Lessons From Selling Billions of Dollars of Orange Chicken

On a recent trip with my ultra-healthy business partners, I convinced them to get dinner at Panda Express.

Now, Panda Express is my guilty pleasure.

I only eat it about once every 3-6 months but when I do….I always get double orange chicken!

It's obviously not authentic Chinese food but it's delicious and it reminds me of my middle school/high school days.

I decided to do a little digging on Panda Express as a business after my most recent trip with my kids.

I figured it would be owned by a private equity company or big conglomerate.

What I found fascinated me and I think there are some solid business lessons we can learn from the Panda Express crew.

First, it was started in 1973 by two Chinese immigrants.

It's been family-owned since then and the vast majority of their 2,200 restaurants are not franchises.

This is almost unheard of in the restaurant industry especially at the scale of Panda Express.

What I found really interesting was how they credit much of their success to simplifying their model.

The founders Andrew and Peggy Cherng, state that they really saw growth when they decreased their menu options and simplified their cooking processes.

They also made an incredibly lean business model that focused on ultra efficient locations in malls.

Their growth was fueled by profit instead of taking on capital partners like most businesses that have massive scale.

I find this really interesting because they did things so different than most restaurant chains.

The most impressive thing I see is how committed they have been to this simple business model for basically 45 years!

It's hard to stick to a business model for 5 years, let alone 45 years.

Today, they have about 3 billion dollars in sales…that's a lot of orange chicken.

I think the most important lesson you can learn from this is to lengthen your timelines.

Imagine focusing only on your current business for the next 40 years.

Would that change how you make decisions? Would that change what services you decide to offer? Would that change your estimated trajectory?

Too often I see entrepreneurs jumping from one project to the next. I've been guilty of this myself! I started PT Biz in the middle of growing Athletes' Potential.

If you can double down on your business and not jump to a new business or project, you will be much better off.

You can get pretty damn good at selling and making orange chicken in 45 years.

Just imagine how good you can be at selling and delivering great clinical services if you focus on it for the next 45 years.