Growing Pains
It’s frequently said that multiple locations mean more work for less money. It’s said so often that, hell, it might even be true! So, in real “confessions” style, I’ll share with you some of the things I’ve learned and dealt with as Springfield Music has grown from a single location to a company with five locations (and growing?). It’s scary! The first thing I will tell you is that expanding is scary. Are your systems good enough to handle more locations? Are you good enough? Obviously, you’ve had success up to this point, which is why you got the knucklehead idea to expand. But, once you do it, you’re in this new market and reality has set in (along with the onslaught of bills, which always seem to outpace the income), it’s easy to wonder if you are up to the challenge. Chip Averwater, in his excellent book, “Retail Truths,” writes, “Multiple stores are a separate skill set.” That is absolutely true. In our case, our rapid expansion showed that not only were our systems not up t