Hi all from Brittany 👋​
If you’ve been around for a while, you know the secret by now. This newsletter never comes from a content calendar. It always comes from a conversation I had during the week. Something someone said that stayed with me longer than expected.
This week, it’s about second locations.
I’ve been surrounded by founders who have ten of them. Others who have just one. Others who are about to open their second. Different stages, different scales, different egos.
But they all share the same question, whether they say it out loud or not.
How do you move from one place that carries your soul… to more of them, without losing it?
Today we’re not talking about the first location. The romantic one. The origin story. We’re talking about the second one. The sibling that looks familiar… but definitely has another mother.
We all got the same sentence from our brain, or other founders who just opened a first place that’s working: We should do a second one.
Saying it like ordering a second espresso. Quick, logical, almost automatic. The first one is full, the reviews are good, the team is finally stable, the landlord stopped calling every Tuesday, so obviously… sequel time.
And I get the temptation. The first location gives us proof. The second one gives us ego. That’s why it’s dangerous.
Because the first place can succeed with founder energy. Presence. Obsession. You being everywhere at once, fixing everything before it breaks. The second place can’t rely on that. The second place asks a much meaner question: do you have a brand, or do you just have a room that works because you’re inside it?
The hard truth is this: most projects get diluted at the second location. Not because founders are bad. Because they confuse“we made it work once with -we know how to reproduce it-
The second location is where you stop being a creator and become a system designer. That shift is brutal. It’s also what separates a nice first project from something that lasts.
In the long version of this letter, below, I’m sharing the rules I use (and the traps I’ve seen too many times) before saying yes to a second location, with concrete examples.
And by the way, over the past months, we’ve also quietly restructured everything around LOBBY. Not to look bigger, but to become clearer. LOBBY Group is now the umbrella. The group. The structure that holds the studio, the media, the investment arm, the living projects. We did this work because at some point, when things grow organically, clarity becomes more important than speed. We needed better architecture. LOBBY Town is a way to make sure every project answers the same conviction, instead of drifting in parallel. This year for us is about building a system.
