Batteries Plus ranked No. 118 on the 2026 Franchise Times Top 400, up six places from last year. The list ranks the largest U.S. franchise systems by global sales. That’s an important number because it cuts through the noise. It’s not an award you can campaign for, it’s just the facts. It’s measured by whether existing stores sell more and by how quickly new stores open.
This ranking stands out to me because it highlights our synergy across the company. Every department can meet its individual targets while a customer still has a poor experience, but a sales-based ranking measures whether our work reached the customer at the counter.
What interests me more than the number is what the climb says about how our franchise system operates, so I want to walk through what changed.
How We Got Here: What Moved Batteries Plus Up the Top 400
The change that reached the most stores started with how we spend marketing dollars. Our marketing team, led by Chris McGee and Sara Whiteleather, leveraged spend at the network level instead of dividing it market by market, which produced 40% more impressions without increasing the total budget.
More reach only helps if customers can find what they came for, and our customer service team and social listening kept surfacing the same problem with matching the right battery to the right vehicle. That’s what led to building our specialized tools. We saw where shoppers abandoned their search, and once we understood the friction, we developed specialized AI agents to fix it. We have now rolled out three agents named; Savannah, Wattson and Edison, each built for specific tasks.
All of that, of course, depends on having stores for customers to actually walk into. Our scaling pace held up in the third quarter, with 19 new signed agreements and 13 new openings across six states. We now sign 60-70 new agreements a year. On top of that, our Commercial First program lets new owners begin building commercial relationships before their stores even open. Many of our franchise owners have built relationships with government agencies, local school districts, hospitals, and more before opening their doors.
What This Means for Batteries Plus
A ranking built on system sales is one independent signal of a system’s health. The test I care about more is whether our franchisees are better positioned to succeed this year than last. Their results are the brand’s results, and every decision we make about marketing, technology and operations is meant to serve them.
That is why we align marketing, e-commerce, merchandising and store operations around one shared goal instead of separate ones. Some of our largest investments in commercial, technology and operations took years to show up, but this company’s success has always come from the experts running our stores. Our job at the brand level is to give franchisees better tools, a clearer goal, and listen when something isn’t working.
No one department or person gets us onto this list, it takes our leadership team and our franchisees working together. I’m honored to work alongside Joe Malmuth, Kirtis Hill and all of our dedicated franchisees. The Franchise Times Top 400 confirms that we are headed in the right direction.
What Comes Next for Batteries Plus
We recognize that rankings arrive after the work is done, so we have already been working on what franchisees will need in 2027. With more than 800 stores open and in development and AI tools now deployed across our stores, we are setting up for a great start to the new year. Pulling back the curtain, we are extending Wattson beyond automotive to our other product categories, applying AI to B2B sales productivity, and working to strengthen store-level profitability. The question we keep asking is how leadership and technology can make every owner’s day easier and every store stronger.
To learn more about the franchise opportunity, visit batteriesplusfranchise.com.