Cousins Subs

Franchise recruitment is a long sale. A candidate raising their hand today might sign a franchise agreement a year from now, and the drop-off between “downloaded the brochure” and “attended discovery day” is where fran-dev budgets quietly die. Cousins needed the recruitment site itself (investment details, territory story, the why-Wisconsin-works pitch) and a systematic answer for every lead that went quiet.

I built cousinssubsfranchise.com as a custom WordPress theme: fast, responsive, structured so the fran-dev team could edit investment figures and market pages without a developer. Then I built the email layer. A four-email post-lead sequence fires the moment someone inquires, and a three-email fading-lead sequence re-engages candidates who stall. Seven pieces total, sharing one visual system with the site, so the emails read like they came from the same place as the page that captured the lead.

The unglamorous engineering was the point. The emails are hand-built HTML: table-based layout, bulletproof buttons, tested across Outlook and the mobile clients where franchise prospects read. A broken layout in a candidate’s inbox reads as a broken franchise system. On the site side, lead forms fed the fran-dev team’s CRM directly, so sequence triggers ran off real pipeline stages instead of a marketer remembering to hit send.

This is agency-era work. I was the developer on the build, under the agency’s banner, and the site has since been rebuilt by others. What it demonstrates hasn’t aged: I’ve shipped the full franchise-development funnel end to end, site and lifecycle email both, for a national multi-location brand. It’s the same pattern I built for Arby’s, Dunkin’, and half a dozen other franchisors.