Grind Mode…

I haven’t written here in a while, which probably says something about the season I’m in.

East Lansing was buzzing this weekend. We had a home football game, perfect September weather, and the kind of weekend when the whole city seems to spill outside. I rode my bike downtown to work at the new For Crepe Sake location at 601 E. Grand River, and people were everywhere. Students, families, tailgates, packed patios, bikes, football jerseys. There are weekends around here when you are reminded very quickly that this is a college town.

It also happens to be Grind Week at Michigan State.

For years now, MSU basketball has used this week to bring the “family” back to East Lansing. Former players come back and spend time with the current team, and it seems to get bigger every year. Guys like Steve Smith, Mateen Cleaves, and Draymond Green return. Even former football stars like Andre Rison have become part of it.

The idea behind it is simple: come back and teach the next generation what it actually means to grind.

Not the part people see on television. Not the banners, introductions, packed arenas, or highlight reels. The work before all of that. Practice. Training. Repetition. Conditioning. Getting better at something when there isn't an audience there to tell you that you're doing a good job.

I had been using the phrase “grind mode” myself lately, so the timing wasn't lost on me.

This weekend, Gina and I spent a good part of our time painting the new For Crepe Sake. We are getting close enough now that the space is beginning to feel less like a construction project and more like a restaurant, although there is still plenty of work between the two. Painting is one of those jobs I always seem to convince myself will go faster than it does. A few hours becomes most of a day, you find another wall that needs another coat, and at some point you look down and realize that whatever clothes you wore are now permanently designated as painting clothes.

On Friday night, I drove to Bloomfield Hills to meet our realtor and a contractor to walk another space, this one for a potential new Local Epicurean. It would be our first move into the Detroit market and, if we ultimately decide to do it, the largest and most expensive TLE we have built. I spent the visit doing what I tend to do when I walk an empty commercial space: mentally moving walls, imagining customer flow, figuring out what could go where, asking what is structural and what can change, and trying to see a finished business where there is currently just an empty box.

Driving home afterward, it occurred to me that this has basically become my weekends.

Not specifically painting restaurants or touring empty buildings, but building. Nights, weekends, and early mornings have become the places where most of this happens. I wake up early and read about how other founders have built companies, why some businesses become durable and others disappear, how people create systems that allow an organization to function without the founder making every decision, and how businesses preserve whatever made them special in the first place as they get bigger. Some mornings I am writing marketing copy. Other mornings I am staring at a spreadsheet, redesigning a process, studying pricing, working through a layout, researching software, or trying to solve some operating problem that I didn't know existed a week earlier.

Then there is the much less intellectual side of entrepreneurship, which sometimes involves a paint roller, a drill, moving furniture, hauling things between buildings, or standing in a restaurant at 10:00 at night trying to figure out why something that seemed straightforward on paper absolutely does not work in the physical space.

I suppose this is what I mean when I tell Gina I am in “grind mode.”

I am slightly uncomfortable even writing that phrase because entrepreneurship has managed to turn grinding into its own genre of self-congratulation. There is an entire mythology around founders sleeping four hours a night, working every weekend, and treating exhaustion as evidence that they must be doing something important. I don't believe that. I have seen plenty of people work incredibly hard on things that didn't work, and I have certainly created unnecessary work for myself through bad decisions, poor systems, or simply taking on too much. Hours worked are a terrible measure of whether a business is getting better.

But watching Grind Week happen around East Lansing reminded me that there is another definition of grinding that I believe in much more.

It is the practice nobody sees.

The repetition.

The unremarkable work that rarely makes for a good story while you are doing it but eventually becomes the foundation underneath whatever people do notice.

There are periods when building something requires an unreasonable amount of that kind of energy, and I am very clearly in one of those periods.

Part of what makes this one feel different is how many things are converging at exactly the same time.

For Crepe Sake is still operating from its current location while University Weiner begins operating there as well. We intentionally created that overlap because FCS is moving and University Weiner will remain, but the transition is far messier in practice than it sounds in a plan. We have two businesses trying to operate from one small space, with different menus, different equipment, different customers, and different rhythms. There are moments when both are operating simultaneously, and the building was never designed for that. It has affected the atmosphere, the service, and at times the customer experience. We know it. Our customers know it. And there isn't a magic operational solution other than getting through the transition and getting For Crepe Sake into its new home.

The new FCS is also a much bigger bet than simply moving the same restaurant down the street. We are trying to build the restaurant we now understand FCS can be after operating it for years. More space, substantially more seating, better airflow, a better kitchen and service flow, an expanded food menu, and a full spirits program with cocktails, mimosas, wine, and frozen drinks. The ambition has grown with the space. We don't just want a better crêperie. We think there is an opportunity to create one of the best brunch destinations in the market, while broadening the concept enough that it can have a legitimate evening business as well.

Of course, before we can find out whether any of that works, we have to finish construction, finish painting, hire and train people, move an operating restaurant, open the new one, and work through all of the problems that only reveal themselves once actual customers enter a building.

And almost immediately after FCS leaves its current location, we start again.

The old space becomes Tiny Joys, our mini donut concept. That means another build, another menu, another identity, another operating model, another opening, and another experiment. There is something objectively ridiculous about standing inside the new FCS painting walls while knowing that one of the next things on the list is to go back to the building we are leaving and start transforming that one.

Grand Rapids is moving at the same time. We acquired the original Local Epicurean there at the beginning of this year, and now we are working through the first meaningful expansion of that location and thinking about what the next version of TLE should become. Construction is taking place there while we continue to develop the concept beyond what either Gina or I inherited. That business has given us a much clearer picture of what TLE can look like at maturity, but it has also raised a much bigger question for me: if this concept really works as well as I increasingly believe it does, what are we actually going to do with it?

That question is what had me in Bloomfield Hills.

A new TLE in West Bloomfield would be a very different decision than opening another small concept near Michigan State. It would put us into a new market, require substantially more capital, and represent the largest single restaurant investment we have made. There is a version of the story where it becomes the location that proves TLE can travel into major affluent markets and gives us the blueprint for several more. There is another version where we commit a great deal of money and management attention at exactly the wrong time and learn an expensive lesson about the difference between ambition and capacity.

Both versions are possible.

That is probably one of the things I have come to understand better as we have built more businesses. Risk looks much cleaner from a distance. After something works, people can usually reconstruct a logical story explaining why it was obvious. When you are standing at the actual decision point, it rarely feels obvious. You have incomplete information, assumptions layered on assumptions, people giving you contradictory advice, and a spreadsheet that can tell you almost anything depending on what numbers you put into it. Eventually you decide whether you believe enough of the thesis to put real money behind it.

Meanwhile, the University Weiner partnership is creating another path altogether. What started as a way to use the current FCS space is becoming a conversation about stadiums at Michigan State and whether a model built there could eventually move onto other college campuses. That business may ultimately have almost nothing to do with the rest of The 601 Group from a customer perspective, yet the work behind it is remarkably similar: figure out the model, test it in the real world, learn quickly, build systems around what works, and decide whether the thing is actually repeatable.

Somewhere inside all of this, I also have a career.

And that is an important distinction because I don't think of World 50 as the thing I do while waiting for The 601 Group to become large enough that I can finally leave. I love my work there. I have spent more than a decade around remarkable executives and a company that has shaped the way I think about businesses, leadership, community, and growth. I am running Supply Chain 50 while also helping build Life 50, which in many ways feels like a startup inside World 50. So I move back and forth every day between building inside an established organization and building outside of one, and I am not sure I would be nearly as good at either without the other.

It does create a peculiar life.

There are mornings when I am thinking about the future of an executive community and nights when I am thinking about whether a crêperie needs another refrigerator. I can spend part of a day talking with senior executives from some of the largest companies in the world and end it covered in paint at 601 E. Grand River. On one level those worlds could not be further apart. On another, I find myself applying the same questions to both of them. What makes people care? What makes an experience different? How do you create something that works without heroic effort every time? How do you grow without destroying the thing people valued before you grew it?

Those questions have become more important to me as The 601 Group gets larger because the way I have built much of it so far is clearly not the way it can operate forever.

There is an irony in spending my early mornings reading about how great founders build systems that remove themselves as bottlenecks and then spending Saturday personally painting the walls of a restaurant. I am aware of it.

But I am not sure the contradiction is entirely a bad one.

I don't want to be painting every restaurant we ever open. That would represent a fairly spectacular failure to scale. I also don't want to become so removed from the businesses that my understanding of them comes entirely through reports and meetings. There is useful information in being physically present. You notice where employees have to walk too far, where customers naturally congregate, where the lighting feels wrong, where a piece of equipment should have been placed six feet in the other direction, and where the beautiful idea on the architectural drawing becomes annoying after twenty minutes of actual use.

The challenge, I think, is figuring out which parts of the work are valuable because they keep me close to the business and which parts I am doing simply because I haven't yet built an organization capable of doing them without me.

I don't have that answer yet.

Maybe that is what this particular grind mode is actually about. It isn't simply working more hours. We have enough businesses now that brute force is reaching its natural limit. The next stage cannot just be Gina and me becoming more efficient at doing more things. It has to be building an organization, systems, leaders, capital structures, and operating disciplines that allow more things to happen without requiring more of us every time.

And yet, before that version exists, there is this version.

There is a restaurant that needs to get open. Another that needs to be expanded. Another concept waiting for its turn in the old space. A partnership being tested. A stadium opportunity being explored. A large empty building in West Bloomfield that might become something important or might remain an empty building we once walked through. There is work at World 50 that I care deeply about. There is a family in the middle of all of it. And there are only so many hours in a week regardless of how ambitious the list becomes.

So for now, some of those hours are going to come from early mornings, nights, and weekends.

This weekend, they came from painting.

And maybe that is why Grind Week resonated with me more than usual this year.

The people who come back to Michigan State for it are remembered for the parts everyone saw. The games. The Final Fours. The NCAA and NBA championships. The big shots. The NFL catches. The careers that came afterward.

But they come back to talk about the part that happened before any of that.

The work when nobody was watching.

Business has its own version of that. If one of these concepts becomes something significant someday, nobody is going to care very much that Gina and I spent a September weekend painting the walls. They won't know about most of the early mornings spent rewriting a process, the construction problems, the bad decisions we had to reverse, the spreadsheets, the moves, or the hundred small things that had to happen before a customer ever walked through the door.

And they probably shouldn't.

That isn't the story the customer is buying.

But it is part of the story of how things get built.

I don't know whether I will look back at this period as the moment everything accelerated or as the moment we tried to do too much at once. I suspect there will be some truth in both. Most periods of meaningful growth probably look a little irresponsible while you are living through them.

What I do know is that I can see more clearly than I ever have what we are trying to build. The individual businesses matter, but increasingly I am interested in the thing underneath them: whether we can build an organization that repeatedly takes an idea, turns it into a real place people care about, learns from it, and then does it again without making each new business entirely dependent on us.

We aren't there yet.

Right now, Gina and I are still painting the walls.

I suppose that's the grind.

- Mike