How to expand your business into a new market (and when a franchise is the faster route)

If you want to expand your business into a new market, find the pain point the people in that market actually have, then pick the route: open your own location, ship from where you are, or buy into a franchise that already built the foundation. That’s the short version of what Brandon Moon of TD Pine Advisors told me when I interviewed him for Unscripted Small Business. It’s also the part most owners skip on their way to signing a lease.

Brandon grew his grandfather’s family business for years, through two acquisitions and a national expansion, before he started TD Pine Advisors with his partner Rafael Pino. He has watched expansion pay off and he has watched it get expensive.

Expansion starts with a pain point, because Houston isn’t Florida

A new market is a new set of problems, and your offer has to answer the ones people there have. I put a real example to Brandon. I work with a precast concrete wall company that started in Florida, already ships walls well outside the state, and was weighing a location in Houston as a distribution hub. Shipping isn’t the hard part for them. So what is?

Brandon’s answer was about customers before logistics: “you need to go where your clients are or where your customers are.” Then he got specific.

He named the kinds of differences that sink an expansion: a supply chain problem in one city that doesn’t exist in the other, or a gap in finding good workers. Before you commit, he says to work through questions like these:

• Why this market? Brandon wants you to be honest about whether it’s “because I’ve got family there” or “because, I see an opportunity.” Only one of those is a business reason.
• What’s driving the opportunity? Is it demand, supply or operations?
• What hurts there that doesn’t hurt here? Supply, labor, competition, regulation.
• How do you message to that person? In his words, you want the person with the pain point to see “that the clear solution to resolve that pain point is me.”

That last question is the one your website has to answer before you ever open the door. More on that below.

Expand the one offering that already travels

Brandon didn’t take the whole family business national. He took one piece of it. About 15% of the business was a single offering with real demand across the country, so that’s the only thing they expanded. “We were able to grow our entire business by about 40%,” he told me, and it cut their dependence on the local market for that product.

Those are his figures from his own company, not an audited study, but the logic holds for you too. Look at your sales and your inbound leads and ask which offering people outside your area already ask about. That’s your test market. You can check it cheaply:

• Pull the last year of quote requests and note where each one came from.
• Look at the searches that find your Google Business Profile and local pages and see which city names show up.
• Ask your best customers in other cities what problem they were trying to solve when they found you.

If one offering keeps showing up, expand that. Leave the rest at home until it earns the trip.

A franchise is a fast track to the foundation, and you still own some gaps

Buying a franchise is the other way into a new market, and I’ve done SEO work for people in exactly that spot, a pizza franchise owner here, a roofing franchise owner there. They’re owners, but they’ve got the franchisor’s marketing stack sitting on top of them. So I asked Brandon how to think about it.

The catch is that franchises cover different things. Brandon put it plainly: “Some franchise only provide the marketing. Some franchises only provide operations.” Some are strict about how you run the place, and some hand you a playbook and send you off to execute it. And even good marketing has a limit: “they’re going to give you a nice marketing, but you have to go close, right?”

Read how a franchisor pitches itself and you can see which hats it plans to wear. Your Pie, a brick oven pizza franchise, puts Support, Our Process and an Ideal Franchisee page right in its menu. That’s a franchisor telling you up front what it provides and who it expects you to be. Before you sign anything, line it up against your own list:

• What does the franchise provide? Brand, marketing, operations, training, site selection.
• What do you still provide? Sales, hiring, local relationships, your own local search presence.
• Do those line up with what you’re good at? Brandon’s example: if you’re not a good closer, a marketing-heavy franchise still leaves you with the hardest job.

Who you bring on to plug those gaps decides whether it works

Whether you open your own location or buy a franchise, there will be gaps. Brandon’s advice for an owner who’s already in and struggling is to step back and name the problem first, then go find help for it.

His hottest take on the show was about pride. When I asked what habit causes small business owners the most trouble, he said don’t let pride become the glass ceiling, and “circle yourself with the people who have done it before and be vulnerable, be open to asking the questions.” He pointed out that a corporate department handles bookkeeping, marketing, sales and operations for you. On your own, you wear all of those hats at once.

Marketing is usually one of the gaps, and it gets bigger in a new market where nobody knows your name yet. That’s the gap we fill here: a website built to convert the people you’re trying to reach, and an SEO plan that gets the new location found.

Your website has to speak to the new market before you arrive

The messaging question from the first section lands on your website. If Houston’s pain point is different from Florida’s, a single generic service page can’t answer both. Each market you enter needs a page that names the local problem and shows how you solve it there, with proof from that area as soon as you have any.

The same pain-point work drives your advertising, too. Matt Slaymaker makes that case for products nobody gets excited about in how to market a boring product.

So before you sign the lease, or the franchise agreement, answer these. What’s the pain point in the new market? Is the opportunity driven by demand or by supply? Which of your offerings already travels? And which hats are still yours once you get there?

You can hear the whole conversation, including Brandon’s case for planning your exit from day one, on the Brandon Moon episode of Unscripted Small Business. If marketing is one of the hats you’d like off your head, get in touch with us.