Most validation calls waste the fifteen minutes a current franchisee is willing to give you. The prospect asks “do you like it here?” and gets a polite yes, or asks “would you recommend it?” and gets an equally polite yes, and hangs up having learned almost nothing they couldn’t have gotten from the franchise’s own marketing page. Validation calls are supposed to be where the real picture shows up — the version without a sales rep in the room. Most people just don’t ask questions built to surface it.
A validation call is only as good as the questions behind it. Franchisees on these calls are almost always willing to be honest — they’ve been where you are, and most remember exactly what they wish someone had told them. The problem isn’t reluctance on their end. It’s that generic questions get generic answers, and specific questions get the real ones — and once you notice that pattern, you can’t unsee it on every call after.
This article extends the basic case for making validation calls into an actual playbook — the specific questions and tactics that get a current franchisee of an established franchise system to tell you what their week actually looks like, not just how they feel about the brand in general.
Ask About a Specific Week, Not a General Impression
Ask a franchisee to walk you through last Tuesday, not their overall opinion of the business. “What did your day look like on Tuesday” produces a concrete answer about hours, tasks, and pressure points; “how do you like being a franchisee” produces a rehearsed one-liner. Specificity forces detail, and detail is where you find out whether the actual day-to-day matches what you pictured when you were reading the brochure. Follow up by asking about a slow week too, not just a typical one — that’s where you find out whether the plan holds up when things aren’t going well.
Ask What They Wish They’d Known Before Signing
Every franchisee has an answer to this question, and it’s usually the most useful thing they’ll tell you. Ask directly: “What do you wish someone had told you before you signed?” This bypasses the instinct to be diplomatic about the brand and gets straight to the gap between expectation and reality — pricing assumptions, ramp-up timelines, how much selling versus operating the role actually involves.
Ask About Support When Something Went Wrong, Not When Things Were Fine
Support quality shows up in the hard moments, not the easy ones. Ask a franchisee to describe a time something went wrong — a client issue, a slow month, a technical problem — and how the company responded. Anyone can describe good support in the abstract; describing a specific breakdown and what happened next tells you whether the system holds up under actual pressure. Pay attention to response time in particular. A franchisee who says “I emailed and heard back the same day” is telling you something very different than one who says “I usually wait a few days and follow up twice.”
Questions worth asking on this topic:
- Tell me about a time a client was unhappy — how did the company help you handle it?
- Has there been a stretch where revenue was slower than expected? What did you do?
- How fast do you actually hear back when you need something?
- What’s the longest you’ve ever waited to hear back, and what happened after?
Ask About Money Without Asking for Numbers They Can’t Legally Share
Franchisees can’t share specific earnings figures outside what’s disclosed in Item 19 of the FDD, but they can describe patterns. Ask about ramp-up time instead of dollar figures — “how long before things felt financially stable” gets an honest, useful answer without putting anyone in a position to make a claim they’re not permitted to make. This respects the legal boundary while still getting you real information about the timeline to expect.
Talk to More Than One Franchisee, and Ask for Names They Didn’t Give You
A single validation call tells you one person’s experience; a pattern across several tells you about the system. FDD Item 20 lists current franchisee contacts specifically so prospects can reach people the franchisor didn’t hand-pick for the call. IFPG’s guidance on validation calls recommends keeping each call to roughly 15 minutes and any in-person visit to about 30 — franchisees are running real businesses, and respecting that gets you better access, not less. Two or three calls is the minimum worth doing before signing anything — a single conversation can be an outlier in either direction, good or bad.
Notice the Relationship, Not Just the Answers
How a franchisee talks about the corporate team tells you as much as what they say about it. Listen for whether they describe the relationship as adversarial or collaborative, whether they sound like they’re managing corporate or working with them. The International Franchise Association’s 2025 Franchisor Survey found that 85% of franchisor executives report a positive or very positive relationship between their company and its franchisees — a number worth testing against what you hear directly from the franchisee’s side of that same relationship. If a franchisee hedges every answer or seems to be reciting talking points, that’s information too — a straight answer, even an unflattering one, is usually a better sign than a polished one.
Validation Calls Separate Strong Systems From Weak Ones
The pattern that shows up across a handful of good validation calls tells you more than any single conversation could. A franchise with a real support system produces franchisees who describe specific, consistent experiences — the same response times, the same tone about corporate, the same honest answer about what the first year actually took. A franchise papering over real problems produces answers that don’t quite line up from call to call, or that sound rehearsed. Once you’ve asked the specific questions instead of the generic ones, that difference is hard to miss.
Every one of those conversations still comes with the same caveat: what one franchisee experienced isn’t a promise of what you’ll experience — results depend on your own market, effort, and execution. But a well-run validation call, built around the right questions, is the closest you’ll get to seeing the business clearly before you sign anything. If you’re evaluating RedKnight, remember it is a new franchise system with no current franchisees to call. Then start the conversation to review the FDD, ask the team direct questions, and meet the people who would deliver your clients’ work.