🏭 The Widget Problem

There's a concept called the Theory of Constraints. Picture a factory with one machine that caps out at two widgets an hour. Doesn't matter how much labor you throw at everything else, you're stuck at two widgets until you fix that machine. Every business has a version of this.

The founder's job, in theory, is to find it and fix it.

Here's my problem: the constraint keeps moving. For the last six months mine was launch speed, so I spent $30-50K vetting new marketing vendors (most of it was flops, for what it's worth) and rebuilt our launch program from scratch. It worked. New locations are launching faster now.

BUT....because I was heads down on that, I stopped posting, stopped doing the organic stuff that used to bring in leads. Now my sales team is asking where the new franchises are. So I'm pivoting again, back to content, plus leaning harder into brokers, while quietly wondering if I'm just going to keep playing whack-a-mole with this until I hire my way out of it.

No clean answer on this one yet. I walk through the whole mental spiral, and a franchise-growth idea I'm stealing from a guy who's cracked something I haven't, in this week's DoF vlog.

In this week’s DoF, I discuss my latest problem-in-progress: learning how help my company grow without feeling like I’m moving from constraint to constraint. This might just be the biggest challenge at this part of my journey of entrepreneurship.

At 6:11, towards the end of the video, I talk about Mike Andes’ YouTube strategy (gaining conversion franchisees) and how that might be a path we can pursue more going forward.

BNI continues to be a big part of the community marketing push in our system. Here one of our franchisees gave us a snapshot of a “mega meeting” he attended recently which is where different chapters in a region come together to learn and network more.

I’ve never been a big brand name guy and I’m not super into luxury watches, but a good buddy of mine is super into microbrands, which are small watchmakers who produce high-quality watches. I’ve been going down a big rabbit hole on microbrands. The two watches I thought were beautiful that I found from this subreddit:

https://baltic-watches.com/en/products/prismic-stone-pietersite

https://usd.farer.com/products/stratton