Ask questions you have about how to expand/manage a multi-location business

[Hailey]

We want your questions 💭 for another episode of the Tipped podcast

Ask any questions you have about how to expand your business and open multiple locations or how to manage a multi-location business.

If your  question is answered on the podcast, we’ll promote your name, business, and business location, unless you’d prefer to stay anonymous. 

[pessosices]

Thanks for the opportunity, @Hailey !

We've been thinking about opening a second location since we opened the first one, but there have been a couple of big roadblocks. 

1. It's hard enough just managing the one shop and finding enough employees to serve. We can't even imagine doubling the workload and being able to find and afford full time manager. How does that work?

2. It takes a few years to pull a profit, and even then there's a lot of risk of product-market fit. Is it even worth it to open a second one or just stick to what we know and do best with the one shop?

3. The work and expenses of opening up another shop seems like a lot. Especially since we would probably have to move our ice cream making out of the shop and into a separate facility to supply enough for 2 locations. Does it make more sense to just jump ahead and open up 2 or 3 new shops at once to maximize things?

Thanks!
Aylon Pesso

Pesso's Ices & Ice Cream

Queens, NYC

(Also I'd love to be/talk on the podcast itself, if that's an option!)

[Hailey]

Hey @pessosices ! Thanks for these. I definitely empathize with the struggles that you highlighted. Expanding from 1 to 2+ is that massive leap from "my/our business" to a much bigger beast. I imagine that expansions often come with investors and/or loans, which could mean giving up part of something that is yours and/or like you mentioned - that increased risk. Lots to talk about on the podcast!

Unfortunately the recording JUST happened yesterday - but i know for a fact that your Q's were added to the list to discuss in the episode 🙂 

I'll let our content team know that you would be interested in being on a future episode/podcast. Thank you again for these Q's and your constant support in the Seller Community @pessosices  

[pessosices]

Thanks so much @Hailey !

Exactly, it seems like a huuuge thing, so I'm curious to see what other folks say.

Fair enough - that totally counts! 

Thanks so much for everything - you rock!

[kmacmmurchy]

Wow, where to start! When we first expanded our coffee houses it happened rather rapidly. We did have an investor help with getting financed and and helped with ideas, but not having food industry experience was a bit of a hindrance. We were able to qualify for a revolving loan of 1 million $ to expand based on the success of our first (flagship) location. KEEP IN MIND IT’S BEST TO HAVE A GREAT PRO-FORMA ON EACH NEW LOCATION for the bank or investors. As we all know (hopefully), location is everything. When we expanded to our first new location we continued to do all our baking and food prep at the original location and we trucked it over to the new location daily. The few bakers we had would start at 4 am to prep for the day. 

Running 2 locations felt like a lot at the time, but once we got past that it started to get easier believe it or not. 

As we continued to scout new locations, we were able to find a bakery for sale that we could turn into a commissary kitchen/bakery to serve current and any new locations we were to build out. We were up to 5 locations by this time, but kind of did them all within a year, crazy I know.

At one time we had 8 locations open, in our city of 225k people. It seemed the market was ripe for the picking at the time (we est. 2011).

The one thing I always did was register each store as it’s own corp, it’s more work, but safer as you can sell separately easier and if one goes down it doesn’t take the other with. 

We’ve seen a lot of ups and downs with the economy up and down and pandemic. In the end, we bought out the partner because we really hated having one, especially when we’re dong all the work. So I’d try to avoid if possible. 

These days we’re down to 4 stores, sold the 5th one during the pandemic that was struggling mostly because they built a Starbucks with a drive-thru in the parking lot next to us. People were willing to suffer bad coffee so they didn’t have to get out of the car lol. So much for supporting local. 

We’re now in the middle of building our first drive-thru and it’s drive-thru only, no seating, quite excited as it’s on a really busy corner.

Not sure if any of this helped, but if anyone has questions, I’m happy to help if I can.

Ken
www.brewedawakening.com