By Alex Filipuk, Founder and CEO, Ideal Siding
Franchise networks grow in stages. The first is local: you prove the model in one market, refine it, and replicate. The second is geographic: you expand into new regions, recruit operators, and build the operational depth to support them. The third stage is less talked about but increasingly common across home services franchising. It is the moment when demand starts pulling your franchisees into newer project categories.
For our network, that moment arrived sooner than expected. Ideal Siding was built as a residential renovation franchise, and for most of our history that has been the lane. Our owners work directly with homeowners and execute with a standardized playbook that has helped us scale to more than 95 locations across the United States and Canada. Over the past few years, however, our franchisees have been receiving inquiries from a different kind of customer: general contractors managing townhome developments, property managers overseeing multi-family complexes, and commercial owners with mid-sized buildings due for re-siding.
Those opportunities were difficult to ignore. They were also difficult to execute without a different kind of support.
Commercial Work Is Not a Bigger Version of Residential
There is a common assumption inside home services that commercial projects are simply larger residential jobs. They are not. The work itself, the materials, the crews, the techniques, those translate. Everything that surrounds the work does not.
A residential project begins with a homeowner, a quote, and a contract that fits on a few pages. A commercial project begins with a set of architectural drawings, a request for proposal, a scope of work written by someone other than the buyer, and a more robust contract. The estimator needs to read the drawings correctly. The proposal needs to be structured in a format the contractor expects. The franchisee needs to coordinate with general contractors, property managers, architects, and sometimes municipal permitting offices simultaneously.
The risk profile is also different. A misread on residential pricing is usually recoverable. A misread on commercial pricing, applied across an 18-unit complex, is not.
That gap, between the operational competence our franchisees already have and the procurement environment commercial work demands, was the problem we set out to solve.
Building Operational Infrastructure, Not a Marketing Layer
We recently launched our Commercial Support Program designed specifically to close that gap. We approached it as operational infrastructure for the network, structured around four areas of support.
The first is pipeline development. We help franchisees identify and build relationships with general contractors and property managers in their territories, including introductions to bidding opportunities they would not have access to alone.
The second is pre-construction support. Our team works alongside our franchisees to review construction documents, develop accurate estimates, and structure proposals in the formats commercial buyers expect.
The third is contract and risk navigation. We provide guidance on contract review, permit coordination, documentation requirements, and determining whether a commercial project is profitable and what the risk level associated with it is.
The fourth is a centralized framework. Previously, commercial work in our network was handled case-by-case, which meant every franchisee was effectively reinventing the wheel. Our new program standardizes the approach so that knowledge gained in one market becomes accessible to operators in every market.
Local ownership and accountability remain central to our model. The program adds the back-office capability that surrounds that local expertise, so commercial scope becomes a realistic option for operators who want to pursue it.
Early Results in the Field
The first projects under the program are already in motion. In Texas, franchisee Aaron Lay is leading an approximately $800,000 siding replacement on an 18-unit apartment complex, a project significantly larger than anything in his original residential pipeline. In Hamilton, Ontario, a franchisee recently completed a $500,000 commercial project. Several additional projects are progressing across markets in the United States and Canada.
Aaron’s reflection on the experience captured something we hear consistently from franchisees who have entered the program: a project of this scale comes with a lot of moving parts, and having support with estimating, proposals, and contract details lets the operator stay focused on execution. That is the outcome the program was designed to produce.
What This Means for Franchisors Looking Ahead
For franchisors operating in mature or maturing systems, demand will often expand before the support model does. Franchisees do not encounter commercial opportunities because the brand decided to enter that space. They encounter them because their reputation, their relationships, and their visibility in the market grow with time.
The question is whether the franchisor responds to that demand by leaving operators to figure it out individually, or by building infrastructure that converts a category of work into a repeatable capability across the system.
Commercial work is a natural evolution for any residential franchise that has reached real network density. The systems that benefit will be the ones that treat that evolution as an operational project, with the same rigor applied to documentation, pricing discipline, and risk management that the original residential model required.
For our network, the months ahead will be about scaling the program responsibly: onboarding more franchisees, refining the documentation, and building case studies that help operators understand what commercial work actually looks like inside their territory.