The Smoky Grass Station

The vendor opportunity at The Smoky Grass Station

The Smoky Grass Station operates 11 retail locations, all company-owned, with no franchised units disclosed in the 2024 FDD. Average unit volume sits at $375,860.66, and the brand pays a 3.5% royalty. The parent entity is Greenbean Ventures LLC, headquartered in Tennessee. For software vendors, the addressable market is small but concentrated: a single corporate owner making centralized technology decisions for every location.

Year-over-year unit growth is not disclosed, and the operator footprint shows just one mapped operator in Wisconsin. This is not a sprawling franchise network with dozens of multi-unit franchisees making independent software choices. It is a tightly held corporate group where a pitch to HQ is a pitch to the entire system.

Who controls software purchasing

The FDD’s Item 1 lists three executives: Zack Green (CEO/Owner), Alex Valley (Partner/Owner), and Joe Griffith, II (Franchise President). With no CIO, CTO, or VP of IT named, software purchasing authority almost certainly rests with this small ownership team. Vendors should expect a direct, relationship-driven sales process rather than a formal RFP-driven procurement cycle.

Because all 11 units are company-owned, there are no franchisee-level buyers to pursue. The decision-maker level is unambiguously HQ. If you sell operational, financial, or POS-adjacent software, your conversation starts and ends with the individuals named above.

Mandated and current tech stack

The 2024 FDD mandates two systems: QuickBooks by Intuit Inc. for accounting and Square by Block, Inc. for point-of-sale and payment processing. These are not recommendations; they are requirements. Any vendor selling adjacent or replacement technology must address an existing, mandated relationship with Intuit and Block.

No other mandated or recommended systems appear in the FDD. This leaves potential whitespace for inventory management, workforce scheduling, loyalty, analytics, or compliance tools — but only if you can demonstrate integration value with QuickBooks and Square. The tech landscape is simple, which means the bar for displacing an incumbent is high, but the surface area for complementary tools is real.

Procurement, renewals, and timing

Item 8 of the FDD contains no procurement extract, so the brand’s designated-supplier or approved-supplier policies are not publicly documented. Vendors should treat this as an unknown and plan to ask directly about purchasing channels during discovery.

Renewal terms, detailed in Item 17, offer a single 10-year extension for franchisees in good standing, subject to a 50% renewal fee on the then-current franchise fee and execution of a new agreement — potentially with materially different terms. For software vendors, this long renewal cycle and the absence of franchised units mean there is no recurring wave of new-owner onboarding to target. Contract windows are likely driven by internal HQ technology refresh decisions rather than franchise agreement expirations.

How to read the The Smoky Grass Station FDD

The 2024 Franchise Disclosure Document is the definitive source for understanding this brand’s operations, obligations, and technology mandates. It names the executives, the parent company (Greenbean Ventures LLC), the mandated tech stack, and the financial performance representations — including that $375,860.66 AUV across 11 company-owned units. The embedded PDF viewer below gives you the full document. For vendors, the FDD is a qualification tool: it tells you the size of the prize, who holds the budget, and what systems are already locked in. Use it to decide whether The Smoky Grass Station belongs in your pipeline. For a ranked target list tailored to your software category, FranCloud can help you prioritize the right franchise accounts.