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- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to the Business of Beers podcast. Your daily dose of strategies, tools and tips to help you build an eight figure business. Today's episode is a clip from one of my YouTube lives. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, there's a link below in the description. Cheers.
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I have a single business. We're doing well. How do I know when it's time to grow and expand, man? This is probably one of the, one of the top questions that again, a lot of people do, which is like, and it's the same thing I struggled with and I even, I mean, I think about it today, right, which is how do you know when, when time is ready to expand? And so I think it comes down to a couple, a couple factors. One is it's, let's start with the bat. Let's start with the fears, right? I think, I think that the main thing that, that holds you back is being honestly worse, worse off, right? I think that the worst thing that could happen is, is that you have a business, it's doing great, you're happy, you've got the great team, and you say, hey, I'm going to go and I'm going to expand. I'm going to like, you know, I want to be like me or like whatever. I want to have a bunch of these things. And then you buy a second location. You don't have good systems in place, you don't have good people in place. And all of a sudden your first location, which is doing great, is now dropping every single month because you're not there anymore. Your second location is just getting really hard to get off the ground. And all of a sudden there's not enough hours in the day. And now both locations are losing money. Maybe you lose one of your key people, then all of a sudden you're like, man, I am making less money. I'm working twice the amount of hours. I have four times as much stress. This sucks. Get me out of here. Let me go back to my, like, my single store. That is the number one concern. And that happens, like, happens to a lot of people. I think the jump from like 1 to 2 is the hardest jump for any owner to make. I. I've seen it many times in Midas where it was a store that. It was a guy in Philly, he had a single store, same story, he was doing really well. He bought a second one and boom, the first one dropped the second one. He could never really get it going. He ended up selling off the second, went back to the first, eventually sold it Got out of business. The challenge is that I have this concept called the hero versus architect. I talked a little bit of it last week, but the idea that for most, not most, almost every small business, you as the owner, are the hero. You're the one who saves the day. You solve all the problems, you do everything, and that you're successful. Successful business is a byproduct of the amount of time, effort, and brute force that you put into it. The second though, that you step out of the business, there's no hero to save the day, and the villains run wild. That's the concern. That's the fear. The solution is not, you just don't do it. The solution is recognizing that, to say, you're right, Brian, I am the hero. I am doing way too much. I need to get out of. I need to stop being that person, and instead, I need to shift to be what I call the architect. Right? And an architect is somebody who has the plans, they have the systems. They are the one who builds teams of heroes. And so if it was me, this is how I would do it. And let's say I run the store solo. We're doing great. I'm making $20,000 a month, whatever. And. And I'm saying, hey, I want to grow and expand. So the first thing I would do is I would look to hire a strong number two. So somebody who can take a bunch of things off my plate that are like, probably admin to start, and I say admin, but admin ops is really someone who can, like, I don't know, answer the phones, schedule people, check people in and out, write estimates, source parts, do all the, like, job costing, follow up with. With people, handle all the, like, equipment repairs and maintenance, and, like, all the things that aren't selling. Okay, like, that would be the first role. If you don't have that in, that would be like, the very first role that would hire is because as the owner, your goal is to create leverage on the time that you have. Because we're all the same. We're all the same number of hours, right? None of us bend time, at least not that we know of. And so the only way you get more time is you create leverage by building a team of people who can do things without you having to micromanage them. And so that would be the first role I'd have that would take care of a bunch of stuff off my plate. I could then focus on driving more and more revenue, and then I could bank that revenue to use to expand. Okay, so build revenue Use it to grow the business. Then I would also invest my time to build systems. And when I say systems, you think about your business in a couple ways. The systems are really like customer service, right? So how do we just create a great customer experience? Whether that means how we answer phones, how we, like, you know, the shop feels, how we communicate with people, all the things that are involved around the customer experience. You're going to have an operations process, right, of how we get work done on time and we're efficient, reliable, and all these things. You're going to have a sales process which is like, how do we talk to people, how do we overcome objections, how do we use payment plans to make it affordable? And you're going to have an acquisitions system, right? Which, which is how do I find properties, how do I vet properties, how do I create a buy box, how do I know when is time to expand, what direction do I buy? An independent. Do I convert, do I do this, do I do that, right? You're gonna have all these things around acquisitions, and then you're gonna have a people system, which is how do I hire, how do I train, how do I develop, how do I do all the things that are needed on a consistent basis that can continue to build a team higher and higher and higher. And so if you're saying I don't have time because I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off running the business all day, then I. The first thing you gotta do, hire somebody who can take a bunch of the operational things. And like I'm gonna say low value, but not the highest and best use of your time. They handle all that stuff. They're a master at it. You now have, I don't know, 15 more hours a week or something. And then you are gonna spend a bunch of your time building these systems, documenting these systems in terms of how we do everything. Then you're gonna hold your entire team accountable to running the playbook, right? Running the systems that you create from there. Now we have systems written and we're following on a consistent basis. Now I'd start the acquisition process. I would start looking for properties at this point, because it could take you three months, six months, it could take years, potentially, to find the right deal that makes sense. That's in your market that you can afford that checks all your boxes, etc. But that takes time. And so you can start that process before you're totally ready to do it because a, it doesn't really cost you anything. So you're not gonna have, like, you're gonna have any cost besides the time that you put into it. And it's also, the more you do it, the better you're gonna get at looking at the opportunities, how to vet them, figuring out how you can finance it. Start to build your list of people who could potentially help fund it. Follow my stuff or whatever. I can help you with a lot of it as well for like, integrating onboarding and, and the valuations and all that. And then once you have, like, you know, you feel like, all right, I think something could happen. Like, we're starting to really make progress. Ideally now you can replace yourself at number one, where either your number two becomes number one, right? This number two person who you've been training and working with for the last couple months and is like, hopefully got it down and is like, pretty much running the show and, like, can actually do sales and all that stuff. That would be like priority number one. And then you hire another in a number two. That would be like, in an ideal world now, it's possible that that person can't sell, but they're really good at ops. And so maybe you have to hire a salesperson. But either way, when you hire that number, when number two becomes number one, or if you hire somebody, you now have systems because you spent all this time you've been practicing, you're drilling it. It's all. You're talking about it in everything that you do. And so now. When you take over store number two, at this point, you've got these systems. Day one, you can install your systems. You've probably already hired a bunch of people to run that store on day one if nobody's there, right? Maybe you've moved somebody from one of your current stores, but, like, everyone knows what to do. You've got the same process, and it's not reliant on you micromanaging and brute force building the business, but instead it is based on the systems that you've created and you've held yourself and your team accountable to following on a consistent basis. Otherwise, you're back to being like, the hero. It's not going to work. When do you know it's time? When you feel confident that you can step out of the business, your team can continue to operate at a similar level to when you're there. And then you've got this confidence that, like, I'm going to make it work. Like, you got to go in and you can be a little scared and a little nervous and all that stuff, but you got to be ready and fired up that you're going to crush this thing. And if you don't feel that, if you feel like you're on shaky ground, then I'm not saying don't do it. But I'm saying you got to really figure out the fear that's holding you back. And there's this great question that is, what do you need to believe to be true? So, like, what do you need to believe to be true in order for you to go ahead and make that move? You have to believe that your current business will not fall in crater. You have to believe that it will continue to thrive without you. You have to believe that that new store, you can get profitable within 30 days or 60 days or 6 months or whatever it is on your spreadsheet that you says, I need to believe that I can get working within this amount of time for it to make sense for me. And at the end of the day, you got to want to build a business, right? None of this is easy, and it's got to be worth it. So it's been worth it for me. It's worth it for a lot of people.