Old-Fashion Businesses Can’t Scale (Until Acquired That Is...)
Old-Fashion Businesses Can’t Scale (Until Acquired That Is…)
The Lexington Candy Shop opened in 1925 on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Not only has the façade remained largely unchanged over the decades, but it still operates much the way it did when its customers wore Baker Boy hats. The “Shop” sources their bread from Orwasher’s Bakery, open since 1916 and located only a few blocks away, for French Toast that is out of this world.
Lexington Candy Shop
The Shop has also gotten international notoriety for one very specific old-school thing that it still does the same way from its first day of business. What is that you ask? How they serve Coca-Cola. They mix the syrup and seltzer water by hand, and top the drink with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It is one of the handful of places left in the United States that does this. Why? Because it is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. It doesn’t scale, but it shows that you can still have a profitable business with old-school methods.
The “Service” Mindset
There are a ton of business owners out there who create “lifestyle businesses” for themselves. They deliver a great product for their clients at a solid margin. Once they get to this point in the business, the only point of the enterprise is to maintain the status quo. The only “how” that matters is how they got there. Once that is figured out, just like the Shop everything goes on autopilot.
If a concrete subcontractor does bids on a legal pad, guess what, they will never change the way they do things. A business that keeps all of its sales leads on an Excel spreadsheet? Good luck trying to sell them a SaaS CRM. I call this the “Service” mindset. The only thing that matters is getting the job done and meeting immediate cash flow needs.
The challenge is that without proper systems in place, you can build a business to support a decent lifestyle but not much more.
