Success and growth makes a first-time multi-unit owner seem like a first timer forever – even after decades of operations. This happens when the owner spends their life building a company and has no ownership experience with other brands or organizations to fall back on.

I collaborate with many extremely admired companies. These are businesses with sales in the tens of millions and profits in the millions. Everything they have ever heard reflected back to them – from their guests, investors, and the community – confirms them as screaming successes.

Even with these incredible results, though, I look around and realize that some aspects of running a great restaurant company in the 21st century remain missing – simply because they just do not know the details. And I make these companies much more successful once they learn them.

For multi-unit operators, the level of your achievement is directly related to what (and how fast) you can learn.
When it’s your first time doing anything, you don’t know all the details.
 

First Time for Everything

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being a parent is getting to witness all the “first time” things – from first steps to first plane ride, to first time at the ocean, to first purchase, to first time staying at home by themselves, to first time hanging out unsupervised with friends at a coffee bar and bookstore (yeah, 14 years old now).

Each of these has a unique aspect. But while raising children often feels like a delight, growing a restaurant often feels like the opposite. The challenges you face in your business can be unexpected and can make you feel uneasy or unworthy.

 

Common Multi-Unit Owner Characteristics

First time multi-unit owners have a unique learning curve. After decades of working with them, I know they commonly exhibit these traits:

1. Aspects of Greatness. I can always identify one or two aspects that these successful owners owe their success to. Maybe it’s hospitality, menu development, marketing, leadership, or business or site selection.
    
2. Ignorance. Eventually owners must learn all the aspects that do not come naturally to them. Since they remain busy running their growing business, they tend to do so by trial and error.
    
3. Unrealistic Confidence. Alternatively, these pitfalls hold them back because they think that the one or two things they master overcompensate for the areas they don’t do well with. At the extreme they think their existing talents negate the need to learn about new aspects of our business. This ends up backfiring – plateauing their companies or worse.
    
4. Opportunity. The most successful people move out of their own way and reach out to peers, restaurant associations, and other experts to find the knowledge they need to be completely prepared to run a great company.
    

To optimize success, know what you don’t know. My biggest successes in catapulting restaurant companies forward in sales, profits, and net worth – with numbers moving upwards in the millions of dollars – have involved installing those missing pieces.