Opening and buying additional locations

When are you actually ready for the next location?

When the current units run without you in them. If a week away would cost you money, a second site does not add a unit, it splits your attention in half.

The people test is stricter than the money test. You need a manager ready to run the new unit and a replacement for the person they leave behind, and the second one is what usually gets skipped.

Cash flow, not profit, is the constraint. A new unit consumes cash before it produces any, and the common failure is a profitable operator running out of cash mid-opening.

Build new or buy an existing unit?

Building costs more time and less money up front. You pick the site, the layout and the team, and you carry a period with full costs and no revenue.

Buying costs more money and less time. There is revenue from week one, and you inherit the staff, the reputation, the equipment and whatever the previous owner was avoiding.

The deciding factor is usually what you are short of. Short of cash, build slowly. Short of time and attention, buy something that already works. Short of both, wait.

What breaks first when you grow?

Your own attention, and it breaks quietly. Nothing fails outright, everything gets slightly less of you, and the first symptom is usually a standards problem at the unit you visit least.

Next is the middle layer. There is a point, usually around the third or fourth unit, where you need someone between you and the general managers, and it is normally recognised late.

Then the systems. Processes that ran on you remembering things stop working once nobody can hold it all, which is why hiring, scheduling and reporting all tend to break in the same season.