The dangers of expansion.

It's the American way.  If you're successful, expand.  Open another location.  Do more stuff!

Of course, all those things may very well lead you away from what made you successful in the first place.

A couple of local defunct restaurant owners are fighting it out in court, plus some apparently less than informed investors.

I expanded into four stores once.  It worked for a couple of years, and then it didn't.  I won't go into all the reasons why.  I borrowed the money, I paid it back.  No partners, thankfully.

One thing I noticed about this story in the paper:  the guy being sued borrowed the money -- took on investors -- but it appears that there weren't controls to keep the money from being spent on already existing restaurants.

I'll tell you what I think happened -- the guy had businesses that were almost working, and he tried to shore them up first, thinking if he did that, he'd have the resources to do all the expansions.  Of course, if the the businesses aren't working now, throwing more money at the problem isn't usually the solution.  You have to change the way your doing business, fundamentally, and very few people can do that.

Closing the other three stores was one of the hardest maneuvers I've ever done.  I was more or less out of the cashflow while the expenses lingered.  It's was difficult to keep the whole thing from cascading downward.  I was in danger of customers abandoned the store, that kind of thing.

I think I was pretty smart about it.  I expanded the downtown Bend store at roughly the same time I closed the Redmond and Sisters stores -- which kept my customers from leaving. 

Anyway, the point of this post is to say -- sometimes you're better off just to keep on doing what you're doing, and resist the temptations to get bigger.  Everyone but everyone will tell you to "go for it."  But make sure you've really got all the bases covered before you try, and be aware that you may be adding all kinds of stress and expenses, and all the extra revenue will most likely go toward paying for others to run the other businesses.

It took a long time to get over the trauma of that.  When we decided to open the Bookmark, it was because Linda was there to run it, otherwise it never would have happened.

Be satisfied with moderate success -- even if it isn't the American Way.