When Laura Moore opened a second shoe store in Austin, Texas, she went about it all wrong.
She had no full-time personnel at the first location of InStep to operate the store while she supervised the opening of the second. Also, Moore didn’t know what to ask her real estate broker when she went looking for a second location; within a year, the biggest tenant of the upscale strip mall where she set up shop moved out and two other retailers followed suit.
“We had this expensive space in a great part of town, but all the customers were going across the highway to shop where there was more stuff,” Moore says.
She learned the hard way that it’s not easy to expand to a second location – unless you have a clear plan with specific objectives. A new shop is like another startup – even if it’s part of an existing structure.
So how can you open a second location easily and thrive? Follow this advice.
What’s the plan?
Have a business plan for each office, advises Robbie Ferris, CEO of SFLA Architects, with three offices in North Carolina. “Each office has a very different function. What works in one office doesn’t necessarily work in other offices.”
Based in Fayetteville, the honchos at SFLA talked for years about opening a branch in Raleigh. But they didn’t do it until the market was ripe for the picking. Specializing in designing schools and university buildings, SFLA opened its Raleigh office when it saw “a tremendous need for schools” there, Ferris says.
Copyright 2009 StartupNation, LLC
Click here to read more from StartupNation