In this monologue, the speaker reflects on a recent experience firing a long‑time vendor whose performance varied dramatically between its Dallas and San Antonio locations. Using that vendor as a case study, he explores why geographic expansion often fails when the second office is treated as a “pygmy” branch—under‑invested, culturally detached, and lacking dedicated leadership. He argues that the only successful pattern is for a senior executive (typically the CEO) to commit substantial personal time and resources to the new location, such as living there part‑time and appointing a high‑level manager with full authority. The speaker details the cultural, operational, and morale issues that arise from half‑measures, and warns that without full commitment the satellite office will underperform and likely be shut down. He concludes with a call to action for multi‑business owners to either embrace the intensive effort required for expansion or accept staying small, and invites viewers to engage via comments and his weekly newsletter.
Chapters
One of my businesses went through recently and fired a longtime vendor. Look, that kind of stuff happens. There's nothing super special about a company like ours, you know, firing a longtime vendor. Super interesting about it was I had a conversation 6 months later with a friend who also had been a customer of this particular vendor. It was super interesting because the friend said something that really stuck with me. He said, hey, you fired this vendor. Well, it turns out the vendor had operations in two cities, one of which was Dallas and one of which was San Antonio. And the friend said this vendor was terrific if you were in Dallas, but horrific, i.e., terrible, if you were a customer of theirs in San Antonio. And it made me really think about this issue of the struggles that businesses go through, especially when you're trying to, well, expand like these guys did geographically. I have some stories about that, and that's what this video is about. And a trick that I've learned in terms of how you can do that geographical expansion and actually make it work and avoid the, well, the struggle that this particular vendor went through that ultimately like caused us to be one of the people that fired them. It's about issues and topics relevant to business owners and especially multi-business owners. So people that aspire to or already own multiple businesses. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, I write a weekly newsletter. There's a link up here. You can subscribe to it. It's free and you know you definitely want more emails, so why not get one from me too? It made me really think about what are the patterns that I've seen that have caused those kind of geographical expansions like this particular vendor did to go right, and when has it gone wrong? And I've seen a pattern that has made it work well when a company has expanded, say, from one city to two, or from one branch to a second branch. And the pattern has worked solely and only one way. Let me tell you what doesn't work. You decide to open a new branch someplace else. You're going to do it kind of like this pygmy thing where it's going to be kind of like your big branch, but you're not going to really go into it. You're not going to invest in it like you would in the headquarters. You're not going to spend time there like you do at the headquarters. You're not going to hire a high level of staff member to kind of own it. You're not going to give anybody just a sole responsibility for making that second city or second branch really work. You can kind of imagine what happens. Everybody in the office treats treats that second place like it's not the headquarters, right? They've all worked for years with the single branch and everybody's in their routines. All the culture is there in the headquarters. And heck, you'll even see it in things when like there's company lunches and events. And when you have this kind of pygmy second branch, that's not a real thing and you're not all in on it, like you'll do crazy stuff like have team functions and like forget to invite some of the people remotely Or I've seen it in the past where companies will have an employee of the month program that gives you a parking space in front of the headquarters. They'll give that award to a remote employee. It's like, well, okay, thanks a lot. Just what I always wanted, a parking space in a city I don't live in. And so as I've been part of companies that have tried to make this expansion from one city to two or one location to multiple, the only thing that has worked is when the CEO or a senior person in the company has basically picked up and said, I'm gonna spend at least half of my time in that other city. And it's even gone so far as basically like getting an apartment in that place and spending that number of weeks and months up there. Companies that have done this well have taken somebody from the headquarters who's a senior person and is totally integrated in the entire organization and is integral to it and said, okay, you're moving to second city and the new city there. And we're gonna show a real commitment to this thing. Like what ends up happening is exactly what happened to this vendor that we fired. You end up with the headquarters being pretty good and then this remote satellite office being this just like pygmy thing that just doesn't work as well as the headquarters. And eventually you're stuck. You just aren't doing well enough to invest more. You're getting demoralized. You're having a lot of stress 'cause of the second location. And ultimately, like I've seen more times than not, the companies that don't really put a commitment into treating the second location like a first-class citizen, they end up shutting down those branches and it's just a lot of pain. I think a lot of smart business people know that this is what it takes to go from one location to two, right? That totally transforms your company where you're a geographically distributed company serving different local markets. I think a lot of smart people know that that's a lot of freaking work and commitment to make that shift from one to two. There's nothing wrong with somebody who owns a business saying, this size we're at, small is beautiful, I'm just gonna stick to this 'cause I understand the cost to kind of achieve that next level of growth. Like I respect that. There's nothing wrong with it. And if you're gonna make this kind of geographical expansion work, like you gotta own it at a high level and you gotta go all in. There's no half measures on it. It's just the way business works. That's kind of the fun of it. This whole thing involves a lot of adventures. Tell me what you think below. Appreciate you being here. And if you think I have it wrong, let me know.
