Location: Chennai with frequent travel across our store markets.

About the Role:

We operate on a FOFO (Franchise-Owned, Franchise-Operated) model, where the success of each store depends heavily on the quality, ownership mindset, and operating capability of the franchise partner. We are looking for a hands-on operator to own the performance and expansion of this network.

This is not a role for someone who wants to manage the business primarily through dashboards and reviews. You will spend significant time in stores, with franchise partners,

understanding ground realities, solving operational problems, and building repeatable systems that make our best stores the benchmark for the network.

What you’ll own:

1. Store hiring – Hiring is the store partner's own KPI, not yours — but you’ll actively guide and support them in hiring the right type of people, with a repeatable toolkit and tighter handoff into our training team.
2. Sales attrition – Also the store partner's KPI. You'll help them diagnose root causes and adopt a retention playbook (comp, incentives, career path) rather than owning the outcome directly.
3. Local demand generation – Reduce over-reliance on centrally-sourced paid leads by building partners' capability to generate local demand (referrals, local tie-ups, community/corporate outreach).
4. Lead economics & conversion – Fix cases where partners consume paid leads (50% CAC-charged post month 6) without converting — via better training, accountability, or lead-routing fixes.
5.



Partner selection & store health – Sharpen partner vetting toward operators over investors; run a regular store review cadence; drive real turnarounds for underperforming stores.
6. Playbook codification – Turn what works in our best stores into a standard playbook for current and struggling ones.
7. New store expansion – Scout markets and real estate (500-600 sq ft, high-street/arterial- road, high-visibility), and screen partners rigorously — at the pace needed to hit 20-25 stores without a quality drop.
8. Leading the Store Ops team – Hire, coach, and manage this team directly. They train store staff and resolve tickets (itinerary, pricing, deal support) — conversion stays with the store seller/partner. Set standards for response time, quality, and scale the team as stores grow.
9. Stakeholder management – Work across performance marketing, training, and finance to translate store-level reality into action, and vice versa.
10. Commercial & compliance ownership – Own franchise LOB budgeting/forecasting, track unit economics (CAC vs. revenue by store), and keep franchise agreements compliant.

What does Success Looks Like:

- Underperforming stores show measurable turnaround, or an honest call on the partner relationship




- Documented hiring/onboarding process adopted across most stores; attrition trending down
- Growing share of revenue from partner-generated local demand
- Store-level lead-conversion economics visibly improving, not just tracked
- 11 20-25 stores in 12 months, without quality drop in stores or partners→ Store Ops team scales with store growth, holding response quality steady

What’s needed:

Non-negotiable

- Stakeholder management- credible with founders, partners, and internal teams at once
- Managing by influence — formal authority over Store Ops only; store partners must be moved through relationship and credibility, not hierarchy
- Problem-solving — root-cause diagnosis, comfortable building the playbook where none exists
- Go-getter mindset, hustle, and a willingness to get hands dirty — in stores, not just on dashboards
- Based in Chennai, in person

Preferred

- Retail operations or multi-location/franchise management background — ground-level, revenue-owning, not purely strategic/advisory
- Experience managing a hire-train-retain cycle for a distributed frontline team
- Direct people-management experience
- Comfort with franchise-model messiness — variable partner capability, local market variance
- P&L; / unit-economics fluency
- MBA preferred, min 5 years of prior work experience

Nice to have

- Travel, hospitality, or similar high-consideration sales category experience
- Experience scaling a partner/franchise network from a smaller base

📌 LEAD - Franchise Operations & Retail Expansion (Chennai)
🏢 Pickyourtrail
📍 Chennai