Five Star Franchising replaced a patchwork of payment solutions with one scalable payment stack across its growing franchise portfolio.
About Five Star Franchising.
Five Star Franchising is a franchise holding company. Headquartered in Utah, Five Star owns and operates multiple home-services franchise brands, each with its own brand identity, geographic footprint, franchisee network, software system, gateway, and processor.
That structure created a fragmented payments environment. Each brand had its own setup, and each franchisee was processing end-customer payments through different systems. Five Star needed a way to consolidate payments across the portfolio without having to own or rebuild the software sitting in the middle.
Zift helped Five Star replace a patchwork of gateways and processors with one payment stack and one relationship built to support a growing franchise portfolio.
The three original brands.
Under the Five Star umbrella, each franchise serves a different home-services vertical. The three original brands that Five Star initially started with were Five Star Bath Solutions, Gotcha Covered, and Bio-one. Each has its own software, its own franchisees, and until Zift its own payment infrastructure.
Five Star Bath Solutions
Full bathroom remodels, tub-to-shower conversions, accessibility installs across North American franchisees.
Gotcha Covered
In-home consultations and installations of blinds, shades, and custom window treatments across hundreds of franchisees.
BioOne
Crime-scene, hoarding, and hazmat-grade home cleanouts, sensitive jobs that need reliable payment infrastructure.
The challenge.
Five Star was managing payments across multiple brands, each with its own gateway, processing relationship, and support model. At the start of the Zift partnership, three brands were running on three completely different payment solutions.
Across the gateway layer alone, Five Star was dealing with NMI, Authorize.Net, and USA ePay, each with its own processes, reporting, and quirks.
For Five Star as the holding company, that created unnecessary complexity: multiple contracts to manage, different residual reports to reconcile, and separate support channels whenever a franchisee had an issue.
There was no consolidated view of payments across the brands, and the economics were split across too many vendors to deliver the value a unified payments relationship could provide.
Multiple brands and multiple payment stacks. Separate gateways, processors, support channels, and residual reports. Franchisees had inconsistent payment experiences, and Five Star had no consolidated view or leverage as a unified holding company.
Why Zift.
Zift offered Five Star something different: a way to unify payments without forcing every brand onto the same software. Five Star didn't have to build or buy a proprietary platform or ask each franchise network to change the systems they already used. Instead, integrations were done with each brand's software, creating one connected payments experience underneath. For Five Star Bath, that meant integrating with ServiceMinder, the third-party software their franchisees already relied on. For Gotcha Covered, Zift integrated with their proprietary GotchaLinked software. For BioOne, Zift worked with the third-party platform already in place.
Each brand kept its own workflow. Five Star gained one payments partner behind the scenes.
The economics made the decision even stronger. By unifying processing under one relationship, Five Star unlocked a more meaningful revenue share opportunity, giving them a clear reason to move every franchise network toward the new stack.
What Five Star uses today.
The Five Star deployment uses Zift's core platform features and operational support.
Invoicing with partial payments
Home-services jobs often run on deposits and progress payments, a bathroom remodel doesn't close out with a single charge. Five Star's franchisees use Zift to send invoices that accept partial payments, then collect the balance when work is complete. Some of this lives in the franchise software; some is used directly inside Zift.
Tier-1 support routed to Zift
Their franchisees can reach out to Zift's support team directly, not through Five Star, not through a reseller. Zift handles the Tier-1 conversation. Five Star isn't running a payments help desk for hundreds of franchisees, and the response their merchants get is markedly better than what previous providers delivered.
Recurring revenue share, paid clean
Payments are now a unified revenue line for Five Star at the holding-company level, not three fragmented residual reports. The economics improved enough that Five Star actively encouraged each franchise network to migrate, which is what made the consolidation happen at speed.
Partnership results.
- Three franchise brands, one payment stack. Five Star Bath, Gotcha Covered, and BioOne all run through Zift.
- Tier-1 support routed directly to Zift. Franchisees contact Zift's support team directly. Five Star isn't operating a payments help desk for hundreds of merchants, and end-user satisfaction is meaningfully higher than under prior providers.
- Invoicing with partial payments. Home-services jobs that run on deposits and progress payments are handled cleanly, invoice, partial collection, final payment, all inside the franchise software or directly in Zift.
- Better economics, unified at the holding-company level. Five Star now sees one residual report at the holding-company level, with revenue share strong enough that they actively encouraged each franchise to migrate.
- Proof that Zift fits franchise and PE-style portfolios. The Five Star deployment is a clear template for holding companies and investment groups managing multiple brands or franchises, Zift can serve the whole portfolio without dictating the software.
Multiple brands? Multiple softwares? One Zift relationship.
If you operate a franchise holding company, a multi-brand portfolio, or a PE-backed group with several softwares in the mix, Zift can help consolidate the payment layer.
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