At Hana Group I ran 21 franchise units across 6 states, embedded inside Walmart, Sam's Club, Whole Foods, and Target footprints. $36M P&L. Three time zones on the same regional meeting. The distance between my two furthest units was longer than the drive from New York to Chicago.
You cannot run that on hustle. You cannot fly to every unit every month. You cannot text every general manager on Sunday night about last week's numbers. If you try, you will burn out by month four, and your general managers will learn that the only signal that matters is the panicked one. The job is designing a cadence that does the work you would otherwise be doing in a truck.
Here is what that cadence looked like, why it was shaped the way it was, and the parts I still tune.
The one standing meeting, and the time-zone Tetris
Every region has one meeting that is load bearing. Kill every other recurring meeting on the calendar and this one still has to run. For a distributed region, this is the weekly regional operating call. Mine ran Monday at 9 a.m. Central. That is 10 a.m. Eastern and 7 a.m. Pacific.
The math was ugly and it was on purpose. Of my 21 units, the plurality sat in Central time. Eastern was next. Pacific had two units. If I had put the meeting at 10 a.m. Pacific to be fair to the west coast, the Eastern general managers would have been eating a late lunch during the call, distracted, and the Central general managers would have been past the Monday setup rush and into the noon peak. Nobody would have been at their best.
So Pacific took the hit. Two general managers started their week early on Mondays. That cost was in the job description before they took it, and it was a real thing that mattered in their year-end review, because it was a real thing that mattered in mine. If you are going to ask people to move their calendar, be honest that you are asking, and price it in.
The standing weekly meeting is not a meeting. It is the heartbeat of the region. Move it around and the region stops knowing what day it is.
Same day, same time, same agenda
Novelty in a cadence is a bug. Every week the meeting had the same seven items in the same order. Regional P&L snapshot. Best and worst unit on labor. Best and worst on food cost. One customer signal from each general manager. Staffing gaps. Blockers. One commitment each general manager owns for the week. Under 45 minutes, always.
The seventh item was the one that made the meeting work. Every general manager had to name one specific thing they were going to fix by the following Monday. Not a theme. A thing. "I am going to rebuild the Thursday close schedule." "I am going to retrain the produce prep at store 14." Next week, the first thing that happened was the check-in against last week's commitment. Peer accountability did more work than my accountability ever could.
Fig. 1 · The weekly cadence for a distributed region.
Travel logic: two markets per week
Two markets per week was the ceiling I never let slip. Tuesday and Wednesday, one market. Land Monday night or Tuesday morning, work two units back to back, sleep in market, work two more units the next day, home Wednesday night. Thursday and Friday at a desk. Weekend off.
That was 40 percent of my week in the field. It sounds like a lot until you do the math on the region. With 21 units and two markets a week, each unit got a physical visit roughly every five to six weeks. That is not a lot of face time per unit. It has to be worth it every time.
Why not three or four markets?
I tried three markets for a quarter early on. Two things broke. First, my desk work rotted. I stopped reading the daily P&L exports on time, which meant the standing weekly meeting became a rehash of things everyone already knew instead of a strategic conversation about the pattern. Second, my video one-on-ones with the general managers I was not visiting started slipping, which meant those general managers experienced the region as absentee leadership, which meant they stopped calling me until things were on fire.
Field time is not a proxy for effort. It is a resource with an opportunity cost, and the cost is measured in desk quality and remote coaching. Two markets a week was the point at which both stayed healthy.
What onsite time is actually for
Two things, and only two things. First, seeing the shift. You cannot audit a shift on Zoom. You have to be in the walk-in, at the line, at the register, watching how the closing manager runs the final hour. Second, the one-on-one conversation that would land wrong on a screen. Hard feedback. Career conversation. Anything that will change the general manager's week or year. That happens face to face or it does not happen well.
Everything else that could be done on video should be done on video. Do not fly to praise. Do not fly to review the week's numbers. Do not fly to introduce a new SOP. Those all land fine on a screen and the travel time is your one non-renewable resource.
Video, phone, and onsite: three different tools
The mistake most regional operators make is treating all remote communication as one thing. It is three tools.
Video
Video is for the standing group cadence and for coaching moments that need eye contact. A struggling general manager who needs to hear that they are doing better than they think. A new general manager who is trying to make a decision and wants to think out loud with you. A performance conversation that will happen in a followup onsite but needs a scaffold first. Video is intimate. Do not waste it on status updates.
Phone
Phone is for a ten-minute unblock. A truck came in short and the general manager needs a call on whether to accept it. A staffing crisis needs a fast answer. A vendor is holding out and needs one call from you to shake loose. Phone should feel like a punch: fast, targeted, done. If a phone call runs past twenty minutes it should have been a video and you should have scheduled it.
Onsite
Onsite is for the shift and the hard conversation. If you cannot articulate before the trip which shift you need to see and which conversation you need to have, do not go. Go next month, when you can.
Dashboards that make async work
The cadence only works if the dashboards do their job in between. If every general manager has to be asked what happened yesterday, the cadence is a status report, not a rhythm. The dashboard has to answer the routine questions so the cadence can answer the harder ones.
Three things on every general manager's dashboard, live by 8 a.m. every day: labor as a percent of sales for the prior day, food cost variance for the week to date, and the top three items sold. Rolled up regionally on my side into a spread view: who was best on labor yesterday, who was worst, what the delta was. I could look at it for four minutes over coffee on Monday morning and know which two general managers I was going to focus the standing meeting around.
The rule for the dashboard is that a general manager should be able to read it in under 30 seconds on their phone before they clock in. Not a report they print. A glance. If it takes longer, they will stop looking, and the cadence loses the piece that was supposed to carry the routine questions. My own version rolled every unit into a single ranked view on the same three lines, sorted worst to best on whichever metric was drifting most that week. Four minutes on Monday, and I knew the shape of the region for the week.
The dashboard does not replace the meeting. It replaces the questions the meeting would otherwise waste time on.
What standardizes and what stays local
The temptation across six states is to standardize everything. Same schedule template. Same menu features. Same promo cadence. Do not do it. If the Ohio unit runs a Cleveland Browns promo in October, the Phoenix unit does not need it, and forcing it on both kills the general manager's ownership at both.
The line I use is: standardize how you measure, localize how you sell. The P&L format, the dashboard, the way you count labor and food cost, the definition of a comp, the meeting cadence, the one-on-one structure. All standard, no exceptions. Local promo, local vendor sourcing where the franchise agreement allowed it, local hiring pipeline, community relationships, and the exact shape of the daypart schedule. All local.
The rule protected two things at once. It made the regional data legible, because I was comparing apples to apples across states. And it kept the general manager as the operator of their unit, not as a puppet running my playbook.
The parts I would still tune
Three things I would do differently if I set this up again. None of them are dramatic. The best cadence changes rarely are.
- Move the standing meeting to Tuesday. Monday morning across three time zones is a bad idea. Something always breaks over the weekend, and the general managers show up to the meeting distracted. Tuesday at 9 a.m. Central gives the weekend to settle and the Monday numbers to close.
- Build the peer swap into the cadence earlier. Twice a year, general managers visit another market for two days. I did this by year two. I would do it in month three next time. Nothing accelerates a general manager's development like walking someone else's four walls.
- Protect Friday harder. I let Friday become a catch-all for the calls I did not take earlier in the week. That killed the writing time I needed to keep the operating rhythm sharp. Friday should be write-and-think, not phone-and-solve.
What breaks in a distributed cadence first
The failure mode is always the same. It is not the standing meeting. The standing meeting is easy to protect because everyone sees it on the calendar. What breaks first is the informal followup call between the weekly and the next weekly. The unit that had a bad Tuesday needs a five-minute call on Wednesday, and in a co-located region that call happens because you walk past each other. In a distributed region it does not happen unless somebody puts it on the calendar.
I built a rule for this after losing a whole month to it. Every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Central, I held a fifteen-minute open slot. Any general manager could grab it. If no one grabbed it, I read numbers. Over time the slot filled itself, and the mid-week course correction became a real thing again. It cost me two hours a week and saved me three visits to units that would have drifted into a bigger problem otherwise.
The point
A distributed region is held together by a cadence, not by a calendar full of flights. The standing meeting, the dashboard, the two-market travel logic, and the discipline of using video and phone as different tools are what make 21 units across 6 states run as one region instead of 21 orphans. The travel is real, and it matters, but it is the smallest part of the job. What actually holds is the rhythm.
Cadence beats geography. Every time.