We're a few units into building out The Zero Miles Meat Co as a franchise, and territory design turned out to be the thing nobody warns you about until it's a problem.

The issue was never really about drawing the lines. It was that the boundary lived in a spreadsheet or a static map only we could see — so when a franchisee wanted to know exactly where their patch ended, or whether the site we were about to approve down the road overlapped their catchment, we were the bottleneck. That's a bad place to be when the answer has legal and financial weight for someone else's livelihood.

Two things fixed it for us:

1. **Defining territories by postcode/district instead of a hand-drawn line.** It's faster to reason about and far more defensible if it's ever disputed — "your territory is these fourteen postcodes" holds up a lot better than a vague circle on a map.
2. **Making the boundary visible to the franchisee, not just to us.** Once they could see their own territory — not a PDF export from three months ago, the actual current boundary — most of the "wait, is this overlapping?" conversations disappeared before they started.

We ended up building our own tool for this (https://franchisem.app) because nothing on the market gave the franchisee side a real view of their own territory — every option we looked at was built for the franchisor only. Wasn't the plan going in, but turned out to be worth sharing here since I suspect it's not just us who's hit this.

Curious how others have handled territory disputes, especially at the point where you're scaling past a handful of units and the informal "we all just know the boundaries" approach stops working.

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What building out territories for our own franchise taught me about avoiding disputes before they start