The Knight School vs Little Diggers

The Knight School is the stronger opportunity right now, and the dimension that wins is terrain. Their approved-supplier procurement model means franchisees are not locked into a single mandated vendor for technology. That gives you a direct path to sell into individual units without fighting a corporate gatekeeper who already has a preferred stack. Little Diggers, by contrast, gives you no procurement signal at all—that’s a black box that could mean anything from wide-open to fully locked-down, and you’d burn cycles just figuring out the landscape.

The tradeoff is TAM. Thirty units is a small pond, and with 28 of them franchised, your total addressable market caps out fast. But that small base is growing at 7.7% year-over-year, which means new units coming online are fresh buying opportunities with no incumbent software yet. The $303K AUV is modest, but a 15% royalty and 2% ad fund suggest franchisees are already writing significant checks to the franchisor—so a POS or scheduling tool that demonstrably protects margin or boosts revenue per appointment gets a hearing. Little Diggers offers no unit count, no growth rate, no AUV, no procurement clarity. You’d be selling blind.

Verdict: The Knight School’s open terrain and visible unit growth make it a concrete, winnable target today, while Little Diggers is an unquantified gamble.