While confidence among franchisors that they will meet their franchise growth targets this year still isn’t back to the high recorded in the first quarter of 2025, the recent modest decline suggested to BoeFly CEO Mike Rozman that sentiment is stabilizing even as economic uncertainty remains.
With just a 4 percent dip from the start of the year, 56 percent of respondents surveyed for BoeFly’s Franchise Growth Confidence Index said they were confident their brand will meet its franchise growth goals this year.
“It’s the lowest drop we’ve ever seen between first quarter and second quarter, so I think that suggests there is some good strength around how franchisors are seeing the market,” Rozman said. The overall confidence figure was 72.7 percent at the outset of 2025 before falling to 42.8 percent in BoeFly’s November 2025 report.
BoeFly conducted its survey of nearly 700 franchisor chief executive, chief financial and chief development officers June 3-19, with respondents coming from several industries including automotive, education, fitness, health and beauty, home services, restaurants and retail. BoeFly helps franchisors qualify their applicants and also connects those candidates with lending options.
Within the overall scale, 34 percent of franchisors said they were not confident they would achieve their 2026 domestic growth targets, an uptick from 20 percent in Q1 but an improvement from 57 percent in Q4 of 2025.
Concern over interest rates and inflation, meanwhile, is easing as the percentage of franchisors who cited each as having a negative impact on their brand’s growth plans fell to below 50 percent for the first time since early 2023, when BoeFly created the quarterly index.
Only 44 percent of franchisors said inflation was adversely affecting growth, down from 55 percent, while 48 percent said current interest rate levels were problematic when it came to growth goals. Other factors, however, are likely at play and keeping the overall confidence from rising.
“Beyond inflation, beyond interest rates, what else are these franchise development people thinking about? There’s other elements, for sure, which they’re facing: real estate availability, competition in the real estate, lead generation, competition in lead generation,” Rozman said. “There are these other critical variables that franchise development people are constantly thinking about.”
Rozman noted the volume of franchisee applicants it conducted financial diligence on for its franchisor clients remained stable from the first to the second quarter; it did 3,600 diligences in those two quarters.
elays in obtaining financing, meanwhile, don’t appear to be having a negative impact on franchise development goals, as just 38 percent of franchisors agreed with that statement. And the decline in concern over geopolitical instability continued, with only 24 percent agreeing that the war in the Middle East negatively impacted franchise development goals, compared with 34 percent in the first quarter.
“The war kicked up, obviously, significant increases in gas, but I don’t think it’s impacting how the development people were thinking about” their growth targets, Rozman said.
