How Make helped FranklinCovey to save $100,000s and free up 100s of staff hours

• Industry: Professional Services - Business and Management Consulting

• Use case: IT Infrastructure Management

• Country: United States

• Company size: 1,500 employees

FranklinCovey is a global coaching company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. It provides training and assessment services in leadership, personal effectiveness, and business execution to organizations and individuals worldwide.

Before discovering Make, the company’s operations relied on a 15-year-old service bus (a piece of middleware that moves data between systems). However, maintaining it was costly and time-consuming. FranklinCovey needed a modern platform that could both connect its systems and enable automation, without requiring a full rebuild of its core infrastructure.

Make delivered exactly that. Blaine Carter, CIO at FranklinCovey, explains how they are using Make to automate workflows across HR, finance, and operations, while also having the power to experiment with AI. It’s saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars and freed up hundreds of hours of staff time.

Not only did we need an integration platform, we needed an automation platform to go with it. With Make, we got both.

The challenges

A legacy service bus weighed down by technical debt

FranklinCovey’s operations depended on a 15-year-old service bus to connect systems. Over time, the codebase became hard to maintain. With original developers long gone, technical debt has piled up, making even small changes costly and slow.

Expensive software and limited flexibility

When evaluating a new finance application, FranklinCovey found it would cost around $60,000 per year. Off-the-shelf tools also came with high training overheads and little room for customization. They needed a flexible solution where they’d be able to build workflows tailored to their needs for a fraction of the price.

Manual processes were draining employee time

Many departments still relied on repetitive manual workflows. One particularly tedious annual HR process, for example, took around 30 days to complete every time. 

The solutions

Replacing the service bus with Make

Make provided both an integration platform and an automation layer, replacing FranklinCovey’s outdated service bus without requiring changes to core systems.

Saving on software costs through customization

Instead of purchasing expensive applications, FranklinCovey combined Make with existing tools to meet business needs more flexibly. This not only lowered costs but also allowed the company to tailor solutions to its exact requirements.

With Make, we didn’t have to change our core systems, which many other platforms would have required. Make also let us build better functionality by customizing tools we already have, so we could avoid buying the $60K-a-year finance app.

Automating legacy functions across departments

Business units, including HR, finance, operations, and sales, began building Make scenarios to replace manual work and legacy processes. These automations became part of everyday operations, freeing staff to focus on higher-value projects.

Building agility into AI adoption

Make gave FranklinCovey a way to quickly test and adopt AI features without rebuilding workflows or reconnecting systems. This allowed the company to ‘fail fast’, find quick wins, and scale the AI solutions that delivered the most value.

With Make, we’re able to use automation and agentic features without needing to rewrite entire workflows or reconnect all of our systems. One HR process was cut from 30 days to 2 hours!

The results

• Hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in operational and software costs

• $60,000 annual spend avoided by customizing with Make

• Huge time savings – one HR process reduced from 30 days to 2 hours, hundreds of hours saved across the business

• Higher employee engagement as teams focus on more valuable work

• Faster AI adoption through agile testing and quick wins

Staff are excited to work with Make because they realize it benefits them not only in helping the company but also in their day-to-day work. It’s helped us save costs, save time, and build engagement.

Why FranklinCovey trusts Make to power its future

With its no-code visual interface, library of over 2,800 pre-built applications, and advanced functionality including AI Agents, Make has become a core part of FranklinCovey’s digital operations. 

The platform has allowed the company to replace outdated systems, automate work across departments, and experiment confidently with AI – all while saving significant costs and freeing employees to focus on more meaningful work.

Make has been a great partner for FranklinCovey. That partnership has been going on for multiple years now, and we hope to continue for many years to come.