A New Book Offers Franchise Leaders a Framework for Growing Without Losing Their Culture
Years ago, I started noticing a pattern that bothered me in franchising. Growth would come. Systems would tighten. Revenue would climb. And somewhere along the way, without anyone deciding it should happen, the values that made the brand worth buying in the first place would start to blur at the edges.
Nobody sets out to lose their culture. It just erodes. One shortcut, one franchise, one hard quarter at a time.
That tension is the reason I spent the last few years co-writing Virtuous Business: A Model Approach with two colleagues from Indiana Wesleyan University. I’ve spent my career in franchising, as a multi-unit franchisee, as an emerging franchisor and a franchise supplier now leading Big Sky Franchise Team. I’ve watched this play out from all sides of the table. The founders who scale well aren’t the ones who abandon their principles for the sake of speed. They’re the ones who build principles into the speed.
That’s the whole premise behind the book, and behind the framework on which it’s built.
A Framework, Not a Slogan
The Virtuous Business Model (VBM) is a unique framework built by Indiana Wesleyan University’s DeVoe School of Leadership, Business, and Technology. The VBM outlines an ethical structure for a virtuous leader and a virtuous organization. The virtuous leader is built around three domains: personal, professional and spiritual domains of leadership. The virtuous organization is built on the premise of three forms of capital: economic capital, social capital and spiritual capital. In plain terms: how you show up as a leader, what deeper purpose is driving the organization, how you’re contributing to the people and communities around you, whether the business is financially sound and if the business is pursuing excellence.
The model’s argument is simple: all leaders and businesses have each of these domains and forms of capital, but few apply equal consideration to them. A financially strong business with no sense of purpose burns people out. A mission-driven business with no financial discipline eventually can’t keep the lights on. The virtuous leader and virtuous organization work in concert together, not separately.
For franchise leaders specifically, I think this matters more than in almost any other business model. Franchising is, at its core, an exercise in replication. You’re franchising something that works and looking to grow it to dozens or hundreds of locations and doing it through owners who invest into your franchise system. If your culture and values aren’t genuinely built into your systems, replication just multiplies the drift. You end up scaling the symptoms of a problem you never solved.
What’s Actually in the Book
Virtuous Business isn’t a memoir, and it isn’t a management theory book disconnected from the real world. The book is broken into three parts. Part one sets the tone by defining and establishing a base foundation of ethics. Part two provides context on the Virtuous Business Model, the Virtuous Leader and the Virtuous Organization through 27 mini-essays. Part three provides readers with a series of definitions and more than 300 reflection questions for leaders and teams to work through together. You can read it front to back, or open it to whichever mini-essay and reflection questions fit your current need.
Why I’m Sharing This With the Franchise Community Specifically
I didn’t write this book to add another leadership title to a crowded shelf. I wrote it because I kept having the same conversation, in different forms, with franchisors and franchisees who kept asking: how do I grow this thing without losing what made it good in the first place?
If you’re building a franchise system, training new franchisees, or trying to figure out how to keep your culture intact as you grow, I think this book will meet you where you are. Not with easy answers — there aren’t any — but with a framework and a set of questions worth sitting with.
You can find Virtuous Business: A Model Approach on Amazon or at VirtuousBusinessBook.com, where there are also 10 free reflection questions available, no purchase necessary. If even one of those questions starts a conversation on your leadership team, it makes the whole process worth it.
