Parnell Woodard
Based in United States
Summary
Parnell Woodard is the founder of The Franchise CTO, providing fractional technology leadership to franchise organizations between 50 and 300 locations.
About
Parnell Woodard founded the marketing agency Emerge in the early 2000s, scaling it from zero to 100 employees and three offices before selling it in 2011.
He then bought and operated two Elements Massage franchise locations in New Hampshire, where his studios became the fastest-growing in the brand. That experience as a franchisee led him to found Adaptive, a MarTech platform whose flagship product, Intelli-hub, supported over 150 franchise brands the world — aggregating point-of-sale and customer data across MINDBODY, Zenoti, Square, and other systems to solve the "always-on journey" problem before the industry had a name for it. Adaptive was acquired by TSG/Xplor in 2021.
Today, Parnell is the founder of The Franchise CTO, providing fractional technology leadership to franchise organizations between 100 and 300 locations. His thesis, in his own words: "You don't have a Tech problem. You have a visibility problem — and you have everything you need to fix it."
Skills
Regions covered
At a glance
Parnell brings hands-on experience across Cloud & Infrastructure, Data & AI. Available for engagements across North America.
How fractional CTO engagements with Parnell work
Parnell works on a fractional basis — typically one to three days a week for an agreed engagement length — so you get senior technical leadership without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire. Engagements commonly include technical due diligence, board reporting, engineering team leadership, technology strategy, architecture reviews, hiring support, and stepping in as interim CTO during a transition.