Where the recruitment-story numbers come from

What this article is for

The Recruiting page shows a handful of numbers a franchisor can put in front of a prospect: what percentage of the network is active, what a top-quartile location's margin looks like, how fast a top-quartile location turns a job around, and how the network's own median compares. Those numbers look simple on screen, a percentage, a dollar-adjacent figure, a day count, but they are read from a nightly network snapshot and an encrypted evidence payload underneath it, not computed live from a database query when you load the page.

This article is the plumbing: exactly where each figure comes from, how the underlying data is protected, and why every number that reaches this page is an aggregate, never a named franchisee's own result. For the page's rows, tiles, and buttons end to end, read Recruiting & Growth: section overview first. For how the same numbers get repackaged into a PDF you hand a prospect, read Generate the prospect recruitment deck. This article only covers where the numbers themselves come from.

Where these numbers live on the page

Open Recruiting from the HQ sidebar, at hq.verinode.ai/recruit-grow. The numbers this article covers show up in two places on that page:

• The Network footprint hero, at the top of the page, above the territory map. Its headline is your total location count, with a pill reading "N% Engaged" beside it, and a line of secondary stats underneath (Territories, Underserved, Open prospects).
• The Take Action tile, the first tile in the first row, labeled Prospect Deck with the headline Generate prospect deck. Its right-hand column, when there's enough data to show one, carries Top-quartile margin and Top-quartile cycle, the same two figures that appear on the generated deck.

Both read from the same source: Top-quartile margin, Top-quartile cycle time, the network median margin, and the hero's percent engaged all come from a single function, a single Verinode function, which reads the most recent row in your network's the nightly network rollup snapshot.

Step 1: total locations and percent engaged

The hero's headline count and the "N% Engaged" pill are the simplest numbers on the page, and they are not part of the encrypted evidence payload at all, they are plain columns on the snapshot row.

• Total locations is the count of rows in your network's own member directory as of the last overnight refresh, active and invited alike.
• Percent engaged divides how many of those locations showed any product activity (a signal of some kind) in the trailing 30 days by the total location count, rounded to the nearest whole percent. A network with no locations on file yet shows no pill at all rather than a "0% Engaged" label.

The pill's color follows your own network's engagement rate: 70% or higher reads green, 40% to 69% reads yellow, anything lower reads red. This is a read on your own network's activity, not a comparison against any other franchisor's network.

If your network hasn't added any territories yet, the whole hero subtext is replaced with: "Add territories from Settings to start tracking coverage gaps and prospect pipeline."

Step 2: the network median margin

The subtext under the hero headline, and the "median" figure printed under the Take Action tile's top-quartile margin stat, both read the network median margin: the median gross margin (revenue minus cost of goods sold, divided by revenue) across every location in your network that has enough financial data on file to compute one. This is a straight median across your own network's contributing locations, refreshed on the same overnight cycle as everything else on this page, not a live calculation.

If no location in your network has margin data on file yet, this figure is simply absent, no zero, no placeholder value.

Step 3: top-quartile margin, and the encrypted evidence payload

Top-quartile margin is where the calculation gets more involved, because it isn't a plain column on the snapshot row. It comes out of an the aggregate payload, a JSON blob attached to the same snapshot row that also drives Margin & Cash and Operations elsewhere in HQ.

That payload is encrypted at rest. The snapshot row carries two versions of it side by side: an encrypted column and a plaintext column. When the Recruiting page loads, Verinode tries the encrypted version first, decrypting it server-side using your network's own encryption key, the same key used everywhere else your network's evidence data is read. Only if that key isn't available, or the decrypt fails for some reason, does the page fall back to reading the plaintext copy, which exists purely as a safety net during Verinode's ongoing migration to encrypting this payload everywhere. Either way, what comes back is the same underlying data; the encryption is about protecting the payload at rest, not about changing what the page shows you.

Inside that payload sits a per-location list: every franchisee in your network with a computed margin figure, tagged with a position relative to the rest of your network, below the bottom quarter, in the middle, or in the top quarter. Top-quartile margin averages the gross margin of every location tagged in the top quarter, rounded to one decimal place. If your network doesn't have enough locations reporting margin data to place anyone in a top quarter yet, this figure is simply absent from the tile.

Step 4: top-quartile cycle time

Cycle time works the same way as margin, from the same evidence payload, but the direction flips: a lower cycle time is the good outcome, so "top quartile" here means the fastest quarter of your network, not the quarter with the highest number. Verinode takes every location's average cycle time (days from job start to done), sorts the whole list from fastest to slowest, and averages the fastest quarter of that list, rounded to the nearest whole day. The tile labels this stat "start → done."

As with margin, if too few locations in your network have cycle-time data on file, the figure is left off rather than shown as a rough estimate.

Step 5: the financial-figures gate

Margin figures carry one more check that cycle time, footprint, and engagement never do. For a franchise network, showing a margin figure to a prospect is a financial performance representation under the FTC Franchise Rule, and disclosing one outside a formal Item 19 filing is the franchisor's call, not Verinode's. Because of that, top-quartile margin and the network median margin are only computed for display here once your network's admin has opted in to showing financial figures in prospect materials, using the toggle at the bottom of the Recruiting page ("Financial figures in prospect materials"). Non-franchise networks never see this gate; every figure shows for them regardless.

When the toggle is off, the effect on this page is simple: both margin figures come back empty, exactly as if your network didn't have enough margin data yet. There's no separate "hidden pending approval" label on this page. The toggle's own description spells out the difference: "Margin figures are withheld from prospect materials. Non-financial figures (footprint, activity, cycle time) always show." Turning it on requires an explicit confirmation that you're responsible for FTC Franchise Rule compliance and that the figures are disclosed in your Item 19; see Item 19 disclosure for how that separate, regulated filing relates to this page.

The sample-size floor: qualitative until it's safe to be specific

Before any of this reaches the Take Action tile, there's one more check that applies to the tile as a whole, independent of the FPR gate: Verinode never presents a top-quartile or median figure computed from a network that's still too small to trust. Below a minimum network size, the tile's sub-line reads:

"Qualitative until 10 active franchisees ([your current count] today). The deck still generates; benchmark pages show a warming-up note instead of numbers."

The right-hand evidence column (the two stat readouts) is left off the tile entirely in this state, it doesn't render with a blank or zeroed-out value. You can still click through and generate a deck; it describes your network qualitatively rather than printing point estimates. This is the same floor the generated PDF deck itself enforces, so what you see on the tile and what a prospect sees in the deck never disagree about whether the network is large enough yet for numbers.

Once your network clears that floor, the sub-line changes to describe what the deck now includes: either "A prospect-ready deck built from your live footprint, activity, and anonymized top-quartile benchmarks" once at least one of the two stats has data, or "A prospect-ready deck built from your live network footprint. Benchmark pages fill in as operations data accrues" if the footprint qualifies but neither stat has enough data yet.

Why these numbers stay anonymized

Three separate mechanisms are stacked on top of each other here, and it's worth naming all three, because they answer different questions:

• The calculation itself only ever produces an aggregate. Top-quartile margin and cycle time are averages across a group of locations, never a single location's figure. There is no code path on this page that reads or renders one franchisee's individual number; the only output is a group average.
• No franchisee is ever named. The Take Action tile's own meta line says so directly: "Anonymized · never names franchisees." The same line appears again in the footer note under the financial-figures toggle: "Top-quartile metrics are anonymized, never name individual franchisees. Generated decks pull from the same payload."
• The underlying payload is encrypted at rest, independent of the anonymization above. Even the named-level detail that feeds the group averages, which Verinode's own leadership-facing views elsewhere in HQ do use, is protected in storage rather than sitting as a plain, readable column.

This is the same guarantee that runs through every part of Verinode HQ: leadership sees aggregates, rankings, and compliance across the network, never a single franchisee's private business detail. Franchisees own their own data; what reaches Recruiting, and what reaches a prospect, is the aggregate signal computed on top of it.

What isn't computed here yet

a single Verinode function also defines a top-quartile operator score field, but it currently always comes back empty, computing it requires a per-location operator score history that hasn't been built yet. Neither the Recruiting page's Take Action tile nor its hero currently shows an operator-score figure as a result. The same function also computes a network median score internally, but nothing on the Recruiting page currently displays it; it's read, but not yet surfaced.

Related articles

• Recruiting & Growth: section overview
• Generate the prospect recruitment deck
• The territory coverage map
• Item 19 disclosure
• Discovery Day
• How network margin benchmarks are computed and protected
• Coverage labels and the anonymity floor
• Network health
• Network hiring flow
• HQ report library
• HQ overview
• Broadcasting to your network