How Your Franchise Gets Created

This page explains what happens when the corporate team creates your franchise on the platform: the six records the signup action builds, why your URL slug deserves care, and what your agreement's pending status means. Eligibility and approval before any of this happens are governed by the Franchise Eligibility & Approval Policy, and the onboarding obligations on both sides by the Franchise Onboarding Policy. The Franchise Disclosure Document controls the offer and sale of franchises; this page describes platform mechanics only and makes no representation about earnings or outcomes.

Signup starts on the corporate side

Nobody self-signs-up for a franchise. Onboarding starts when someone with admin access opens the franchise signup screen, enters your business name, your name and email, the shop address, and a royalty rate, and selects "Create Franchise." That one action builds your entire existence on the platform: six records, in order.

The six records

1. Your workspace. Your franchise's fenced-off area on the platform, linked under the All About Pawz master. Everything the platform knows about your shop hangs off this.
2. Your franchise record. Business name, URL slug, address, phone, email, and your storefront URL if you have one. This is the business's identity on the platform: the name customers see, the slug in URLs.
3. Your agreement. Created in pending status: created but not signed. The royalty rate entered at signup lands here; if the field was left blank, it stays empty until it is set before signing.
4. Your primary location. Named "[Business Name]: Main," marked primary and active, with its timezone set to America/Chicago. Your shop's physical footprint starts here; additional locations are added later.
5. Your login. The owner login described in Getting Into Your Franchise Portal: franchise-owner role, marked as the owner. The franchise record is then linked to it, so the system knows which person owns which business.
6. The audit trail. A permission-audit entry recording the signup. Then, unless the option was deselected, the invite email goes out.

The whole thing is one action. If any required piece is missing: no business name, no owner name, no owner email: signup is rejected and creates nothing. It is all-or-nothing: there is no such thing as a half-created franchise in the system.

The slug: choose it carefully

Your URL slug is derived from your business name ("Pawz Grooming: Austin" becomes "pawz-grooming-austin") unless a custom one is entered. It must be unique across the platform; if it is taken, signup fails with "Slug already taken" and nothing is created. The corporate team chooses another.

What "pending" means for you

Your agreement starts pending. The franchise record is active from the first moment: the business exists: but the agreement is not signed yet. Until it is, you are operating on the onboarding handshake, not the contract. Get the signature done promptly; the Franchise Agreement Policy governs what the agreement contains, and the longer it sits pending, the longer the ambiguity about which terms bind you. If the royalty rate field was left blank at signup, the agreement has no rate yet: that is resolved before signing, not after. The rate itself is set in the agreement; see Your Franchise Agreement.

When signup fails

The failure modes are all visible. "Slug already taken" means choose another slug. A mid-transaction failure rolls back rather than leaving you half-built. If the corporate team is not sure whether signup went through, they check for your franchise record by slug before retrying: retrying blind is how duplicates happen.

The invite email failing is the one silent failure, and it is handled: signup succeeds regardless, marked as email-not-sent. Your records exist; only the email did not go out. The fix is resending, not re-running signup.