Growing the Business or Why Size isn’t Everything

So while listening to Marketplace on NPR recently I heard an advertisement for a product that allowed small business owners to “focus on growing their business” and it made me wonder, is “growing your business” always the goal for small business owners?

Now don’t get me wrong, there are some very specifics ways I would love to grow our business. I would love to sell more $50 dollar vintage beers to guests to who really appreciate the time and effort it takes to create a vintage list like ours.

But I am not interested in growing our business in other ways, for example, by adding catering sales or more locations.

Those things would probably help our bottom line. But there’s a formula of sorts for time vs. money. You can make almost infinite amounts of money, but time is limited.

To do more catering business would take an enormous amount of time for Nick and I, because catering is incredibly different from running a restaurant and in some ways is more difficult in our opinion. A second location adds a whole other set of headaches and also requires an entirely different skill set than running one location.

Even though it’s been almost eight years, some days I feel like we are just getting good at running The Porter.

In America I think it can be difficult to be satisfied. Our culture screams, “Bigger! Better! More! More! More!” And in business there is a certain ethos that your are either growing or shrinking, maintaining is not an option.

It is not enough to simply sit on your laurels, restaurants must evolve to stay relevant, but that doesn’t mean we need to open a new location to continue to evolve. In fact, not opening additional locations has allowed us to focus on our brand and continuing to define and refine it. With each year there are more things The Porter doesn’t do that sets us apart as well as new things we try. For example we used to do pint nights, but we found people are not really drawn to free boring shaker pint glasses. It’s not special enough for us or our guests.

A new thing this year has been our slushie machine. Nick and Chris saw Omnipollo making Slushie Beer Toppers at the Copenhagen Beer Celebration and they immediately thought ” let’s do that!” Voila! The slushie beer topper was born at The Porter, and had been a big hit this summer.

So yes, maybe we are “growing our business,” but in our own way, The Porter’s way.