Client Success: How RECS Built a Scalable People Framework Before Opening Site Two
Scaling from one location to two sounds simple on paper: open another site, hire another team, and repeat what worked the first time.
In practice, this is often the point where growing businesses start to feel the strain.
Which roles need to be duplicated? Which should support both locations? When do you actually need another hire? And how do you keep labor lean without leaving either location under-supported?
When RECS began preparing for its second location in Tualatin, the challenge wasn't simply hiring more people.
It was deciding how the organization itself needed to evolve.
Before the new location opened, I partnered with the RECS leadership team to build a people framework designed to support the next stage of growth — without simply recreating the first location's organizational chart.
The Challenge: Growing Without Duplicating the Organization
A structure that works well for one location doesn't always translate cleanly to two.
As businesses expand, roles can begin to overlap. Managers take on responsibilities that don't logically belong to them. New positions get created to solve immediate problems rather than long-term needs.
Before long, labor costs grow faster than the business.
For RECS, we wanted to answer some important questions before the second location opened:
Which responsibilities belonged at HQ versus an individual site?
Which roles could effectively support both locations?
Where would additional headcount actually be necessary?
How should responsibilities and reporting relationships evolve?
How could compensation support internal equity and future growth?
Could the structure we were building work again when it was time for another location?
The goal wasn't to build a bigger organization.
It was to build a scalable one.
The Solution: An HQ + Site Model Built for Growth
We worked together to create an organizational framework that separated company-wide responsibilities from location-specific operations.
That included:
Defining HQ versus site responsibilities to reduce unnecessary duplication
Designing purpose-driven roles around what the growing business actually needed
Reviewing reporting relationships and accountability as the organization expanded
Building a total compensation approach that considered internal equity and future growth
Creating a repeatable framework that could help inform future locations
One of the most important parts of this work was resisting the instinct to simply duplicate everything.
Going from one location to two doesn't necessarily mean you need two of everything.
Sometimes the right answer is another hire.
Sometimes it's redesigning a role.
Sometimes it's clarifying ownership.
And sometimes the best business decision is not hiring yet.
That's where organizational design becomes more than an HR exercise. It becomes part of the growth strategy.
The Result: A Stronger Foundation for Multi-Site Operations
RECS has since opened its Tualatin location.
In its own public updates about the expansion, RECS has highlighted the planning, teamwork, setup, and execution behind bringing the new location to life.
Behind that visible opening was another important piece of growth: creating greater clarity around how people, roles, compensation, and decision-making could operate across multiple locations.
The objective wasn't to create a perfect org chart that would never change.
Growing companies change.
The objective was to give RECS a framework for making better people decisions as it changes.
That's what makes this kind of work exciting.
Opening location two is a milestone.
Building an organization capable of supporting locations three, four, and beyond is the strategy.
Scaling Is a People Strategy, Too
Businesses often spend enormous amounts of time planning a new location's lease, equipment, technology, financing, construction, inventory, and launch.
The people infrastructure can become an afterthought.
But before opening another location, leadership should also be asking:
Who owns what?
What should be centralized?
What needs to exist at each location?
When does additional headcount become necessary?
How will we compensate people consistently as the organization grows?
What are we building today that we'll have to rebuild again at location three?
Those questions matter whether you're opening a second restaurant, brewery, taproom, hospitality concept, retail location, or another type of multi-site operation.
You don't need to build the organization you'll need at 20 locations when you're opening location two.
But you should understand whether the decisions you're making at location two will help — or hinder — getting there.
Preparing to Scale Beyond One Location?
I work with growing businesses on the people side of expansion — including organizational design, compensation strategy, workforce planning, hiring frameworks, acquisitions, and fractional HR leadership.
Sometimes that means helping determine who to hire.
Sometimes it means helping determine not to hire.
And sometimes it means taking the organization that got you here and redesigning it for where you're going next.
If you're preparing to add a location, acquire a business, or move into your next stage of growth, let's talk before you simply duplicate the org chart.