The picture in one page
Burgess Media is Tom's LLC. Tom is one of roughly 20 to 25 independent developers contracted to Brand One, which sells franchises on behalf of about 20 to 24 brands. Tom represents Another9 and Menchie's today, with a third expected. Brands rotate roughly every two years once a territory is sold out, so the setup has to expand without being rebuilt.
Tom
Eight to ten one-to-one calls a day. Needs meeting links, his Outlook connected, follow-up handled for him, and one place that shows what has not been touched.
Monique
Sweeps behind every call, owns reporting, imports and exports, and updates FranConnect. Needs conversion rates, time in stage, stall alerts, and the ability to send as Tom.
Cammie
Picks up the repetitive follow-up. Needs templates, tasks and the ability to send under Tom's address while logged in as herself.
FranConnect stays live. Brand One renewed it for six months from August 2026, so it may retire around February 2027. Until then, changing a stage inside FranConnect is what fires the branded emails, so it keeps its job. That single fact shapes most of the sync design.
Roughly 950 records owned by Tom across two brands, of which 75 to 150 are active at any time and the rest are dormant. Five to ten new enquiries a day, heaviest on Mondays when brokers release their weekend leads.
The goal, in Tom's words: nothing falls through the cracks, nobody stalls, and the follow-up stops eating nights and weekends without slowing the top of the funnel down.
Terminology mapping table
Franchise language and HubSpot language describe the same record with different words. This is the table we all work from, so nobody is guessing what a candidate, a developer or a lead means in a given sentence.
| Their term | What it actually is | In HubSpot |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate, prospect | The human being pursued | Contact |
| Interest in one brand | An active pursuit, not yet a real opportunity | Lead, one per brand |
| Real opportunity | Funds, timing and intent proven | Deal, one per brand |
| Developer | The salesperson representing a brand | Deal owner and Lead owner (Tom today) |
| Brand | Another9, Menchie's, and the ones that follow | Property on Lead and Deal. Dropdown or custom object, decided at architecture |
| Brand One | The umbrella company Tom contracts to | Context only, not a record in this portal |
| Franchisor | The brand's own corporate team | Out of scope, they take over post close |
| Broker, consultant, network | Pays for lead gen, introduces candidates, earns commission | Company (type: Broker) plus a Contact for the individual |
| CQ | Confidential Questionnaire, the qualification application. Quality varies | Property, and the gate before a Deal is created |
| FDD | Franchise Disclosure Document, gated by state registration | Property and task. Sending stays in FranConnect |
| Discovery Day | Late funnel event, candidate meets the brand | Deal stage |
| Founders Intro | Introduction to the brand founders | Stage. The escalation point in the monday.com board |
| Validation | Candidate speaks to existing franchisees | Deal stage |
| Legal | Contract and franchise agreement | Deal stage |
| Franchisee | A candidate who signed | Contact with a closed won deal |
| Dead | Not deleted. Dormant and still reachable | Closed lost or parked. Nobody leaves the database |
| Remarks | Free text notes on the FranConnect record | Notes on the activity timeline |
| Status | Where they sit in the process | Lead stage or Deal stage |
| Drip campaign | Branded emails that fire on entry | Stays in FranConnect. Marketing, not ours |
| Status emails | Branded emails that fire on stage change | Stays in FranConnect. Marketing, not ours |
| Standalone emails | Tom's own one-to-one follow-up | Moves to HubSpot as sales templates |
| Add, change, delete | Incremental export: new rows, edited rows, removed rows | Import file spec, matched on record ID |
| Territory | The geography being sold | Property, plus the state registration check |
FranConnect field mapping
This table is Monique's to fill, and it feeds the property specification sheet. It is also what keeps the FranConnect update a quick lookup rather than a judgement call every time.
| FranConnect field | What it holds | Object | HubSpot property | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| To be completed from the export, with Monique | ||||
Two things that hang off it
- The stage map. Each HubSpot stage to its FranConnect status, both directions. Where FranConnect stage names can be copied verbatim this is one-to-one for most rows, which is the plan.
- The unique identifier. We need to confirm the export carries a record ID. Without one, every sync becomes name matching. Some FranConnect views show names under column headings with no email and no ID attached.
FranConnect does not hold the introducing broker as a clean field. It sits inside the record in brackets, so pulling it out means parsing the text, matching against a deduplicated broker list and correcting the inconsistencies by hand. This is the largest piece of spreadsheet work in the project, and the reason deals are loaded in two passes rather than one.
The relationships to track
This is the part specific to Burgess Media, and the part most setups get wrong. One person can be several conversations at once, and the broker who introduced them is a relationship in its own right rather than a source field.
Broker Company (the network) └── Broker Contact (the individual, e.g. Greg) └── introduced ──> Candidate (Contact) ├── Lead: Another9 ──converts──> Deal: Another9 └── Lead: Menchie's ──converts──> Deal: Menchie's
| Relationship | Why it matters | How |
|---|---|---|
| Contact to Lead, one per brand | A candidate can be interested in two brands at once. FranConnect creates the same person twice | Lead object with a brand property on each |
| Contact to Deal, one per brand | Someone can be under contract on Another9 while still being chased on Menchie's | Multiple deals per contact, no duplicate contacts |
| Deal to owner | Both deals sit with Tom today. Under Brand One the second would sit with a different developer | Owner set per deal, never assumed at contact level |
| Deal to broker, introduced by | Broker deals carry commission and the broker is owed progress updates | Association with a label |
| Contact to broker | Do you need every broker a candidate has ever come through, or only the one on the current deal? | Open decision. Cheap now, expensive later |
| Broker contact to broker company | Brokers sit inside networks and reporting is wanted at both levels | Standard contact to company |
| Contact to lead source | Organic, referral or broker. Tom wants separate conversion rates per source | Property set at creation and carried for life |
| Contact to referrer | A closed franchisee refers a friend. These convert highest of all | Association or property, to be decided |
| Deal to brand | Every report splits by brand, and brands rotate in and out | Property, so a new brand is a dropdown value not a rebuild |
| Contact to state | Each brand is only registered to sell in certain states | Property. The send guardrail stays in FranConnect for now |
| Record to FranConnect ID | The sync key behind every incremental import | Unique identifier property |
The automations
Sixteen in total, in three groups. None of these are marketing emails. Branded marketing stays where it is today, and Burgess Media sends one-to-one sales email in Tom's voice only.
Foundational, before anything client facing goes out
| # | Automation | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Send as Tom | Cammie and Monique log in as themselves and send under Tom's address. The candidate should only ever see Tom. This is the single most important thing to get right, so it is set up and tested first. The data model and the pipeline are built on the assumption it works. |
| A2 | Email and calendar | Tom's Outlook connected, meeting links moved into HubSpot, Calendly retired. |
In the build
| # | Automation | Trigger | What happens | Built by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A3 | Stage change follow-up | Deal or lead stage change | Templated one-to-one email in Tom's voice, sent as Tom. Roughly half go as-is, half get a personal line from Cammie | Monique |
| A4 | Stall alert | Time in stage passes a threshold | Task to Monique or Cammie, and optionally an outbound touch. Time in stage is the single most valuable number the portal can produce, and thresholds vary by stage | Monique |
| A5 | Post-call tasks | Tom finishes a meeting | Standard follow-up tasks created against the record. Three to five per call, mostly templated, across ten calls a day. Today this is a handwritten pad swept by hand | Monique |
| A6 | Task back to Tom | Something only Tom can do | Assigned to Tom: legal, contracting, closing. Roughly three or four out of every ten meetings. This becomes his end-of-day list | Monique |
| A7 | The untouched view | Always on | One place showing what has been touched, by whom, and what has not. Replaces reconstructing it across five systems | Monique |
| A8 | FranConnect sync back | Daily or twice weekly | A list of every stage change made in HubSpot since the last run, so it can be keyed into FranConnect. Manual by design, since that stage change is what fires the branded emails. Expect around ten a day | GNG spec |
| A9 | Import cycle | Nightly or set cadence | Add, change and delete import matched on FranConnect record ID. The full base is exported each time, of which only 20 to 30 rows have moved | GNG spec |
Parked, and quoted separately whenever you want them
These are the items listed under What We Have Left Out For Now in the proposal, named here so nothing gets lost.
| # | Automation | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| A10 | Broker progress updates | Automatic notification to the introducing broker as their candidate moves: meeting held, next meeting booked, gone quiet, moving to legal. Brokers invest heavily in these leads and then lose visibility the moment they hand one over. This is the fastest route to standing with them. |
| A11 | Post-close nurture | Three month anniversary email in Tom's voice to closed franchisees, who are the strongest referral source there is. Easier to build once there is real closed data to send to. |
| A12 | Gone-quiet sequences | Re-engagement for candidates who have stalled, enrolled from a workflow. |
| A13 | Dormant reactivation | When a new brand arrives, market to the dormant and the closed. Waits on the broker credit question. |
| A14 | Pre-qualification gate | Candidates earn their way onto the calendar through forms, videos and a real application before a one-to-one. Worth testing, though some of the disclosure has to be one-to-one by law, so this can only ever gate the front end. |
| A15 | Meeting notes onto the record | Plaud already produces the transcript, summary and task list on every call. Open question is whether it integrates to HubSpot or stays copy and paste. |
| A16 | FDD compliance guardrail | Blocking a send into a state where the brand is not registered, and warning when one has already gone. Stays in FranConnect for Burgess Media, noted here because it matters if the model ever travels further. |
Who builds what
The build splits three ways, which is what keeps anything from being done twice or missed. This also lives on the shared ClickUp board.
| Gather 'n' Grow | Monique | Parked |
|---|---|---|
| Portal foundations: association, lifecycle and owner settings | Account defaults, users, seats, permissions | Broker progress updates (A10) |
| Send as Tom, set up, tested and handed over (A1) | Email and calendar connection, meeting links (A2) | Post-close nurture (A11) |
| Two discovery sessions and the data model mindmap | Email templates and folders | Gone-quiet sequences (A12) |
| Property specification across Contact, Company, Deal and Lead, then built from the sheet | Record layouts across Contact, Lead and Deal | Dormant reactivation (A13) |
| Lead stages and the lead to deal conversion rule | The deal pipeline, its stages, required fields, and the written definition of each stage | Pre-qualification gate (A14) |
| The relationship model and association labels | The terminology mapping table | Plaud integration (A15) |
| The FranConnect field mapping and the import file spec | Workflows: stall alerts, task creation, thresholds (A3 to A7) | Dashboards and reporting |
| Four imports: contacts, brokers, direct deals, broker deals | Sequences, and triggering them from a workflow | AI credit usage |
| Handover, review, and one check-in call after go live | Deciding the records that cannot be matched with certainty | FDD guardrail (A16) |
| The commercial edge cases on broker credit |
Properties are created straight from the specification sheet rather than keyed in one by one, so nothing is mistyped and the internal names match the import file. Properties only. Imports and associations are done in HubSpot the normal way, and the access is removed at handover.
Boundaries and setup
What sits outside this portal
- No marketing email from Burgess Media. No drip campaigns, no branded sends, no FDDs. That stays where it is, and the plan is to keep benefiting from it rather than rebuild it. Burgess Media sends one-to-one sales email in Tom's voice.
- No website connected. The brands are not yours, so there is no tracking code and no marketing contacts.
- No onboarding pipeline. The moment the contract is signed the franchisee goes to the brand's operations team. The only ongoing touch is the relationship one.
Licensing
One Sales Enterprise seat for Tom, which is what carries unbranded meeting links and sequences that can be triggered from a workflow, plus two Core seats for Monique and Cammie. Pro and Enterprise cannot be mixed on the same hub, which is why the split sits this way. Enterprise includes AI credits, best pointed at anything that keeps candidates moving.
Timing
- Cammie starts HubSpot Academy on 1 September, so the lessons she is pointed at depend on what the portal looks like.
- Tom comes into the portal once it is set up to suit his process. Cammie comes in after that, when there is something ready for her to learn.
- FranConnect is on a six month renewal, so the double running period is finite.
The monday.com board is a working model of the same thinking: leads with a brand dropdown, escalation at Founders Intro or Discovery Day, deals created only when real, with deal value, close probability and a broker flag, and a dashboard tracking quarterly goals against an annual target. The structure carries over. The maintenance does not.