What made you special in one place might not survive the trip.
A neighborhood restaurant. A local watering hole. A little place that serves something so good you want to tell everybody about it, while secretly hoping nobody else finds out.
You know the places. They’ve got a certain something.
Then somebody gets the bright idea to expand.
Suddenly we’re talking about locations, markets, distribution, franchising, and all the other words that can turn a beautiful little business into a PowerPoint presentation.
Don’t get me wrong. I love growth.
But I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with founders and business owners facing a fascinating challenge:
How do you take what makes your business special and make it work somewhere else?
Because there’s a big difference between making something bigger and making sure it still means something.
You Can’t Franchise a Feeling. Or Can You?
Let’s say you’ve built a business people love.
They come back. They bring friends. They tell stories about it.
Now you want to grow.
Fair enough. But what exactly are you growing?
The product? The experience? The culture? The relationship customers have with the brand?
All of the above?
And now you’ve got a question worth losing sleep over.
You can reproduce a recipe, replicate a store design, and print the same logo on a thousand boxes.
But can you reproduce the reason people fell in love with the business in the first place?
Maybe. First, though, you have to understand what that reason actually is.
And I’m not convinced it’s always what the founder thinks it is.
Founders can fall in love with every detail of what they’ve built. And why wouldn’t they? They’ve lived through the decisions, experiments, mistakes, and occasional miracles that brought it to life.
But not every detail is sacred.
Some things are essential to the business’s identity. Others are simply how that identity happened to express itself in one place, at one particular moment.
Preserve everything and you risk building a museum. Change everything and you risk losing what people cared about.
The challenge is knowing the difference.
The Difference Between Replication and Translation
In my career, I’ve spent thousands of hours working in publicity, branding, entertainment, and communications.
One thing I’ve learned is that what works brilliantly in one room doesn’t necessarily work in another.
Any comedian who’s ever killed in one club and bombed in the next can tell you that.
Same material. Same performer. Very different evening.
Sometimes, the same evening!
The room matters. The audience matters. The context matters.
A product that’s a natural fit in one community may need a different introduction somewhere else. An experience that’s familiar to your original customers may be completely foreign to people encountering it for the first time.
That doesn’t mean abandoning what makes the business special.
It means learning how to translate it without diluting it.
Founders, I say this with love. And a reasonably safe distance.
You know your businesses intimately. Sometimes a little too intimately.
You know the origin story, the setbacks, and why that one seemingly insignificant detail matters so much.
But your next customer doesn’t.
Neither does the retailer, distributor, or potential partner.
Each encounters the business from a different angle, with different questions.
That’s why I describe my work this way:
I listen to your story through the ears of your audience.
I’m listening for what makes the business valuable, but also for what somebody who wasn’t there from the beginning might miss.
Because eventually, growth requires people who have never met the founder, visited the original location, or heard the story.
And the business has to make sense to them, too.
So, What Actually Travels?
I’ve been asking founders a question lately:
What is the one thing about your business that absolutely must survive the journey?
Not the logo. Not necessarily the decor. Not even the words you’ve always used to describe it.
The thing that makes people care.
Once you understand that, you can make better decisions about what to preserve, what to adapt, and what to leave behind.
Because growth isn’t about recreating the original everywhere you go.
It’s about knowing what made the original worth growing in the first place.
Consistency is repeating what worked. Coherence is understanding why it worked, so it can work somewhere else.
And if you can’t tell the difference, you might just end up franchising the furniture.