From $2.9M and one location to $9.7M and four, in ten months.

Wesley runs Happy Holdings Group, the company behind Bowls of Rice and Bunch of Dumplings. When he joined The Scaling Engine in January 2025, he had one location in Chicago and was about two weeks from opening a second. He had done that once before, in 2022, and closed it within a year. The second store was too close to the first, and it was pushing a sandwich brand that never found its footing.

The interesting part is what he did after closing it. He went back to one location, focused on the brand that customers were actually returning for, and grew Bowls of Rice from about 22 orders a day to about 170. By the time he came to us, the concept worked. The missing piece was management.

He said it plainly in his first interview: it was not a pain point yet, but it was going to be a pain point if the company got where he wanted it to go. He wanted to close the loop that broke the first time he had two locations.

Over the next ten months, the work was about building the layer between him and the stores. His managers were given goals, and each goal came with the details underneath it. As the goals grew, the managers were trained to adjust their details to reach them. His marketing manager's goal became revenue, with return on ad spend as the guardrail, and hitting the goal unlocked new levers: more locations to deploy capital into, more tools to manage with.

Wesley describes his role now in one sentence: it is not to figure out the best systems for the business, it is to figure out how to get the best people and lead them to make the best decisions. That shift is what let the company go from one location to four, then keep going.

The numbers he shared on camera were $2.9M when he started and $9.7M about ten months later, with four locations open and two more signed. By July 2026, his team reported opening locations eight and nine. None of that was done for him. As he put it, knowing what to do is about 10 percent of the effort. The other 90 is doing it.