A second location signed four months after opening. The last concept took three years.

Albi owned an Italian restaurant for years. It was a good family business and it was never going to be more than that, because it depended on him. When he decided to build Sunny's All Day Brunch and Bar, he wanted the opposite: a concept that could go nationwide. So two months before Sunny's opened, he joined The Scaling Engine.

He almost backed out. The morning after paying, he tried to call and cancel. The call did not connect, he showed up to the first session anyway, and by the end of that hour he said it might have been worth the whole program on its own. Alex started asking questions about his business and reacting to the answers, and things Albi thought were strengths turned out to be the wrong way to think about it.

The first thing that changed was the direction of planning. Instead of starting from today, he set a five-year goal and worked backwards: how many locations this year, what org structure that number requires, who has to be on the team for the system not to break. That produced a list of positions he would never have hired for one restaurant. He hired them anyway, knowing it would cost some profit now, because they are the foundation for many locations later.

The second thing was decision rights. He now describes his job as knowing the what, not the how. His direct reports own their areas. He reads the reports, analyzes them, gives feedback, and coaches. Result analysis, in his words, was something he never read in the business books.

Four months after Sunny's opened, he signed the lease on the second location. His Italian restaurant had taken three years to do the same thing. On camera he said that without the program he would have been in the restaurant talking to servers and cooks, with no chance of reaching the location count he is now planning for.

The number he shared at the time of the interview was about $75,000 a week in revenue. He was careful to say the revenue might have been similar without the program. What would not have been similar, he said, was the growth and the freedom.