Scaling Up a Business
A business owner who knows how to build relationships but cannot find the right person to help him grow.
Background
Sam* runs an alcohol beverage brokerage business in the American Midwest. He sources products from craft breweries and distilleries and markets them to restaurants and outlets. His business sits between the producers and the end consumer, replacing the need for each producer to employ a dedicated sales representative, and giving outlets a single point of contact for multiple brands.
The business is profitable and has been running for four years.
The Challenge
Sam wants to expand the business into other states. To do that, he needs someone to help him. He hired one person previously, but that person took another opportunity elsewhere. Now Sam says he has difficulty trusting people and cannot find the right person to bring on.
What We Explored
The session started by unpacking what trust actually means to Sam in a business context. For most people, trust is instinctive. They cannot explain why they trust someone. In a business context, that is not a workable framework.
Sam was able to articulate his criteria clearly: he needs someone ethical, self-motivated, quality-focused, and consistent. Given that these are not unusual qualities, the question became whether his search method was the problem rather than the people themselves.
We also clarified what role Sam actually needed this person to play. He wants someone to take what is working in his current state and replicate it elsewhere. In effect, this person would be operating like a franchisee, investing their own resources. But due to franchise laws in his state, that structure was too complex to set up right now. The simpler path was a business contract with clear expectations, which removes the need to base everything on trust alone.
Sam had been spending about four hours a week looking for this person through his existing network and friends of friends. Several interested candidates had dropped out because their spouses were not supportive. He recognised in the session that this approach was not working. He decided to spend one focused week exhausting his existing network. If that did not produce someone, he would hire an employee to run his current state, and go to another state himself to expand the business directly.
Working backwards from his goal of having someone operational by June, the timeline gave him March and April to find and onboard the right person.
Why This Approach
Sam stated at the outset that his business is a relationship business. Trust is not just a personal quirk for him. It is structurally important in the craft alcohol market, where small-batch products require consistent quality standards and where buyers need to trust that the broker will not let them down. The fact that Sam had previously worked successfully with someone demonstrated that his concerns were not paranoia. They were legitimate and specific.
Once his trust criteria were made explicit, it became clear that the issue was not trust in the abstract. It was the method and the timeline. That is a solvable problem.
What Shifted
- Sam understood that his inability to find someone was partly a function of how he was looking, not only who he was looking for.
- He committed to one focused week exhausting his contacts.
- He had a clear fallback: hire someone to run the current state and expand into another state himself.
- He walked away with a concrete timeline and renewed energy around the goal.
"When someone is stuck, it is rarely because the problem is unsolvable. Usually it is because they have been looking at the problem the same way for too long."
*Name has been changed for privacy and confidentiality.