Chiquinho Sorvetes hits 152% ROI by automating franchise management

Grupo CHQ is the holding company behind Chiquinho Sorvetes, a franchise network founded in 1980 that grew from 80 to more than 500 stores across 25 Brazilian states. Running entirely on a franchise model means the group’s operation depends on multiple internal departments, from Marketing to Legal, to support franchisees, process requests and guide new unit candidates through every stage of expansion.

Before Pipefy, none of that ran on mapped processes. Franchisee requests landed in the Marketing department with no structure, no prioritization and no tracking. There was no way to measure how many requests the team handled, which ones came up most often, or how long each one took to resolve. Once the team gained visibility into the data, they found an average SLA of 17 hours, the number that became the starting point for change.

That lack of structure also limited the network’s ability to scale. The franchisee recruitment process offered no visibility into candidates in progress, no read on which type of interest was driving volume, or how that volume shifted over time. Growth meant relying on scattered information and teams buried in repetitive work, like manually emailing hundreds of franchisees one at a time.

Pipefy rolled out first in the Marketing department, with a clear goal: bring every franchisee request into one place and give the team a way to prioritize it. That first deployment proved the model, and the platform expanded from there to 12 departments and 18 active processes, including Sales, HR, IT, Legal, Customer Service and Finance.

At the center of Grupo CHQ’s operation in Pipefy is the franchise request process. A public form embedded on the company website captures information from prospective franchisees and automatically triggers the related legal and financial workflows, connecting departments that used to operate in isolation. The same model was rolled out across other areas: public forms now centralize every incoming request, email templates handle repetitive communications automatically, and connected workflows removed the need to hand off information manually between teams.

The result is real-time visibility into where every request stands, the ability to measure volume by process type, and enough autonomy for each team to evolve its own workflows without waiting on IT. Automation now absorbs the repetitive work that used to eat up hours of employee time, freeing people up for the work that actually requires judgment and relationships.

The most visible impact is speed. The Marketing department’s SLA dropped from 17 hours to 25 minutes in just six months. For a network with more than 500 franchisees spread across 25 states, that shift makes a tangible difference for everyone who depends on headquarters to keep their business running. At the same time, employees now work with far less overload, spending their time on higher-value work instead of repetitive tasks.

The financial return confirms the scale of the transformation: 152% ROI in 2024, with 5,000 hours saved every month through automation. Beyond the numbers, these results point to a structural shift in how Grupo CHQ operates, with mapped processes, lighter workloads across teams, and an operation built to support the network’s growth without a proportional increase in human effort.

Chiquinho Sorvetes (Grupo CHQ) is a Brazilian ice cream brand founded in 1980. With more than 500 stores across 25 Brazilian states, the company operates on a franchise model and continues expanding nationwide, while keeping product standards and service quality consistent across every location.