Said It Here

How to scale a local business without being spread too thin

Expanding past a single location often forces owners to choose between opening a risky, expensive second site or hiring a manager when they fear lacking the attention span to operate in two places at once. Trying to set up additional locations or partner with others is difficult to manage remotely, especially when trustworthy subcontractors or partners are hard to find.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Taking time off work to help full time
  2. 2
    Implementing automation, standard playbooks, and scorecards
  3. 3
    looking at subcontractors
  4. 4
    testing subcontractors on smaller jobs and giving reliable ones more work
  5. 5
    partnering with a strong operator in each new location with a profit share
  6. 6
    buying smaller companies and keeping the owner involved during handover
  7. 7
    building locations longer term for a bigger buyout
  8. 8
    relying on good systems and staff to run locations without direct involvement

In their words

Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.

“Now that here business is reaching capacity we are exploring expanding. But my fear is that she will not have the attention span to be the operator in two locations.”source ↗

“Or should we resign ourselves to risky/epxnsive location number 2, and hire a studio manager?”source ↗

Crypticarts · r/smallbusiness · 2 upvotes

“I want to make other roofing companies work for me, but they all have a full agenda. We tried setting up other locations, but it is hard to manage when you are not around.”source ↗

iloveyermum · r/Entrepreneur · 1 upvotes

“I run an asphalt business and have 3 subcontractors I can rely on but fuck they were hard to find”source ↗

divvychugsbeer · r/Entrepreneur · 1 upvotes

“Opening a new location every 6 months is very easy to stretch yourself thin unless you have VERY good systems and staff in place that can run these locations without involvement from you”source ↗

Adventurous-Quote190 · r/smallbusiness · 1 upvotes

Where this came up

r/Entrepreneurr/smallbusinessbusiness growthretailscaling

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