Our franchise counsel wrote the story of how Cork & Candles ended up building ArtistryHost. I want to add the part that only makes sense from the host stand.
Spadea Lignana, the franchise law firm that has handled Cork & Candles since before we had a second location, published a piece last week called How Cork & Candles Built ArtistryHost to Solve Its Own Franchise Problem. It's a fair account and I'd rather you read theirs than mine. But it's written by lawyers, for people thinking about franchising, and there's a version of the same story for people who are just trying to get Saturday night to run clean. That's this post.
The problem that looked like a software problem
Cork & Candles is three businesses in one room. Guests reserve a table like a restaurant. They get a guided, hands-on service like a salon. They walk out with product like a retail store. Every booking platform we tried was built for exactly one of those.
We went through a lot of them. Clover, Bookeo, Acuity, FareHarbor, Peek, Stripe, Toast, and a long, honest effort to make Square Appointments work. The appointment tools think in one-to-one services. Our unit is a party of six, with capacity rules that apply to the whole venue, not to a chair. The restaurant tools understood the floor and over-complicated the experience. The tour platforms understood groups and taxed our guests six percent for the privilege.
So we did what most operators do: we ran two or three systems at once and reconciled them by hand at the end of every night. One location, that's annoying. Three locations, it's a part-time job. Ten locations, which is where we're headed by the end of this year, it's a liability.
The reframe that came from the lawyers
The thing that changed how we built the company came out of a conversation with our franchise attorneys, not an engineer.
A franchise is a promise of sameness. A guest at King of Prussia should get the same experience as a guest in Center City. The operating standard that makes that promise enforceable has to be the same at every unit, and so does the data each unit produces. If one location takes bookings on Acuity with no card, another runs Bookeo with a deposit, and a third is on paper, the brand standard exists in the operations manual and nowhere else. You can't compare the numbers because they aren't measuring the same thing.
Their framing was that the legal structure and the operating system are the same promise, made twice. I've been quoting it back to prospective franchisors ever since: fix your consistency before you franchise your inconsistency.
Once the problem was "every location must run the same way and produce the same numbers," the software question answered itself. We needed one booking flow, one card-on-file policy, one run sheet, one report, on the point-of-sale we'd already settled on. Nothing on the market did that for an experience business. The gap was never Square. It was that nothing spoke experiences.
What we built, and what it did
ArtistryHost runs on top of Square. Every booking is a real Square order. Experiences are managed centrally and pushed to every location, with per-location overrides for hours, capacity, and pricing. Card on file at booking for no-show protection. A run sheet built for the person at the host stand, not for a reservations manager in an office. Bookings, counter retail, and gift cards in one Square deposit and one report per location, rolled up across the brand.
The write-up quotes the results across our four operating locations, and since those are our numbers I'll stand behind them here:
- 96% of bookings arrive with a card on file.
- No-shows are at 5.8%.
- 90% of guests who start checkout finish it.
- Roughly 20 hours a week of admin work went away.
Those are Cork & Candles' numbers on Cork & Candles' floors. Yours will be different. The one I'd pay attention to is the no-show rate, because it's the direct result of the card-on-file policy being the same everywhere, and we tested what happens when it isn't.
If you're an operator, not a franchisor
You don't need a franchise agreement to have this problem. Any experience business with more than one person taking bookings has a consistency problem; a second location just makes it visible.
The cheap version of the fix is to pick one way of doing each thing and write it down. One booking flow. One deposit or card policy, applied the same way by everyone. One place the day's bookings live, that the host stand actually looks at. One report at the end of the night that you don't have to assemble from three exports.
The less cheap version is to put all of that in software that enforces it, which is why we built on Square instead of around it, and why ArtistryHost is flat-fee and Square-native instead of a percentage platform that sits between you and your money.
What's next for us
Ten more Cork & Candles locations by the end of 2026, every one of them opening on the same booking flow, the same policies, and the same report, from day one. That's the part the lawyers care about and, it turns out, the part the host stand cares about too.
Thanks to the team at Spadea Lignana for writing it up, and for the reframe.
Running more than one room? ArtistryHost is Square-native booking built for experience businesses, with central experience management and per-location reporting built in. Flat monthly fee, no per-booking percentage, 14-day free trial. Start free →