Custom theme · Franchise development · Email lifecycle
Dickey's Barbecue Pit
- locations in the system
- 500+
- brand founded, Dallas, Texas
- 1941
- conversion path (the inquiry form)
- 1
Dickey’s Barbecue Pit is the world’s largest barbecue franchise, with 500+ locations and a franchise-development team whose pipeline starts on one website. During my agency years I built franchise.dickeys.com, the site whose entire job is turning barbecue ambition into qualified franchisee inquiries.
A fran-dev site is a different animal from a restaurant site. Nobody here is ordering brisket. The visitor is weighing a six-figure commitment, and the site has to answer an investor’s questions (the model, the process, the support) while moving them toward exactly one action: the inquiry form. For a system the size of Dickey’s, small conversion leaks multiply across every market they’re trying to develop.
I built the site as a responsive WordPress theme, custom end to end: the ownership pitch, the process walkthrough, available-markets content, and the inquiry form feeding the fran-dev team’s follow-up. Every template was structured so each page ends at the form. No dead-end pages, no orphaned content.
The engineering priorities were editorial control and speed. Content lives in structured fields, so the fran-dev marketing team could update investment details and market pushes without touching a developer, and without being handed a page builder they could break the brand with. Prospects research franchises from their phones, so the build was responsive-first and kept lean; a national brand’s style guide is non-negotiable, and the theme enforced it rather than merely permitting it.
The site was the front door, but a form fill isn’t a franchisee. I also built Dickey’s post-lead email nurture, the automated sequences that keep a prospect warm between the inquiry and the salesperson’s call. This was agency work, shown as shipped, and the site has been in other hands since. Site plus nurture is still the whole fran-dev conversion machine, and I’ve shipped that same pattern for a string of national franchise brands. If your pipeline starts on one website, that machine is what I build.
