Global Franchise 10.3

Expanding a business internationally is an excitingmilestone, but it can also feel like a massive undertaking.The biggest challenge is scalingwhile preserving the core essence of what made the brand successful in the first place. Before School of Rock, I spent more than two decades in global and regional leadership roles, including 16 years at Unilever and later as Chief Financial Officer of a large LatinAmerican vehicle importer.Those experiences taught me how scaleworks on paper. But it wasn’t until I launched School of Rock inChile and began expanding across LatinAmerica that I learnedwhat international growth looks like on the ground. Themost important lesson I’ve learned is to protect the core of the business and localize the rest. At School of Rock, the core elements are non-negotiable. Our unique performance-based approach, including weekly one-on-one lessons, band rehearsals, and live performances, remains the same in every location around theworld.This methodology, alongwith our safety standards and brand expectations, does not change. That consistency allows families, students, and staff to trust the experience, wherever they are. Around that core, everything elsemust be tuned locally. Setlists reflect local music culture. Parent communication aligns with local expectations. Operations adapt to labor laws, safeguarding requirements, and regulations that vary bymarket. As we expanded into Peru, Colombia, and beyond, each country brought its own surprises – from permits and venue availability to sourcing equipment and navigating regulation.The surprises never stop, but neither do the solutions. The second lesson is that executionmatters more than ambition. International expansion demands close attention to operational detail Matías Puga Hamilton , School of Rock Master Franchisee for Latin America and the UK, offers a perspective on the operating discipline behind a successful global expansion. WHAT IT TAKES TO BUILD A FRANCHISE THAT TRAVELS Why bad subscriptions die and true habits survive The subscription economy is having its retail moment. In 2017, analysts declared brick-and-mortar dead. By 2021, the real story emerged: bad retail was dead. Stores that offered nothing you couldn’t get online had no reason to exist. Experiential retail didn’t just survive – it thrived. Subscriptions are now facing the same sorting mechanism. The question isn’t whether recurring revenue works. It’s whether you’ve earned the right to recur. For a decade, companies treated subscriptions as a shortcut around customer decision-making. The goal was inertia – hoping people would forget the $19 charge on their credit card. But in an inflationary environment, that charge stops being invisible. When it moves into the foreground, customers perform an audit. They don’t just look at the price; they look at the tether. If a customer feels trapped by a contract or a difficult cancellation flow, they’ll fight to reassert their freedom. That’s when churn accelerates. To survive, subscriptions have to pass two basic sanity checks. First, the value must be impossible to digitize. Second, the value must compound over time. Once consumers realize something can be downloaded, streamed, or replaced with content, membership becomes optional. At Zoom Room, we lean heavily into the fact that we can’t be downloaded. Our core thesis is simple: to get the dog you want, you need a socialized dog. And socialization isn’t a video tutorial. It’s a biological event. Dogs need exposure to other dogs, unfamiliar people, loud noises, strange smells, and unpredictable situations, all in a controlled environment. That experience can’t be replicated online. We earn the right to be a destination because we provide something the digital world physically cannot. The second requirement is just as important. For a subscription to stick, its value must compound, not remain static. For us, the subscription isn’t a billing tactic; it’s a biological necessity. Puppies have a short, critical developmental window that requires frequent socialization. Learning happens through repetition and cadence. Because the dog needs consistency, the owner needs a model that removes friction. A subscription eliminates the weekly decision of whether to attend and ensures the dog gets what it needs. We earn recurring revenue because it’s the only model that actually delivers the outcome. As the subscription economy faces a long-overdue reckoning, Mark VanWye , CEO of Zoom Room, argues that recurring revenue only works when brands earn the right to it by creating habits customers can’t replace, digitize, or walk away from lightly. 52 GLOBAL FRANCHISE Issue 10.3