Field note · January 2026
What regional NSW firms get wrong about scale
From Berrico, the temptation is to treat kilometres as the plot. Open a depot closer to the customer, and the story writes itself. The Regional Expansion Clinic keeps seeing a different tax: the second competent hire who will not relocate, the bank that still underwrites the founder as a person, and the culture that treats Sydney staff as visitors rather than colleagues.
Scale from a regional base is possible. It is rarely a clone of the original site. The original site has a reputation, a weekend rugby network, and a warehouse lead who can smell a bad job. The second site has a lease and a job ad. If the mandate does not fund overlapping coverage for six months, you have bought a sign, not a business.
Credit is the other quiet character. A growth line that looks elegant in a pack can still trip a covenant when stock has to sit in two places. We ask firms to put the bank letter next to the map before they print the map.
None of this is an argument against ambition. It is an argument against treating the Hume Highway as a strategy. The Intensive’s constraint map exists for this reason: if the constraint cannot move, the ambition must.