Despite the importance of experience, the question of whether and how a franchisee’s operating experience affects performance remains undertheorized. Taking a multi-unit franchisee owner’s perspective, we unravel the performance effect of an owner’s operating experience. We theorize on the differential effects of three facets of this experience: local experience, intensity of distant experience, and heterogeneity of distant experience. Bringing customers into franchising research, we propose customer satisfaction as a key intervening mechanism and customer diversity as a key contextual condition for the performance effect of an owner’s operating experience. An analysis of 14,069 stores in the McDonald’s chain over three years and of more than six million customer reviews shows that an owner’s greater local experience and higher heterogeneity of distant experience improve, whereas higher intensity of distant experience impairs, store survival and sales growth through customer satisfaction. Those performance effects are moderated by the extent of customer diversity.

尽管经验很重要，但加盟商的经营经验是否以及如何影响业绩的问题仍然没有得到充分的理论支持。从多单元加盟商所有者的角度，我们揭示了所有者运营体验的绩效影响。我们推论上的这段经历三个方面的不同影响：本地经验，远处经验强度，和遥远的异质性经验. 将客户带入特许经营研究，我们建议将客户满意度作为关键的干预机制，将客户多样性作为业主运营体验绩效效果的关键背景条件。对麦当劳连锁店三年内 14,069 家门店和超过 600 万客户评论的分析表明，所有者的本地体验和远程体验的异质性更高，而远程体验的更高强度会损害门店生存和通过客户的销售增长满意。这些性能影响受客户多样性程度的影响。