There is nothing we love more than a Wrike user who refers to herself as a “workflow nerd.” That immediately signals that we’ve got a Wrike Champion on our hands!
For this edition of “Championing Change,” we spoke with Jill Baker. Jill took a fragmented, multiplatform onboarding process and created efficient and effective workflows for her organization.
Championing Change is our blog series in which we interview real Wrike users about how they help their teams adopt Wrike. We explore how they use Wrike to improve workflows, engage new use cases, overcome user resistance, and build a culture of collaboration within their organizations.
Let’s look at how Jill has streamlined franchisee onboarding at Buzz Franchise Brands (BFB) by saving teams hours of work, improving task tracking, and creating greater visibility across teams.
The challenge: Fragmented tools and slow onboarding
At its core, a cross-functional onboarding workflow in franchising is a standardized sequence of tasks that aligns multiple departments — from marketing to operations — to successfully launch and support new franchise owners. For organizations like Buzz Franchise Brands, this process is critical to scalable franchise growth.
Buzz Franchise Brands is a multibrand franchising company dedicated to building and growing franchise businesses. The BFB digital marketing team is highly involved in preparing each new franchise location for launch — from getting websites live to implementing tracking, analytics, and core marketing infrastructure. That’s no small lift, but with Wrike as her foundation, Jill built a process to make it scalable.
As Digital Marketing Manager at Buzz Franchise Brands, Jill was well aware that the existing process for getting a new franchisee up and running was far from efficient.
Before engaging Wrike, the BFB team relied on a combination of a ticketing platform and Google Forms. Information was scattered, and requests were often missing the necessary details to get started. Moreover, the process was time-consuming, taking the digital marketing team nearly 2-3 hours to navigate between documents and disconnected tasks to complete their portion of the onboarding setup.
“As we began onboarding new franchisees at an accelerated pace, I recognized that our existing process — spread across documents, emails, and teams — was becoming inefficient and difficult to manage,” Jill explains.
As the brands grew and new franchisees signed on, this lack of scalability became a frustrating bottleneck for both the marketing department and the organization as a whole.
Building the solution: A centralized source of truth
Jill knew there had to be a better way. So she designed and implemented a new onboarding workflow entirely within Wrike.
The goal was to eliminate the guesswork. Jill built the process to clearly outline every step required from the team, embedding detailed “how-to” documentation directly into each task. This move had two immediate benefits:
- Streamlined execution: Experienced team members had immediate access to resources without searching through drive folders.
- Faster ramp-up: By using contextual learning (embedding SOPs directly into task descriptions), Jill helped new users get up to speed quickly without leaving the platform.
I built the process to clearly outline every step required from our team. This not only streamlined execution but also made it easier for new team members to get up to speed — something that’s been especially helpful as we’ve added new hires over the past year.
Jill Baker, Digital Marketing Manager
The result: Cutting onboarding time by over 60%.
The Buzz Franchise Brands team felt the impact of the new Wrike workflow quickly — and in a big way. By moving the franchisee onboarding process into Wrike, Jill accelerated one of the team’s most repetitive but important functions and significantly reduced the time spent on it.
“Since implementing a centralized Wrike workflow, the time required for marketing to complete their onboarding steps has been reduced to approximately 30 minutes,” Jill notes.
For the team, a cumbersome time-suck is now a thing of the past. For the organization, this efficiency allows Buzz Franchise Brands to support more franchisees at scale while maintaining high consistency and quality. Winning all around.
Improving cross-functional visibility
The previous onboarding process wasn’t just bogging down the marketing team; it was affecting the training, operations, and creative design teams as well. When Jill implemented the new Wrike workflow, she made sure to include input and visibility for other departments.
All stakeholders can now see exactly where a project stands — without the need for email threads or status meetings. That added transparency helps teams answer critical questions, such as:
- Has the new franchisee completed training?
- Is the website setup underway?
- When are ad campaigns launching?
Including all affected teams in the onboarding improvements means the whole team is more aligned and informed, and trust has improved. Jill notes, “This visibility has promoted trust not only within our immediate team but also across departments.”
Leading change from marketing to operations
Adopting new software can introduce hurdles and isn’t always met with enthusiasm. But at BFB, Jill recalls, “Everyone was eager for a more efficient, centralized solution, and Wrike delivered on that.” Additionally, Jill’s approach to change management focused on solving pain points rather than forcing compliance, and her team responded positively.
And Jill didn’t stop at her own team. As the primary admin and self-described “Wrike expert,” she actively led adoption efforts across the organization. She developed Wrike request forms and specialized task types, workflows, and automations for cross-functional partners, which help other departments manage their work more consistently.
Future-proofing processes with collaborative workflows
Jill’s success with Wrike comes from a genuine passion for efficiency. “I’m a total workflow nerd, and I say that with pride,” she laughs. “I really enjoy finding ways to make things more efficient, whether it’s for myself, my team, or the other departments we work with.”
For Buzz Franchise Brands, Wrike has become the operational backbone that supports growth. By standardizing workflows and opening lines of communication, Jill has future-proofed the company’s processes.
“One thing I care deeply about is making sure the right information gets to the right people,” Jill concludes. “Wrike helps us do that, and it’s made a huge difference in how we operate as a team.”
Are you ready to streamline your processes like Jill? You can read more about marketing project management or start your free trial today.
