Once the location is in your head, it’s hard to let it go
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn in response to recurring conversations with founders and leadership teams around this topic.
I’m publishing it here as part of an ongoing body of thinking around restaurant strategy, market entry, and operational decision-making.
I’ve been working with a client recently who kept coming back to New York. I get it. It’s exciting and on paper it makes sense for the brand. But if you start with the location, it ends up influencing everything else.
You’ll bend your expansion model to make New York work, even if it means taking on more capital risk or operational involvement than you originally planned.
The model should come first.
There are five main routes to international expansion, and it’s a sliding scale. More control costs more capital and moves slower.
How much control you want to keep. How much capital you’re prepared to put in. How quickly you want to scale. And what you’re willing to give up to do it.
Working through that can make some markets drop out immediately.
Working through that honestly can make some markets drop out immediately. If you decide on direct ownership for brand control, markets with foreign ownership restrictions are off the table. If you want to franchise, markets short on serious franchise partners become non-starters.
The location doesn’t become less exciting. You just go in with your eyes open about what you’re trading off to make it work.
Model first, market second
Since first sharing this, I’ve seen the same issue surface repeatedly — particularly with businesses entering new markets or scaling too quickly. The underlying challenge is rarely strategy itself, but how early decisions constrain execution later.
Andrew Jobes is the founder of Jobes & Co., a Dubai-based advisory working with restaurant and hospitality businesses across the Middle East and international markets.