Giving franchise managers their own scope without touching HQ content

The argument every franchise HQ has had: managers want their own admin access, HQ wants brand-standard content untouched. The classic LMS answer is to either lock everything down (managers cannot do their job) or duplicate content per franchisee (chaos at scale). The real answer is permissions scoped by location, with a clear separation between HQ-owned courses and locally-assignable content. Aristotl's Owner / Admin / Educator / Learner model is built for exactly this split. ## Why managers need real scope The store manager at site 37 is the person who sees the new hire on day one, knows when the regional health inspector is coming, knows which frontliner needs a refresher because they were out for two weeks. If they cannot assign training, set a deadline, or check completion without filing a ticket with HQ, you have built a system that punishes the people closest to the problem. The usual workarounds make this worse. Shared HQ logins (security disaster). Email-based assignment requests (HQ becomes a help desk). Per-franchisee tenants (no rollup, content drifts). All of these are spreadsheets in a different format. ## The four roles A permissions model that works for franchises has exactly four roles, scoped to a unit (region, location, segment). **Owner.** HQ-level. Full access across the network. Owns billing, owns content libraries, owns top-level structure. Usually one to three people. **Admin.** Scoped admin. A district manager is an Admin scoped to their region; a store manager is an Admin scoped to their location. They can assign existing courses to their staff, set deadlines, see their completion data, intervene when frontliners fall behind. They cannot edit HQ-owned course content. They can create local content if HQ allows it. **Educator.** Authoring access. Builds and edits courses. Usually L&D or training-team members at HQ. Some franchisees have one Educator who creates location-specific content (regional language, local SOPs); HQ-owned content remains read-only. **Learner.** Frontliners. They see assigned courses, complete them, see their own progress. The critical detail is that scope is orthogonal to role. An Admin scoped to one location has the same permissions inside that location that an Owner has across the network. The role defines what; the scope defines where. ## The HQ vs local content split Not all content is created equal. HQ-owned compliance content (food safety, harassment prevention, brand standards) is locked: managers can assign it, track it, but cannot edit it. Locally-creatable content (the morning-shift briefing for the new espresso machine, the local-language version of a customer-service script) lives in a different bucket: managers or franchise Educators can create it, edit it, assign it inside their scope only. This split is the thing that makes the model work. HQ keeps brand-standard training intact. Managers get the autonomy to run their location. The spreadsheet workaround disappears. ## Concrete walkthrough A new frontliner starts at site 37 on a Monday. The store manager logs into Aristotl, sees their location dashboard, opens the new-hire onboarding course (HQ-owned, locked), assigns it with a 7-day deadline. The frontliner gets a notification on the store tablet. The store manager can see, in real time, which modules they have completed. On Wednesday, the frontliner is behind on the food-safety module. The manager messages them, the frontliner finishes it Thursday morning. The HQ rollup dashboard sees the same data the manager does — completion, on time, no spreadsheet, no ticket. That is the franchise model working as intended. The manager has real authority over their scope. HQ has visibility without micromanaging. The content stays brand-standard. ## What this looks like at scale At 200 locations, this model means 200 store managers each running their own scope, three to ten district managers running regional scopes, and HQ owning the network. Nobody is logging into a shared account. Nobody is emailing assignment requests. The audit trail is clean — every assignment, completion, and deadline change is logged against a real user. Compliance becomes a query, not a project.

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