About Franchise Data Experts

Franchise Data Experts was founded by Lois Williams and Jim Sitman in 2020.

    Lois Williams – President

Lois has worked in various aspects of restaurant development for more than 30 years at numerous restaurant concepts, including TGI Friday’s, Cici’s Pizza, Wingstop, and Corner Bakery Cafe.  Her work has been in the areas of franchise compliance, demographic and target market research, sales projection modeling, non-traditional development, data base administration, purchasing, and general restaurant development process management.

The over-arching focus of her work has been to help companies optimize communication, develop streamlined processes, and report on critical data.  This empowers multi-unit owners to be nimble and make solid, fact-fueled financial decisions that help their business grow and thrive.  

    Jim Sitman – Chief Technical Officer

After spending 10 years in the print media industry specializing in segmentation and demographic analysis, Jim Sitman founded his company, New Perspective Data Solutions, in 2006. New Perspective was founded with the goal of leveraging data assets for insights and better decision making. That work included development of dozens of custom applications for clients including print distribution systems, customer analysis tools and GIS/Mapping tools.

New Perspective’s client list includes a large number of franchise and multi-unit businesses, including: Winmark Corporation, Panera Bread, Wingstop, Midas and Corner Bakery Cafe. Each of these clients needed help managing unit based data and New Perspective developed tools and built systems to improve the process.

UnitTrak represents the culmination of everything Lois and Jim have learned during their time in the restaurant/franchise industry. They collaborated on many projects over the years, often based around unit data management, and regularly discussed the need for a tool like UnitTrak and a shared desire to build it. They are proud to bring it to you now!