🟡 5 MINUTE SUNDAY · Every Sunday. One tip. Under 5 minutes.
Once your ops are mapped, expansion stops being a new project. It's just a copy-paste with one adjustment. Most founders think branch two means starting over. It doesn't, if branch one was ever mapped right.
— 01 — ONE LEADERSHIP TIP
You don't need a new plan for the next branch. You need one that's already been tested, and the guts to cut it if it doesn't hold.
I once asked my boss why our IT consultancy, tucked into a building in Kreuzberg, wasn't expanding past our one office. He said it was too complex. We had 70 people in that one office. Complex enough already, he thought, and every time the topic came up he'd list the reasons. Different labor laws. Different clients. Different everything.
I told him it was only complex because nobody had documented what actually made those 70 people work. We knew how to deliver. We just never wrote it down. Map it right and you can copy it.
He needed a year to agree.
Once he did, we mapped every process end to end. Onboarding, delivery, client handoff, escalation, all of it. Mapping it on paper was the easy part. Living with it wasn't. Once we actually tried to standardize how people worked, not just how we said they worked, some of the leaders pushed back hard. A few of them quit rather than change how they'd always done things. I hadn't planned for that. Building the machine is one thing. Getting people to run it the same way is a different fight, and it cost us people I didn't want to lose.
We opened in Switzerland and in Munich. Switzerland wanted the relationship, the dinner, the local face who got the culture and could sit across the table from a big account and build trust before we'd delivered a single line of code. Munich wanted speed and a clean technical handoff. Same delivery process underneath both. Completely different front door.
Munich didn't work. Not right away, and eventually not at all. Talent there cost more than we'd planned for, and the margins on the deals we were winning couldn't carry that cost the way they had back in Kreuzberg. We tried to fix it, adjusting pricing, adjusting the team. After a year and a half, the numbers still weren't moving the right direction, and I had to make the call to close it.
My boss didn't want to. Closing a branch felt like admitting we'd been wrong, and he was more afraid of that than of the number bleeding month after month. It took real convincing, not one conversation but several, laying out exactly what staying open would cost against what closing would save, before he agreed. We shut Munich down. Switzerland stayed. And the company kept growing anyway, because the operation underneath both was solid enough to absorb losing one branch without losing the whole thing.
Three years, 70 people grew to 250, all traced back to that one office in Kreuzberg. It worked because we fixed the mess there before we ever touched a new city, and because I was willing to close what wasn't working instead of protecting it out of pride.
The takeaway: One operation, tested on 70 people in Kreuzberg. Every new market adjusted what already worked. And when one market didn't work, the operation underneath was strong enough to survive cutting it loose.
— 02 — ONE COMPANY WORTH KNOWING
ok this week its actually 3 ...
Wise, Deel and Personio: three very different companies that expanded well, all running the same five moves underneath.
Sequence over speed. Wise didn't launch everywhere at once. UK first, in 2011, built on organic word of mouth among expats and international students who were tired of losing 5 percent of every transfer to bank fees. A 2013 Series A funded the compliance and licensing infrastructure, and only after that did capital go toward the US in 2014 and Australia in 2015. By 2016 Wise had hit over 50 countries and 2 million customers.
Deel ran the same play on a much smaller clock. They almost didn't survive their first model, a trust-based payment platform with no real traction. One to two weeks before their Y Combinator demo day, Deel's founders pivoted the entire business, scrambled to sign 290 contractors and hit $5,000 in monthly revenue in 10 days. That tiny, proven base became a $17.3 billion company. Neither one tried to win five markets in year one.
One exclusive local lever, not a generic feature set. Personio didn't try to be good at payroll everywhere at once. They locked in DATEV, the system running an estimated 60 to 80 percent of German payroll, and let that single integration do the trust-building a generic product never could. This is the Switzerland move, translated into software. Find the one thing that removes friction fastest in that specific market, and build the entry around it.
The core stays untouched. Personio's actual product doesn't change country to country. What changes is the regulatory layer sitting on top of it, rebuilt market by market on purpose. Same as my consultancy. The delivery process was identical in Munich and Zurich. Only the relationship style at the front changed.
Real pain drives the roadmap, not a spreadsheet. Deel's founders built the product because they'd personally hit the wall trying to hire internationally, patching things together through PayPal and early Wise transfers with no real contract protecting anyone. That lived friction shaped what they built next.
Fix what's broken before you scale it, and be willing to cut what doesn't. This is the one that kills most expansions. Wise spent years building compliance infrastructure before a dollar went toward the US and Australia entries. Personio is deliberately slow-rolling payroll country by country because getting local regulation wrong is expensive to unwind. A broken process copied into three markets doesn't get fixed. It gets tripled. And sometimes the honest fix isn't more patience, it's closing the branch that's never going to carry its own weight.
(Sources: Contrary Research on Personio, Wise's own company history, a16z's Deel breakdown)
The lesson: The companies that expand well don't move faster. They move in order, one proven market at a time, and they're willing to close what doesn't hold its own weight.
— 03 — ONE THING TO ACT ON
Do this before next Sunday.
- Document your best branch or team's process end to end before you touch a new market. If you can't describe it in writing, you can't copy it.
- Enter one market at a time. Let it teach the next one.
- Find the one local lever that removes friction fastest there. Not a generic playbook copied from your home market.
- Know your exit number before you enter. Decide in advance what "this isn't working" looks like in real numbers, so you're not negotiating with your own fear when the moment actually comes.
- Expect the culture fight. Standardizing how people work isn't neutral. Some people will leave rather than change, and that's a cost to plan for, not a sign you did it wrong.
- Fix what's broken in your current operation before you scale it anywhere, and if a branch stops carrying its weight, close it before pride turns it into a slow leak.
⏱ Time required: 25 minutes
See you next Sunday.
— Alisa
Alisa Reznik · Fractional COO · Executive Advisor · Keynote Speaker
Helping founders and senior leaders scale themselves, not just their business.
Ready to open your next branch the right way? I work 1:1 with founders who need the operation built before the expansion. Book a free 20-min call →
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