I'm shutting one down.

I'm shutting one of the fourteen down. Bloomin' Blinds, the window treatment franchise I own in North Austin. Revenue was fine. It never made money.

It came down to labor, which is where most of these decisions actually land.

Here's the problem with blinds. About half a dozen major manufacturers, and each one has hundreds of product lines underneath it. Different fabrics, different automation, different repair mechanics. Somebody has to hold all of that in their head or the job doesn't work.

So you hire a tech and you spend real months and real money teaching him all of it. He gets competent. Then he leaves, and every dollar of that training walks out with him. Same with sales. You start over. My techs and salespeople kept shuffling, and I never got anybody far enough up the curve to earn back what it cost to get them there.

That's where the margin went. Not to a competitor, not to pricing. To turnover.

And none of it is visible on the top line. Revenue was coming in the whole time. Jobs were getting done. If you only looked at the number most owners look at, the business was working.

I've hired a GM for every business I own and the first one has never worked out. Not once. Usually three or four reps before someone sticks, and blinds is denser than anything else I've got, so call it five or six. That's the real cost of absentee ownership. You're not funding a hire. You're funding a search, and the search is long.

It's doable. You need an expert holding the knowledge while you run those reps, and enough cash to absorb the losses until you've got two or three trained people and actual redundancy. Somebody with more time and capital than me should go do it. I don't have either.

The way I make the call is opportunity cost, and it's less romantic than people want it to be.

Any business can be worked on forever. You can always see a path. There's always a version where you hire better, systematize more, wait another year and it comes good. But the path existing was never the question. I model what it takes in hours and dollars to get this one running without me, then I model the next best thing I could do with those same hours and dollars. If the second one gets there faster or returns more, I'm done.

It's allocation, not a verdict on the business.

This week, do this.

Pick the unit you're least sure about. Location, crew, service line, whatever.

Add up what you spent last year replacing and retraining people in it. Recruiting, ramp time, the work that got done badly while someone was learning, the senior person who stopped doing their job to cover.

Put that number next to the unit's profit.

For a lot of owners those two numbers are close, and if they are, you don't have a demand problem. You have a retention problem wearing a revenue costume.

Most people never do that math because turnover doesn't come with an invoice. It just sits inside labor and looks like the cost of doing business.

That's a lot of what we do in Owners Club. A operations expert that will ask you what something actually costs while you're looking at what it brings.