franchisors’ internal organization, such as working with marketing and operations executives and their staff to coordinate activities.
Franchise Dynamics’ fulfillment model is shared risk-oriented and, unlike some other FSO companies, it never takes a portion of royalties from clients.
THE AUTHOR
Robert Stidham is the CEO of Summa Franchise Consulting, founder of Franchise Dynamics, and principal of Arizona Home Health, a major stockholder in a healthcare franchisor. He is the recipient of the 2021 International Contribution to Franchising award at the Global Franchise Awards.
AT A GLANCE
Main HQ: Arizona, U.S.A.
Contact: info@summafranchise.com
