Growth, scale and new locations

Growth breaks the things that were working, and it breaks them quietly at first. Systems that carried one location or one crew don't survive contact with two. The failure usually shows up as service problems months after the decision that caused them, by which point nobody connects the two.

The work is building the operating capacity ahead of the expansion, so the new site opens into a system instead of into a mess.

Before the second location

• Can the first site run without you in it? If not, the second one will consume whoever was holding the first one together.
• Is the process written down anywhere but in people's heads? Whatever's undocumented gets reinvented at the new site, differently, and you won't find out for a year.
• Who's the leader, and are they ready? The most common expansion failure is a good technician promoted into a job nobody prepared them for.
• Does it solve a customer problem? The best second locations aren't more of the first one. They remove a reason customers were saying no.

Capacity before revenue

Sales can be turned up faster than operations can be built. That's why fast growth so often arrives with worse margin and unhappier customers at the same time, and why owners end up feeling punished for winning. We sequence it the other way. Build the capacity to deliver, then open the tap.