Read time: 3 minutes

When I left London in 2020, there were three restaurants I'd always leave thinking:
“why aren’t there more of these?!”

Rosa's Thai, Yard Sale Pizza and Pizza Pilgrims.

At the time, each had maybe a handful of locations.

I've been going back to London once or twice a year since. When you visit a city that infrequently, you notice what's changed.

This past December, I walked around and these restaurants were everywhere. Rosa's Thai had expanded across the city. There was even one in Finsbury Park, right by where I used to live.

Pizza Pilgrims now has more than 20 locations. My wife and I even went to one and surprise surprise, it was still fantastic.

But it took five years.

Five years of serving great food, building systems, hiring the right people, finding the right locations.

Five years for something that was obviously good in 2020 to become obviously successful.

I know these are restaurants with physical locations. Your business probably looks nothing like this. But the principle still holds.

The gap between "obviously good" and "obviously successful" is just time. And most people quit in that gap.

They see slow growth and assume it's not working because they have 20 year old gurus on Instagram telling them they should already be making $1m/year cash.

Those comparisons make us pivot too soon and abandon things that are already working.

Rosa's Thai didn't reinvent their menu every six months. They just kept serving great food.

So if you're getting early signals that something's working - people telling you they love it, clear learnings, genuine engagement from customers - you're probably onto something.

It's just too early to see the results yet.

Keep accumulating skills. And keep going.

See you next week,

Will

P.S.

Will McTighe

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