One On One with Dustin Thompson

AI was not used in the creation of this podcast. This is the Social Geek Radio Network.

Hello, geeks, and welcome to the Social Geek Podcast. I’m Jack Monson, your host and marketing Consigliere.

Today’s guest is Dustin Thompson in a one-on-one conversation with me. Dustin is the Director of Franchise Development at one of the biggest brands in franchising, Jack In The Box, and one of this year’s Franchise Thought Leadership Award winners.

All right, today’s show is brought to you by Pilot, AnswerConnect, and before we get going, a quick note from Thunderly. Are your friend dev marketing agencies, content creators and PR teams really working together? Learn how Thunderly’s amplified integrated marketing can drive franchise development growth at thunderlymarketing.com.

Dustin Thompson is the Director of Franchise Development and Marketing at Jack In The Box, and he’s also a Franchise Thought Leadership Award winner for 2026 from Social Geek, and he joins us on the podcast now. Dustin, what’s going on?

What’s going on, Jack? Thank you for having me on the show. This is great.

Yeah, good to talk to you again. You know, you’re one of those guys who I never would have met if not for some events like FLDC and the multi-unit show and some of these other industry events. Those shows can’t be Zoom calls. It’s got to be in person and that’s where people like you and me actually meet.

Yeah, that’s always fun because you get to, you see people a lot on LinkedIn, you see a lot of presence, but getting to meet people and actually fill their vibe, if you will, it’s really, that’s the fun part of to me franchising, right? That’s the interesting part.

Yeah. And any more, I’ve been saying if I didn’t meet you in person, you could be AI. So I can vouch for the fact that you are not AI.

I am not AI. I am Dustin Thompson. I am living and breathing.

There you go. All right. And a thought leader this year. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Where do you see franchising, capital F franchising, right? The space. Where do you see it changing in the next, let’s say one year, maybe two years, not too far down the line, but in coming months and a couple of years?

Yeah, I think the one big thing is, franchise development is about circuiting, right? Most brands are already ready for it. But essentially, you’re kind of seeing two segments of franchising. And I listened to your interview with Edith, and she kind of talked about this as well, right? There’s two segments. And that’s true. You basically have a sophisticated multi-unit, you know, operator with institutional capital, and they want, you know, data, AUV transparency, you know, in-depth item 19 information, which, you know, can’t be provided outside of, you know, what’s in the FDD, and before they’ll ever get on a discovery call, right? That’s one side. And on the other end, you’ve got first-time candidates, which is interesting because they’re pre-educated more than they’ve ever been, right? So they’re learning about your brand on TikTok and Reddit and AI search, and they’re asking a lot of the questions that, you know, previously would take two or three calls to maybe open up for a franchise candidate to open up and ask those questions or even know to think about those questions. Those are happening on the front end on your first call. So it’s definitely gone in two different directions. So I think that’s very different compared to what we used to see. And the second shift that nobody’s talking about to me is Google’s zero-click strategy with AI answers. And they’re quietly rewriting lead generation. And that directly impacts franchise development. So I definitely see that being a major change. Because if your website is not, let’s say, structured to basically answer the questions of candidates, then you’re definitely not answering the questions that AI is looking for. And that means you’re going to be invisible moving forward. It used to be a totally different space where you could create good content, really game SEO and be at the top of Google search. And now being number one in organic, you’re buried below sponsored results and AI snippets. It’s not even as important. Now, mind you, I think it’s still 40 plus percent of the most cited things in AI come from the number one rank. But outside of that, people are slowly disappearing. And that number one spot isn’t as important as it used to be. It’s from a structural standpoint. So I definitely see that changing in the next one to two years.

Does it feel like you’re talking to a lot of candidates now who found you through ChatGPT or Claude or something like that?

Yes, it’s interesting. With Google Analytics, you could track that and you can find who comes from where. And we use HubSpot and HubSpot is able to track where somebody comes from. But I would say the engagement from leads, I look at them very similar as I look at organic leads. They’re more engaged. They typically spend more time on your website. Nobody has asked me or I haven’t yet been asked or a question hasn’t been framed to me, said, hey, I saw you on AI, right? So that has not happened yet. But you know by the questions they’re asking, one of two things is happening. They’re either on your website, really going through your content, which is great, or they’ve done their research on AI and they’re coming to the table with those comparisons already in place. It used to be they’d come to our website and we teach them about our brand. Now they’re learning about multiple brands, 20, 30 brands at one time with AI. Most of the time, you wouldn’t have that, what’s it say, the amount of time that would have taken to do that amount of research, you probably would have narrowed it down to one to three. Now, I could compare 20 plus in seconds.

Make my own matrix. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. That’s really interesting too, that you’re probably talking to people who are more, I don’t want to say better educated, but they’re at least more informed or they have more data than they did five, ten years ago.

It is. I think the key is that what we have to figure out is, is the data that they have accurate. A lot of what I want to do is discovery is saying, like I understand you know what our franchise fee is, that hasn’t changed in a while, our royalties haven’t changed, but the incentive you’re quoting is an old incentive, or our veteran discount is very different than what it used to be, or our total cost of investment has shifted. Those are things that when they provide information, it’s good for us to have an understanding of that because I can at least say, hey, look, I’m glad you got that information, but let me send you over the most updated information so we’re getting the most up-to-date information to make your decision on.

One thing I’ve never asked you about, and it’s coming to light in our conversation here, is your title and role with Jack In The Box. It’s unique. You are the Director of Franchise Development and Marketing. You’ve got one foot in sales and one foot in marketing. Is that accurate?

That is a very accurate description. I would say, I think the future of Franchise Development and this role kind of comes from this hybrid position. Here’s why I say that. Most of my career was spent in lead generation. So, why that is important is that I’ve seen how things have shifted. From 2008, when I came into the industry to today, I’ve seen how things have shifted as far as how leads come to the table, what efforts are taken to generate those leads. And then really now I understand how much information leads have and how much information leads are wanting from us as a brand. So, I understand the warm introduction. I understand how they got to our brand so that when we have that initial discovery call, not only do I know all the content on our website because we put it together, I understand what to send them to answer their questions. And if I don’t, I can quickly put together a video for them, just a live video and say, hey, you had a question on our two different incentives. How can I better explain that so you understand which one is right for you? So part of that, again, is it’s a hybrid position. My day is split, right? So I generate the leads that I call. So you know where they come from. You know what sources are being interacted with the most. You know what sources are not interacting the most with your content. You understand how much time people are spending on your website. I understand what videos they viewed, what forms, what brochures they’ve downloaded, what slides they’ve taken a look at. So I think it’s a very unique, like you said, it’s a very unique role. There’s not many people to do this, but I think it’s important. So because now more than ever, sales is connected to lead generation. If I’m not in tune with the leads, how can I sell to someone if I have no clue how they landed on our brand or why they’re here? So again, I take pride in that, but it is a lot of work.

Yeah. But I think you’re going in the right direction. I’ve seen several of our friends in the industry who were marketing experts and really understood the data and understood how to sort of pull people in to have those conversations. And then it turns out, oh, by the way, he or she is actually a very good natural salesperson too. They know how to solve problems. They know how to listen to people and take care of what that person needs taken care of. So I hope to see a lot more people with your same title in the next decade.

No, I would love to see it. And honestly, I think it’s great for brands. And again, we talked about a lot of the benefits, but I think it’s important for, in the beginning when I started this, a lot of franchise development marketing was outsourced or was housed on the brand side. I know you’ve seen that, right? Yeah. I’m not saying that it can’t be a component of that, but especially from a brand building perspective. But what we’re targeting is very selling a hamburger is very different than selling a 10 plus million dollar investment, right? So understanding again how people got there is important. But having those questions, I remember the first 10 years of my career was really working with the sales team and asking them, what are people asking on these calls? How can we do a better job of answering those questions so that when they see that information and they’re asking those questions, one, we’ll rank number one in Google, but two, they want to schedule a call with us because they know we’re sharing that information. It’s no longer being a gatekeeper. I don’t have to interrupt people anymore now. It’s just very different.

Yeah. One thing that I think my team at Thunderly does really well is nothing against marketing people, especially consumer marketing people. They’re quite lovely. But I think what we’re good at is having our team directly interacting with the Frandev salespeople, because taking out that layer of translation, I want to actually speak with the people who are speaking to the candidates, not in the form of a spreadsheet or a monthly wrap-up report, but actually getting the flavor of those conversations. Do you want more like Jane Smith or do you want more like John Doe over here? Who do we need to deliver when it comes to lead generation? I think you can talk to marketing people all day, but until you talk to the Frandev salespeople, you’re not really going to get the answer to those questions.

Yeah, and I completely agree. Because every day my job is, my entire career at this point is answering questions. If we can work better on how to answer those questions, great. But again, answering somebody’s investment questions and understanding the nitty-gritty of like, this is an item 7 and this is an item 19 and this is what we can speak to, that’s extremely important. The customer acquisition cost of a franchise development lead is far higher than most cases than you would find right on the consumer side. So again, just totally different audience. They’re in love with the brand most of the time, and they love the brand and what they’ve experienced, but this is a completely different process and I think it’s separate.

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So, this will be, I just celebrated my fifth anniversary in April, the beginning of April.

Okay. So, looking back, maybe over the past five years, or go back even further than that, if you want. What’s your favorite thing about what you’re doing now as opposed to back then? Is there something that’s really come up lately that’s really been a game changer for your career and your work and your life?

Yeah. So, a lot of that shift has been, again, on my side, is really immersing myself further and further into a full-time sales role, but also being full-time lead generation. But I would say, let’s look back 10 years ago, which it’s hard to think that was 2016. It feels like so much longer.

That feels like that was three quarters ago, wasn’t it?

Yeah. Exactly. It doesn’t feel that far back. But 10 years ago, franchise sales was a performance to some degree. You had a deck, you had your talking points, you had a sequence you ran people through, and success was getting, what’s the best way to say it? I wanted to get my message to you before you hung up on me to some degree. You were measured on contacts, your calls, your appointments, your deals, and the culture rewarded closing with anyone with a pulse to some degree. It was a very, very different time. Today, the best discovery calls, I barely feel our sales calls at all. They don’t even, it’s not even a hard sell anymore. It’s more of just like two people talking about an opportunity. They feel like the due diligence running is running in both directions. That’s how I look at it. They show up ready for an FDD summary where it used to be you had to build them up to that. They’ve already watched multiple videos. They have looked up different burger franchises. They’ve been on Gemiini or Chad GPT, and they’ve looked up our Item 7. They’ve compared us to other brands. They walk into the call just better suited for a conversation of a business of our stature, a $10-plus million investment. I think what that has done really in the last 10 years has shaped how I sell. My job is now, it’s not presenting anymore. It’s more validating and disqualifying. Ask sharper questions about what is your operations experience? How coachable are you? What is your capital? What is your territory strategy? What is your willingness to follow our system? I’ve always been more of an honest person. That’s more of my style. I’m not a hard sell kind of person. This really suits me well, how things have shifted because now it’s less about the hard sell and more about coaching and really understanding how they’re going to be successful in the business. Here’s the counterintuitive part of that. Closing rates go up when you stop trying to close everyone. That’s a luxury. Don’t get me wrong. You have to have a boss that’s understanding of this process. That’s the caveat here. But candidates can feel the difference between somebody’s trying to hard sell them in pushing a franchise versus executive filtering. The ones who are right for our brand or any brand I’ve worked for, they lean harder because they trust the conversations we’re having, because we’re up front with the information on the front end. We’re not making them jump through hurdles to find our Item 7, or find our FDD, or find that information. And they can tell when people are being straight with them. People have a really good intuition, especially entrepreneurs. I mean, entrepreneurs are really good about picking up on fake. So to sum that all up, it’s finally a grown up conversation, and it’s really the part of the job I enjoy the most.

Yeah, could you imagine if you took some of the great candidates you’re talking to right now, and took them back in time 15 years and had them talk to a friend of salesperson, the friend of salesperson would be like, oh my gosh, these people are fantastic. They know what an item seven is. They’re already prepared to have a conversation. And so, I don’t know, I think everything you said makes me feel very optimistic about this whole space really growing the way we’ve wanted to for the past decade, because there are so many people who are not just willing to grow, but they’re ready. So, as opposed to, you know, years ago, you and me out there trying to sell something. So-

It’s very different, yeah. And again, how they find you is very different, right? I mean, we didn’t have all the avenues that we have now. I mean, I remember we used to put a ton of money into print media and, you know, you would have those kinds of things. And now we don’t really do any print media. Everything is mainly digital. And I would even say now, we lean more towards content. And when I say content, answering questions, right? And that’s something that I’m not saying was never important, but it’s more important than ever, not only because that’s what people are growing accustomed to, being more transparent with pricing, your development schedule, all of that. But also, they’re looking for that information that maybe they didn’t receive. And a lot of times that comes through validation through franchisees. And that’s the part of the process that we try to push along so that they can speak to franchisees and get the side of the story that you may not want to hear from me. Maybe you don’t believe it because I’m on the sales team. But they are people that live and breed the brand every single day. And they can answer those questions. So to me, it’s how can I educate them, get them in the door, and then connect them with franchisees sooner rather than later.

And it’s also knowing what questions all of those folks out there have. And that’s some research and data that 20 years ago didn’t really exist outside of a survey or something like that. So it had to take place in that first sales conversation. And you’re kind of blown right by that. The people are coming to you with their questions. And you pretty much know what they’re going to ask you already, right?

You do. And you have a lot of common questions. I mean, I would say most brands typically find somebody maybe falls on your home page. Then they’re going to see if they’re a good fit. They’re then going to go into, you know, my financially qualified to do this business. And then I would even say third or fourth is, you know, the brand, am I a good fit for the brand, right? So I think that that shift has also changed because I think now people are more, we lean more with the financial, we lean forward more with the financial qualifications in the beginning. Because again, this is a capital intensive business. And so if you can’t afford to, you know, do a three plus store deal or a multi unit deal, which most brands have now in our investment level, then it’s probably not going to be a good fit for you.

Yeah, yeah. So tell me what you guys are working on these days. Anything new in the world of Jack In The Box as far as developing and scaling and growing?

Yeah, so I think there’s three streams and they all kind of connect back to the same idea. Modern franchise development rewards brands that show up thoughtfully, more candid than it’s actually are, right? So the first part of that is regardless of, I went for a legacy brand today, a QSR brand, but regardless of where you are in the process, everybody is pretty much even when it comes to AI and search, because it’s new for pretty much everyone, right? So whether you’re a legacy brand or you’re an up-and-coming emerging brand, everybody now has to kind of state their claim and do the work to build their AEO and GEO, right? No matter how good you were at SEO and dominated the SEO search rankings, people are just 10 blue links aren’t as important as they used to be. So basically, everyone’s still optimizing for the 10 blue links today, but that traffic is slowly starting to shift towards AI answer and German optimization, ChatGPT, Perplexity Gemini, Google’s AI overview. All of that is growing and it works completely differently than what we’re accustomed to, right? These systems don’t write pages, they synthesize answers. Right or wrong, they synthesize an answer. So we’re doing deep schema markup work. It’s a big thing that I’ve talked about a lot on my LinkedIn, but really is understanding the importance of website schema, making sure your FAQ pages are tagged in the schema, your item list, your organization types, those types of things. Then basically, the ultimate answer is making sure the machine understands we’re a burger franchise with a specific investment range and specific territory availability with specific requirements for operators. That’s what I need that to pick up from our website. So we have to update the website or I update the website to make sure that we make sure that message is known. Basically, 99% of sales teams right now, lead generation teams have no idea why their leads are down. They blame the economy or the interest rates or media mix. The real reason is-

Price of Google.

Yeah, exactly. A lot of it is Google. They don’t have an AEO strategy. They don’t understand schema markup and the Google zero-click shift has both of those things and non-negotiable for franchise development. I would say it probably belongs to all brands, but specifically for this podcast, franchise development teams. I would say the second stream of things that I’m working on right now is competitive intelligence and now it used to be, you could go through and peruse all the FTDS and have to find them and pull that data of what the investment calls for your competitors. Now, that’s easy to find online. So putting that information together so that one, you can put together those types of tables on your website because AI wants to pull those comparisons. When you say brand A versus brand B, it’s got to be able to pull that information from somewhere. You want it to be your website, right? You want them to land your website. So putting that kind of information together. The third one, and I would say, and I know you and I talk a lot about this, but video.

Yeah.

I’m leaning all the way in the video. It’s content that answers real candidate questions, from the basic item seven that everybody’s familiar with, to what an actual day in the life looks like for our operators. I think this is the biggest opportunity for franchise brands right now, because video lets us do things all at once. We can share our knowledge, right? Which is huge. We can share information about the brand. We can answer questions they would have, that they would typically have to find in other areas. And to me, the most important part is, it’s going back to our conversation originally on this video, of us being a real person, right? We can be our true selves on these videos, and show some personality, and show, hey look, when you inquire with our brand, you’re working with Dustin Thompson, and I am a real person, and this is me answering your questions. And I’m going to do the same for you once you enter our process. We do the same with a lot of people within our development team. So our real estate team, our construction team, we invite them on to these videos so that they know when you become a franchisee, these are the people you’re going to be sitting across from, and they’re going to be the ones that ultimately are supporting you throughout your development process and timeline. And I think that’s important. That’s something that AI can’t do. You can AI generate a lot of videos, but authenticity is something that can’t be replicated.

Yeah, it’s kind of ironic that in the age of so much more video content out there, what’s really going to make the difference is authentic video, not all of this AI generated slop that so many people are putting up there. And I think people are, they’ve been sort of entertained by some of these AI videos over the past few years. But if you’re really looking to invest a lot of money in something, I think actually seeing real life human beings talking about it. And also back to what you said about the franchisees and the Day In The Life stuff. That’s my favorite kind of video because you actually get to see someone and you’ll know right away, do they enjoy what they do? That comes across on a video and it’s not going to come across if it’s some AI cartoon kind of thing.

And I would say honestly, that’s the hardest content to get, not from getting it, franchisees not willing to do it. That’s hard to do. And you need a lot of video editing. There’s a lot of things that go into that. And that’s why I think a lot of brands don’t have a lot of that type of content, because it is really difficult. And you’ll see a lot of that where people will go to their annual convention, and they’ll shoot a bunch of video together. And that’s great. But sometimes if you could get out in a store and watch a franchisee interacting with their customers and their team, those are important because I think the culture, the franchisee sets within their entity is extremely important, if not the most important part of the success of a franchise. When you look at our largest franchisees in the country of any brand, they all have a lot of things in common. They’re involved with the business, they’re personable, they culture internally, their employees look up to them, they lead by example. That’s really hard to capture in a video. You can hear it from other people, but it’s hard to capture that in a video. But if you can, that is a gold mine of content.

That is golden and nothing against all of the CEOs and CMOs out there. But I think what candidates really want to see is, what does that franchisee’s day look like? That’s so much more compelling than any person sitting behind a desk telling me something.

It’s funny, we talk about being counter-intuitive when you think about it, but we were just talking about how things are being synthesized, fake avatars, synthetic voices, deepfakes, those types of things. A lot of brands haven’t even gotten into the video strategy yet, and the video strategy is already kind of shifting to be more real versus AI, right? Yeah. Even if you haven’t gotten on board a video yet, you’re not behind. You could still hop into this, and it’s probably more valuable than it’s ever been in the development strategy. I read something the other day, maybe you’ve heard this, but it was 83 percent of consumers say they can spot generic video content. I would say that’s probably decently accurate, I think most people can recognize that. But 36 percent of people said using AI video would lower their trust in a brand, and 78 percent said they would trust a video with a real person more than AI. I think if anything, those stats, and they’re going to shift and probably go up and up.

I think it’s going to continue. Yeah.

Yeah. You and I both, I would even say you as much as anyone are leaders in the industry, we see this every day, and we see the shifts across our industry and other industries that use video. This is a trust-based business. I’ve heard it my entire career. Franchising is a people business. If you deviate from that and you start going down the AI video route and synthetic voices, you were basically going opposite of what makes franchising great, in my opinion.

Very well said. We kick off this podcast every week with the statement, AI is not used in the creation of this podcast. I’m not trying to make a political statement or anything. I want people to know that when you’re about to hear Dustin or me or whomever, whatever other guests, these are actual real live people that you can have a conversation with. This isn’t something that was cooked up by Claude.

Well, and I think we have the experiences that we can share. That’s something AI doesn’t have. These types of conversations is something that you can’t go reference with AI because they don’t exist. So if you really want to understand how video is impacting franchise development, you need to talk to people doing it. You need to talk to those who are creating the videos, people who are tracking the videos, the people producing the videos. Those are the people you need to talk to and that type of information is not in AI, and I don’t see that changing for quite a while, because that’s internal knowledge that we share. Again, this is a connection-based business and I have no issues talking to people, and I think that’s what makes, again, franchising great and the only way we’re going to do that is if we kind of, I’m not going to say ignore that, but we have to look past that and still have conversations with one another, and that’s why I think we mentioned earlier, but the trade shows and being in person are so vital to just our growth as people in the business and wanting to grow our careers and our businesses, but also franchising in general. We have to maintain those connections.

Yeah. Well, I’m glad we connected here and I want to thank you for all of the great thought leadership content you’re putting out. What’s your favorite place to have people connect with you? Is it still LinkedIn?

It is. Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place. I have a lot of people reach out, you know, they comment on some of the posts I make, but yeah, definitely LinkedIn. I would love to connect with anybody again. I always say my tagline, yours is, you know, this is not AI, right? Mine is I have nothing to sell you, right? Like I’m in the business. I want to see every franchise will be successful. If I can answer any questions you have, if I can help point you in the right direction, if I can connect you with somebody that’s an expert in the industry that can help you get there faster or quicker, that’s what I’m here to do. I want to help people. I truly enjoy the business. I truly enjoy the franchise development and lead generation. This is my passion. So please, if you have any questions, I don’t say that lightly, please reach out and I’ll do my best to answer your question or connect you with somebody that can.

All right, my friend, thank you so much for giving us some time today. And I will see you probably in, oh, I don’t know, Atlanta, Las Vegas, one of those wonderful capitals of franchising in the very near future.

I look forward to speaking with you and seeing you there, Jack.

Thanks again to Dustin Thompson of Jack In The Box for joining me today. Thanks also to our sponsors, Pilot, AnswerConnect, and Thunderly. And thanks to you for listening, telling a friend about us, and staying connected on the Social Geek Radio Network.