“When we were looking for properties, we couldn’t find anything prebuilt that fit our business needs, because we have a very diverse business,” she explains. “We do insurance restoration work, but we also do insurance contents restoration, which is people’s household goods. Smoke-damaged goods need to be cleaned and deodorized and stored. And then we have an emergency-service business that needs to be available 24 hours a day, and trucks that need to be kept inside. Building this 40,000-square-foot space was really a better way for us to go.”
Conversely, the Salo folks believe the time is not right for them to buy. “Here’s the thing,” Folkestad says. “We are passionate about the mechanics of what we do. We are very strong believers in not splitting the focus. The purchase of a building is just another non-core thing that we’d be dealing with. It adds complexity. We would probably do that at some point if we could guarantee that it would give us further control to our culture. But right now, we love the fact that our landlord will take care of things.”
Whichever way you decide to go, Lacey says it’ll be less traumatic if you manage it carefully. Start preparing for a planned move a full year ahead of time, he says. Have a well-defined plan, and dedicate a team of people to make sure details are taken care of.
“I had been given advice to that extent, and I frankly ignored it because we were too busy growing,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a year from now. All we have to do is move our furniture, right?’ In reality, you should project manage it, literally to the day. Stuff happens, and that’s just part of life, but if you prepare, you can get through it.”
Marketing
What about the
Web?
It’s difficult to pin down how a company’s marketing plan is transformed as it goes through growth. Many successful firms think of themselves as relationship-based. The initial clients are people the entrepreneurs know personally. As more sales employees are added, more clients are pulled into the fold because of the employees’ relationships, and due to word of mouth among potential clients. If done well, this strategy can create very broad expansion.
That was true to some extent at Next Level Café. But in order to grow as fast as they wanted to, the sales force there had to find a way to expand their network. “Our strategy has changed over time,” Anderson says. “About three years ago, we did a lot of cold calling, door knocking, and trade shows. We tried different media advertisements. It’s a brutal world doing that all day. You burn through salespeople, and you don’t get very high-quality leads. But we were young, and we weren’t very well acclimated, and we weren’t very well networked.”
