Some hospo owners dream of building a business empire across multiple cities, countries, or continents; others may even look to franchise their businesses and bring others to success.
Going from a one- to multi-location operation is no mean feat. It requires careful decision-making, listening intently to customer demands, digitising effectively, and keeping your ears close to the ground to ensure you’re capitalising on the current trends shaping our industry.
Understanding what keeps your community and guests coming back
Before expanding, it’s important to know what makes your first location successful. It’s in that first location that you can optimise processes, iron out kinks, and ensure you have a robust formula for attracting customers. Hone in on things like optimising sales, responding to trends, efficient reporting, and ensuring you’re focusing on profitability and understanding your customers. Reporting linked to your point-of-sale system and contact management tools like customer directories which enable you to store customer information and view how they interact with your business, can be powerful tools here.
Building and retaining a loyal customer base
Having a loyal customer base in your first location – almost like a cult following – will be the best endorsement you could get when expanding into new ones. Double down on marketing and ensure you’re engaging with existing customers and attracting prospective ones through carefully thought out social media strategy and loyalty programs that reward customers and provide personalised experiences for each customer. Ensure that you’re encouraging customer reviews and engage with them appropriately. Use technologies like automated discounts to keep price points fresh and provide further reasons for customers to keep coming back
Remote management and replicable systems
Creating a feeling of presence and consistency as you scale is critical, as you can’t be in all locations at once. Having a solid system in place when expanding will help you replicate the secret sauce that made your first location so successful. For example, look for technologies like point-of-sale systems which offer easy onboarding and training of staff, and give you the ability to create different permission levels at any location, execute staff performance management, and allow you to publish, manage and approve content, such as your menu catalogue, from a central dashboard. Technologies should also allow you to make real-time updates at a location level.
Being resourceful
Doubling your operations doesn’t mean you need to double the level of complexity, work and resources. It’s key that you find efficiencies during the scaling process that enable your business to remain profitable as you grow by streamlining your rostering and implementing self-serve technologies like payment kiosks, automation, freeing up time to focus on high-value ones, and automated inventory management and purchase orders.
Learning from the best
One business that successfully went from one to many stores is the Australian healthy fast-food chain Fishbowl. Fishbowl was founded in Bondi Beach in 2016 by school friends Nathan Dalah, Nic Pestalozzi, and Casper Ettelson, and now has 46 stores across Victoria, NSW and Queensland – and is expanding to New York this year. Nathan, Nic and Casper are innovators and have been early adopters of technology that’s allowed them to manage all of their 40+ stores from their phones. They’ve also put processes and operations at the heart of what they do to ensure quality and consistency. As they aptly put it: “Our design-driven spaces, vibe-making music, bold personalities and cultural diversity are all essential ingredients in bringing to life our healthy and delicious dream”.
Staying ahead of the pack
Going from one location to many isn’t easy, but there are a few fundamentals that can drive success. Getting the right processes in place from the outset, ensuring that you focus on making your first store a blockbuster before you even think about expanding, and providing immaculate consistency when you do choose to scale, will help you stand out to customers and keep you ahead of the pack.
