The salad chain Sweetgreen is now valued close to $3 billion. Not bad for a company started by three college students in their dorm room back in 2007, back when it was just one salad bar in Washington, DC. But did you know, just a few years ago, the company entered into a crisis. I’m talking about a crisis of their own making. In 2015, the founders, Nick, Jonathan, and Nathaniel decided to stop expansion. They realized that in the near future, more and more of us would order on an app. We’d want to customize our orders and come pick up our salads on the go. So instead of investing in new stores, they invested in central kitchens. They invested in building customer loyalty with an app and in infrastructure that would make it much easier to order and pick up. It took the founders three years to get it right. But when 2020 came around, Sweetgreen was in a prime position to handle remote orders, and the company’s sales skyrocketed. And it proves that sometimes, in order to take five steps forward, you have to start by slowing down, thinking, and maybe even taking a step or two backward. To hear the whole story of how Sweetgreen went from a single shop in DC to one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America, check out the story on my podcast, how I built this. Or click the link in bio.