Global Franchise meets the COO of NYC-Based tech holding company Metric Collective
Eli Robinson is the COO of Metric Collective, a New York City-based technology holding company that focuses on franchise innovation. He helps oversee various companies in the portfolio with a specific focus on growth. Whether it be sales, marketing, product, business development or whatever, Eli tries to ensure that Metric is a better company tomorrow than it was yesterday.
What was your route into franchising?
I quit my first job out of college without anything else to do (classic Millennial move) and wandered aimlessly for a number of months before being introduced to the team at FranchiseHelp, which was looking for a marketer at the time. I knew little about franchising or marketing at the time but it seemed like a great opportunity.
What services do you and Metric Collective provide for people in the franchise industry?
We own and operate four businesses in the franchise space: FranchiseHelp, FranFunnel, Oakscale, and Metric Digital. In some way, shape, or form, all our businesses are associated with using technology to provide marketing and sales software and services to franchises.
Why can’t people generate their own online leads?
Expertise. The online world is only getting more complicated, as players like Facebook and Google prefer catering to Fortune 500 companies as opposed to SMBs. You need to be really good to understand online marketing, and most franchises don’t have the budget to hire that kind of person on their team.
What affords you most satisfaction about your work?
Like any successful business, we get it wrong a number of times before we succeed. This makes those moments when one of our initiatives pays off all the more satisfying. Franchises have many, many problems and the vast majority of them the owners are qualified and well-positioned to solve themselves. It’s those really tough ones that makes me happiest to help them tackle.
What aspect of your work offers the greatest challenges?
I’ll go with two things here. First of all, franchises don’t really embrace technology. We deal with a lot of franchisors who categorize us a “necessary evil.” Convincing franchises that tech should make their lives easier as opposed to more difficult is not easy. Secondly, staying motivated is not easy. As I said earlier, we deal with far more failure than I would otherwise like. Waking up the morning after something didn’t go right and getting back at it can be difficult.
How do you think would other people describe you?
I get Hoover from Animal House a lot! But other than that, the word I hear come up the most is “curious.” If we ever have the chance to sit down for a meal, I usually have at least 20 questions that I can’t wait to find about people and the world that surrounds them.
What’s the next step in your career?
These days, I’m spending a lot of time working on FranFunnel, our messaging and sales enablement product. I’d love to see 500 franchises using us by the end of next year.
If you had to start over, what would you do differently?
Obviously a ton. But these days, I find myself a bit obsessed with the idea of time. As a “start-up” we want everything to happen instantly, or better yet, yesterday. Every day that something goes by unaddressed is a “problem.” Yet, businesses succeed and fail more on the order of years as opposed to minutes. Looking back, I wish we focused on a longer time horizon for the various business challenges we have faced.
How do you relax?
Playing golf and writing trivia questions.
