Why Franchises Need to Own Their Phone Numbers (And What Happens When They Don't)

I’ve set up phone systems for franchise operations, and I’ve seen the same mistake over and over: each location picks their own phone provider, sets up their own account, and the phone numbers end up belonging to whoever signed the contract at that location.

It works fine — until it doesn’t.

The problem nobody thinks about until it’s too late

A franchisee leaves. Maybe the location closes. Maybe someone new takes over the territory. Now you need the phone numbers that customers have been calling for years. The Google listing, the Yelp page, the business cards, the signage — they all point to those numbers.

But those numbers are on a contract with a provider you don’t control, under an account you don’t have access to. The departing franchisee might cooperate with a port request. They might not. They might have already cancelled the account and the numbers went back into the pool. Now a plumber in Des Moines has your old customers’ calls.

I’ve watched this play out firsthand. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it costs the business money every day those numbers are in limbo.

How franchises should structure their phones

The fix is straightforward, but it requires thinking about phones as infrastructure rather than an afterthought.

The franchisor — or the business entity — should own the phone numbers at the platform level. Individual locations get their own lines, their own auto attendant, their own voicemail. But the DIDs (the actual phone numbers customers call) belong to the parent organization.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• All locations run on one hosted PBX platform. Not separate accounts with separate providers. One system, one provider, one relationship.
• Phone numbers are provisioned under the parent account. They’re assigned to locations, but they’re owned centrally.
• Each location gets its own configuration. Unique greeting, unique hours, unique routing rules. From the caller’s perspective, each location is independent.
• When a location changes hands, it’s a reconfiguration — not a port. Update the greeting, re-provision the phones, and the new franchisee is live. Same numbers, same day. No porting process, no downtime, no drama.

What a location actually gets

Just because the numbers are centrally owned doesn’t mean location managers lose control. Each site gets:

• Their own auto attendant with custom greetings and menu options
• Their own ring groups so calls hit the right people
• Their own hours and routing rules — different close times, different holiday schedules
• Call recording for training and quality
• Mobile app access so managers can handle calls on the go
• Voicemail to email so nothing gets missed

The phones themselves ship pre-configured. Plug them in at the new location, connect to the internet, and they register automatically. The BLF keys, parking keys, speed dials — all set up before the box is even opened.

The inter-location advantage

When all locations run on the same platform, you get things that siloed phone systems can’t do:

• Transfer calls between locations with a button press. No hanging up and dialing a separate number.
• Shared company directory across all sites. Any phone can look up and dial any extension at any location.
• Centralized analytics so you can see call volume, missed calls, and patterns across the whole operation.
• Consistent phone experience. Staff who work at multiple locations use the same phone layout everywhere.

The cost argument is backwards

I’ve seen franchise operators go with the cheapest per-location option they can find. Maybe it’s $20/month with some VoIP provider that does everything through an app. On paper, it looks like a win.

Then a location turns over and the numbers are gone. Or the cheap provider has an outage and three locations go dark. Or the local manager cancels the service because they found something cheaper, and now there’s a gap in coverage.

The cost of doing phones right across a franchise operation is minimal compared to the cost of doing it wrong once. A single number porting mess — with the legal back-and-forth, the temporary forwarding, the lost calls while customers hit a dead line — costs more in lost business than a year of proper phone service.

How we do it

At SLINC, we set up franchise and multi-location phone systems as a single unified platform. Every location gets their own configuration, their own phones (shipped pre-configured), and their own local management. But the numbers, the platform, and the relationship stay with the business.

Adding a new location takes a day. Phones ship configured. Plug them in and they’re live.

Closing or transitioning a location is a reconfiguration, not a catastrophe. Update the greeting, re-provision the phones for the new operator, done.

One bill. One provider. One call to fix anything.

If you’re running a franchise or multi-location business and your phones are a mess of different providers and orphaned accounts, let’s talk. This is exactly what we do.