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You open your second location thinking it's going to double your profits, but instead it doubles your headaches. Now you have two crews, two payrolls, twice the problems, twice headaches, half the money. So what do you do? Do you slow down? Do you sell one of them? Or is there a way that you can grow your business without losing control? My name is Brian Beers. I have built an eight figure business through franchising and I help others do the same. And if you want to learn more, hit that subscribe button. So the first thing you really have to figure out is, is do you have strong systems to grow? So in your business, are you the single person who is stitching everything together? Are you the one that is driving the sales and driving the operations and doing all the bookkeeping and you're like the guy with a thousand hats. A lot of business owners operate that way. It is their natural tendency. Because as owners like we are willing to do whatever must be done in order the business to succeed. And that works great up to a certain point, but eventually it breaks. Because now what you try to do, and I've seen this many, many times in many owners is now they say, well, I'm doing really good, I'm making all this money, I'm going to open up a second location and I'm going to do the same thing. But here's the problem. You can't be two places at the same time. You're either here or you're there. And so what happens is now you spend all your time at that second location and your first location is now in the shitter and it is not making any money and sales are dropping and your phone is now blowing up in both direction because you have all these people who don't know what to do because they rely on you so much. And the other team now like you're building that one from zero and you're at your wit's end and you're burned out. This happens so often. And the way that you break this is you have systems. Your goal is that you do not do the things right. You hire people who are sponges and they soak up everything that you have to teach and you let them do it. Then what happens is when you go to that second location, now replacing you is this fully absorbed sponge that you've been working with for the past three months, six months, maybe a year, and they are running the business without them. You have let go of the reins prior to making the big jump to let them go and you have systems in place, you've documented things. Some of the best ways you can document or use notion, use ClickUp, use loom videos, Google Docs. Like it doesn't have to be complicated, but it's just this question of like when this happens, what do I do? And the answer is not call, Brian. The answer is search this chat. Now with like AI and ChatGPT, you can take all your SOPs, all of your documentation, all of your knowledge. You can get into a PDF, you can upload it to a ChatGPT custom project and you can just search the knowledge and be like, what do I do when the credit card machine stops working, the lock broke, who do I call? And it can read through your systems to then tell them what to do. That's like the first thing you have to do if you want to really grow your business and you're serious is you have to a remove yourself from the daily operations. It can't be, I do everything myself. I am the best service person, I am the best operator. It has to be that we do it like we do it together. I'm going to teach you because you're going to be the sponge and, and I'm going to teach you everything. I let you know and I am going to sit there and bite my lip when I hear you selling a job and it's not going as planned, I'm going to lose a sale in the short term because you need to learn how to do it. And if I immediately go and just like grab that phone and be like it, I'm going to show you what to do and I'm going to take this over and watch me how I do it. Most people don't learn that way. Most people learn by doing. The better approach is you listen, you sit there, you, you bite your, you bite your tongue and then you, you walk them through it to say, okay, how did that go? And they'll tell you and then it's like, what do you think you could do better? And then they tell you. Then hopefully they realize, oh yeah, I forgot to, you know, ask for the sale. Or when they talked about, you know, this certain objection, I should have said this. Okay, so now what do you think? We can call them back and try to do it right? And so then you game plan, take a call. Hopefully they have a win and hopefully they remember the next time. But you have to sacrifice some short term things if you really want to grow and if you don't, totally fine, you can go and take that and be the super salesman. But that's a Big part of it. You have to make your systems number one. You have to document them, get them in SOPs, throw them up into ChatGPT, do all that stuff and then hire that strong manager, that sponge as I call it, before you want to grow. So you're going to have to carry that extra payroll for a little while. I have a friend in the fitness business who's in my eight figure franchisee Mastermind group and he has one location is very successful. He is working on building his second location and for the last nine months he's been carrying the payroll of, of multiple people who are going to be working at that second location and it's costing him. Well, their payroll, right, because they're not really contributing at that point. Like they contribute a little bit, but not to that point. But when they open up those doors they are going to know exactly what to do because they've been working with him for the last nine months. They know all the systems, they know the process, they've seen it all and so they can hit the ground running. And then it also the day it opens they have instant lift and profitability because they already had the same fixed expenses but now they're generating all this additional revenue in their memberships and all their sales and stuff. As an owner you have to be willing to make those investments. You have to take the short term losses, the short term pains of losing that sale, of carrying that extra payroll for the long term game of building a sustainable system. And once you can go from 1 to 2 then to go from 2 to 4 isn't that much of a jump because now you are hopefully not the like sole person running those locations. You can bring on another person, you can get them trained. Maybe you have assistant managers or number two or second in commit, whatever you call it and, and then those two could be the next man or lady up to then take over the next two territories or the next two locations and then once you have four, it's the same thing you duplicate again. This is exactly how I've grown our core business which is Midas auto repair. From two locations that I bought in 2016 to we have 35 today that will do close to $50 million in revenue. It has been this copy paste and upgrade model and removing myself like the entire business runs without me. It is great. I have built this team of people who run the business and they handle a lot of stuff and they are amazing at all this and I give them that freedom where a lot of other owners don't give that they can't let go. They want to be involved. And when you have high performing leadership, people like people who have an idea and they want to run with it, guess what they hate? They hate to be micromanaged. And so if I got in there and I micromanaged the shit out of them and question every decision and expense and all this, like, they wouldn't want to work for me. Like, high performing people do not want to work for bosses who micromanage them. You have to have this, like, way of teaching them and then letting them run and then hopefully, you know, they learn a little bit and then you kind of continue to stack it up. Finally, you have to grow on your terms. I think, you know, obviously there's this culture of growth. If you're on Twitter and YouTube and Instagram, you see all these people and their businesses and all these stories and you're like, why would it be bigger and bigger and bigger? And then you're pushing yourself because for vanity metrics, right? To think, well, I should be further along and look what Brian, or look what this guy's doing or these other guys in the group. The thing is, like, everyone grows at their own pace. And the worst thing that you can do is to grow. When you're not running, you lose a bunch of money, and then now you're worse off than when you started. And I think that's the big thing that scares a lot of people about growth, or at least it should scare them about growth, is that you grow because you have this bigger vision, this better dream. Like, you want to make more money, you want to employ more people. You've got this huge vision of what to create, which is amazing, but at what's the price? Would you sacrifice everything to get there? If there's a chance that you would fail, you wouldn't do it. I have opportunities that I could double, triple, quadruple in size, but I would be taking on a tremendous amount of debt, extending myself geographically way beyond what I'm comfortable with. And at the end of the day, it's like, is that worth it? Like, is making a move that could potentially wreck me worth sacrificing what I have today? One day I may be ready to do a bigger move like that. I'm not ready today. I'm not in that position today. And I have other dreams of what I want to build in other directions. Directions. Just be careful of that, right? That people will pressure you. You may pressure yourself. It's a matter of when the time's right, okay? And the time is Right. When you have good systems, when you have the people, and then you look to create those opportunities. When you believe it's right, you have to believe in yourself. You have to believe that you can do it and that if other people can, why not you? And it's this balance between. You don't want to push yourself beyond to the level that it would wreck you. But on the other hand, there is a comfort zone that you have to get out of and that you will be challenged to learn new things, to push yourself to things that you didn't think were possible. For me, years, many years, I only wanted to own stores that I could drive to in that, like, within 45 minutes max. And I had opportunities to buy stores that were an hour and a half away. And I turned them down because I thought that was too far and that I couldn't go to them. And if I couldn't go to them, they wouldn't be successful because I. I don't know, ego or whatever it was, but I, for many years, didn't have the confidence in myself to do that. And then, I don't know, one day changed. It was after Covid and I hadn't been in our stores because of, you know, Covid and young kids and stuff and whatever. I just. I didn't want to do it. And we did fine. We did great. Like, we were having record months and weeks, and I wasn't physically involved in the stores now. I was present virtually. We did zoom calls and team calls and slacks and text messages, and I was present, but I wasn't physically there. And I said, well, if I'm not visiting a store or, you know, having involvement in a store that's like 15 minutes from my house, then it might as well be an hour and a half from my house, right? Like, what's the difference? There could be these times where you have these triggers and then you believe, okay, I see. This works. Like, there's a sprinkling of. Of success, and then you focus on that and you continue to grow it. So franchising is an amazing business. Once you get the system down, you can copy and paste. It works in other businesses, too. Maybe you don't own a franchise, but you have a business that you want to grow. You want a system, ties it. You want to think about it like a franchise. Maybe you want to open. There are multiple cities with oper partners. Like, all these same principles apply no matter what you do. It's about having those systems, having great people growing when you're ready, pushing yourself beyond the comfort zone and just believing anything is possible. And if I can do it, if other people can do it, I know you can too. And so if you enjoyed this video, shoot me a comment below. I'd love to hear from you. I respond to almost everyone and follow along for more content on scaling businesses. Cheers.