Napoli,
I am told I look like Steven Spielberg, so look for a little statue of him and put my name on it.
Just kidding,
I did not have a choice. I opened one location and bought the second later the same year. Within a couple of months I was offered a job I really wanted so I really needed to concentrate on creating management systems and managing my managers to get the results THROUGH them (I did have solid experience in that area having been COO of a 40 million dollar business with VPs and managers reporting to me)
Question 1 is: Does the business have the cash flow to pay a manager AND produce a nice profit? If so it can be done, if not you could still do it, but there would be nothing left over. In my case, I need to be doing at least 500K for there to be much left over.
Question 2 is: Is you focus where it needs to be? Back to the statement about getting results THROUGH your manager. One needs to concentrate on setting expectations, creating systems, providing resources and removing obsticals so that the manager CAN run the place without you. It is a different mind set than running the place yourself.
Question 3 is: Are you willing to reward the manager for doing it? This level of responsibility is not a $10 per hour role. Comp varies by region/market and by the size of the business. In my case the manager costs me 45-50K by the time I add in benefits.
In the end, I am proud of the business, I like it. But… I don’t want to work there. At 625K sales I am able to take about 90-95K out of it NOT including the rent I pay to myself. (I was able to buy both property locations over the years) I need more than that to live on so I am still employed elsewhere. (I am a business broker) I also teach business related courses on local marketing, leasing and startups at the college and volunteer as a SCORE counselor.
Suggested tag line:
Two store Indy. One Delco and one Slices. Owned a little over 9 years. It makes me crazy when the cooks run plastic stuff through the ovens by accident.