Your Candidates are using AI. Are you helping them?
AI is playing a huge role in your Candidate's vetting and evaluation process. If the only thing you give them is your FDD, you're not setting them up for success.
In This Lab Report
You’ve got your diligence process running like a top. Your broker networks are engaged. You’ve got leads flowing. The way Candidates evaluate your brand has changed a lot in the last 3 years. You have to give them more tools to work with the AI they’re using so they have all the context they need to make informed decisions. AI Native brands are going to win.
Give Your Candidates Context
If you’re using AI a lot, you’ve heard the term Context. In the world of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI tools it means (in brief) the details you bring that you want the AI to focus on instead its general knowledge which is often confused and out of date.
At the FranDev Lab I’m hearing 9 out of 10 Candidates are using AI. Which means they’re asking AI about franchising in general, how to evaluate brands, about markets and models, and about your brand specifically. No AI has as much context about your brand as it needs to be a great diligence partner. If the only thing you give them is your FDD, their AI doesn’t have what it needs to help your Candidates make a good decision.
Where to Start
The good news is that AI is a more thorough reader of your brand materials and content than any Candidate will ever be. AI is going to be the only person outside your marketing team who reads every word. So give your Candidates a huge (and I mean it) packet of Context to give their AI.
You can (and maybe have) put some of this on your website but you can’t rely on AI to find it and you want to go deep for Candidates.
What you should provide:
A single document full of all the relevant information about your brand that qualified Candidates can download and drop right into their AI. I suggest adding it to your Sales Room (I recommend Arrows) right after your Intro/Discovery call.
It should be on-brand but don’t focus too much on design. The top priority is deep, well structured content easily digestible by AI. A simple PDF or even a Word doc is fine.
You should be able to easily get to 50 pages of highly relevant content. (And get AI’s help to write it!) Their AI will love it.
Sections I suggest starting with:
A Diligence Process Guide: break down your entire diligence process from Intro to Discovery Day and signing. When, what, where, why, and who of each stage. What questions get answered, what' they’ll learn. Set their expectations on the timeline.
Brand Story & Industry Overview: Give a detailed narrative and timeline about your origin story, your leadership team, and the industry you operate in. Size, growth, demand drivers, even competitive landscape. Give AI something better than whatever it scrapes from the internet when a Candidate asks “tell me about [Brand].”
Your Support & Infrastructure: what you provide on an ongoing basis — field support, marketing, technology, operations, vendor relationships. Everyone talks about this, ,go deep and specific. Reiterate what’s in your FDD. Talk about the why for everything you offer. Include testimonials about how useful your tech is. Answer the questions they’ll never ask about how they operate.
Roadmap to Open: Detail the full journey from signing the FA to opening day for a typical Franchisee with both a narrative and a timeline. From the immediate next steps, to any location/site search, build out, acquiring equipment, training, and launch. Tell them who they’ll be working with. You want AI to be able to answer their questions and build them a plan.
Who Thrives at [Brand]: personality traits, backgrounds, skills, motivations. Include real owner snapshots that show the range. Be specific enough that AI can pattern-match against the Candidate’s own self-description and start connecting them to your brand. You want their AI to say “It looks like your background is a great fit!”
Day in the Life of Ownership: what does a Tuesday look like? What the owner does, what you hire for, what the franchisor handles. How do they spend their time? Candidates are making a lifestyle decision — give AI something concrete to anchor that conversation.
Decision & Validation Tools: any tools you already give them or use. Self-assessment, Excel workbooks, territory definitions, etc.
You’ll notice a lot of this is what you’d cover on your milestone calls in your diligence process and at Discovery Day. Your Candidates’ AI isn’t hearing these things so you need to give it the information your Candidates need.
So…now what?
Compiling that information feels overwhelming.
But you should have Discovery Day recordings and materials and call transcripts to use as source material if nothing else.
Collect all that and use AI to organize it into the documents I suggest above. It will probably take longer to collect the materials than create the documents.
And if you need help, I’m happy to talk. And…if you don’t have solid Franchise Diligence Call transcripts, we should talk about Call Catalyst AI, the AI tool built specifically for franchise diligence calls.