Hardee's - AA vs La Pino'z Pizza

Hardee’s is the clear near-term opportunity, and it comes down to a combination of terrain, TAM, and timing. The approved-supplier procurement model is the decisive terrain advantage: it means franchisees are free to choose their own POS, marketing, and back-office stacks, and a vendor can sell into the system without fighting a franchisor-mandated solution. La Pino’z Pizza’s franchisor-controlled model, by contrast, almost certainly locks the software stack down at the corporate level, turning the entire brand into a single, binary deal—and the filing is already due, so the window to influence that decision is closing fast. With 1,369 franchised locations and a $1.28M AUV, Hardee’s franchisees have both the need and the budget for sophisticated software, giving you a large, addressable base that can be sold one owner at a time.

The meaningful tradeoff is unit growth versus immediate wallet. Hardee’s is contracting slightly, but that contraction is measured in dozens of units against a 1,300+ open field—hardly a disappearing TAM. La Pino’z promises a greenfield, but with zero current units, an unknown launch cadence, and a