Tate Fisher has opened a lot of stores. The fastest brand his team ever supported was opening 3.5 locations a week for almost two years. The one that almost broke his business went the other direction. A commitment to open 90 stores turned into 11, a $600,000 hole, and a choice: file bankruptcy and walk, or spend the next several years paying vendors back a dollar at a time. Tate chose the second option. This episode is about why, and what the hole taught him about partnerships, family, and saying no.
What You'll Hear
- Why Catalyst spells its name with a K and what Manhattan, Kansas has to do with it
- The gear framework Tate uses to match a brand's problems to its size and growth pace
- How the Sprint and RadioShack joint venture bankruptcy clipped a rocket mid-flight
- Why Tate took the $600,000 loss personally instead of pushing it onto vendors
- How working through that crisis turned Catalyst from "Tate's business" into "our business" with his wife Katie
- The all-in-or-none-in meeting Tate's executive team held the day after COVID shut the world down
- Tate's three-question hiring filter: right person, right skills, right core values
- Why hire slow, fire fast is the lesson he's had to relearn the hardest
Catalyst Group and the business of opening locations fast
Tate Fisher runs Catalyst Group, a firm that helps multi-location service brands open new locations without losing their minds. About 80 percent of Catalyst's work is with franchise brands. The rest is corporate-owned chains that grow by opening their own stores.
Tate's origin story in this world goes back roughly 20 years. He and a business partner were a top retail partner for Alltel before the company was sold off and eventually folded into Verizon. They opened chains of Alltel stores and hit a problem that became the seed of Catalyst. The construction industrial complex, as Tate calls it, is not built to open lean, repeatable locations quickly. It's built for hotels, hospitals, schools, and custom homes. Every project is a snowflake. That makes fast, consistent multi-location rollout painfully hard.
So Tate and his partner built their own sign company, their own internal facilities team, and their own systems to plow through the same obstacles every time. Around 2006 and 2007, peers in the industry started calling: your stores perform better, they look better, who's doing all that for you? That was the moment Catalyst started to exist in shadow form. In 2013, Tate sold all three retail chains, bought his original partner out, and went all in on helping other brands open locations. Today Catalyst's fastest-ever client was opening 3.5 locations a week for almost 22 months. A more common healthy pace is one location a week. The shape of the work, Tate says, is running dozens of parallel-path projects and making sure you've already cleared the hundred obstacles you know are coming so the team has room to handle the handful you didn't see.
Gears, unit economics, and knowing when you deserve to scale
Catalyst uses a five-year gear framework to talk about multi-location brands. The gear a brand is in depends on a combination of size and pace. A brand trying to open 50 locations next year has similar problems whether it has five locations or five hundred, Tate says. The resources differ. The problems look very similar.
Gear one, in Tate's language, is proof of concept. Three to 10 locations. The question at that stage is whether the brand has real unit-level economics. Can each coffee shop, or each whatever, actually make money on its own? If the answer is no, Tate is blunt: you don't deserve to scale. Economics of scale can improve a business that already works. They cannot fix one that doesn't. He's watched enough brands blame their early failure on not being big enough yet, then scale the failure into something bigger.
Sam pushes back with a Subway-origin anecdote, the idea that you can sometimes scale into success. Tate accepts the edge cases and still holds the line. Every brand he's worked with that didn't have some version of early success ended badly. The gear framework is not theory for him. It's a filter. Catalyst typically doesn't engage with a brand in gear one. By the time a brand is ready to franchise, it's usually earned its way into a later gear, the marketplace is pulling for new locations, and capital requirements plus the advantages of independent owner-operators make franchising a cleaner growth path than pure corporate expansion. That's where Catalyst picks up the phone.
The 90-store commitment that became 11, and the hole that followed
Catalyst was engaged to help open stores for Sprint dealers across the country. The pipeline pointed at roughly 90 new locations over two years. Then Sprint's joint venture to operate RadioShack stores fell apart. The joint venture went bankrupt. The broader consequences were worse than the bankruptcy itself. Sprint froze all new growth to stop the bleeding, which eventually cleared the runway for the Sprint and T-Mobile merger.
For Tate's business, 90 stores became 11. The 11 were the ones already past the point of no return in construction. Everything else evaporated. Tate describes it as a rocket that got its wings clipped. What made it harder was the group taking the hit: not Sprint itself, but hundreds of independent Sprint dealers who'd had growth plans pulled out from under them, and Catalyst, which had staffed and committed around those plans.
The advice from accountants was straightforward. File bankruptcy. Start over. Tate didn't. The hole was roughly $600,000. He spent the next several years climbing out. That meant saying no to opportunities he couldn't resource, rebuilding the sales pipeline with different kinds of clients, and having a specific kind of meeting with his top vendors. He told them the story, acknowledged they could force him into bankruptcy if they wanted, and asked instead for time to pay them back. Almost all of them, including some of his largest suppliers, said yes. One small vendor refused. Everyone else, Tate says, believed in what Catalyst was doing and helped the company work through it. That experience is also why Catalyst walked away from Fortune 500 and publicly traded clients. Tate's line: we're not in the business of helping procurement people get promotions.
How a crisis turned Tate's business into their business
Tate's wife Katie came into Catalyst part-time before the Sprint situation hit. She had a finance and accounting background, had worked in accounting at K-State University, and had been doing financial consulting for veterinary clinics after they moved the company to Kansas City. Tate needed help on the finance side. The plan, he jokes, was six months, temporary, you can keep your other clients.
The Sprint event changed that trajectory. Navigating a hole that size, with that much personal exposure, was not something Tate wanted to hand off to a new hire. Katie stayed. Eventually Catalyst became her only client. Eventually she became a full-time partner in the business.
Tate and Katie also come from similar backgrounds. Katie grew up in a farming and ranching family in northwest Kansas. Tate grew up with grandparents who farmed and ranched and parents who did the same until the mid-80s farm crisis forced a different path. For both of them, family working together was normal. Tate is openly skeptical of work-life balance as a goal. He calls it one of the biggest lies society has told itself. He'd rather talk about integration, a life where work and family and shared dreams build on each other. He's also honest about the downside. He hasn't always been the husband and CEO he wants to be at the same time. But he can't picture doing the work without Katie as a partner in it.
The quiet shift, the one they only named years later, is that the Sprint years moved Catalyst from Tate's business to their business. Before that, it was his company and she was helping. After it, the legacy was shared.
Hiring for the right person, the right skills, and the right values
Tate's hiring framework has three questions. Is this the right person. Do they have the right skills and knowledge. Do they embody the core values.
Right person, in his language, is mostly a behavioral fit for the role. Tate is a fan of Predictive Index and similar tools, and has used variations of DISC for years. The point isn't the specific instrument. It's that people are wired a certain way, and asking someone to operate far outside their wiring is, at best, a setup for quiet dissatisfaction. Self-awareness and maturity can extend how long someone survives in the wrong seat, but the math usually catches up.
Right skills and knowledge is the adjustable one. Training, coaching, and time can move it. It requires clarity on what the role actually needs, which many organizations skip.
Right core values is where Tate spends the most time with other business owners. His strong opinion: core values are not aspirational. They're descriptive. If you have to work to embody them, they aren't yours yet. Catalyst went through a multi-year discovery process, reviewing their own winning game film, to figure out what was actually true about how they operated. He pushes hard against permission-to-play values like integrity or honesty. One of Catalyst's core values, borrowed from how they operate in a construction-adjacent world, is we do what we say we are going to do. That sounds like integrity, Tate admits. In construction, he says, it's a differentiator.
The three-question filter shows up again on the hard side. Tate names hire slow, fire fast as the lesson he's had to relearn the most. When someone who got the business through an earlier stage is no longer a fit, his instinct is to delay, and he's watched that delay cost the rest of the team. He's proud of the people Catalyst has helped transition into their next thing. He's also clear that the decision never gets easier, and he doesn't think it should.
About Tate Fisher
Tate Fisher is the founder and owner of Catalyst Group, a firm that helps franchise brands and multi-location service companies open new locations at scale. Before Catalyst, Tate was a top Alltel retail partner, building and operating three retail store chains. He founded Catalyst in Manhattan, Kansas and runs it today with his wife Katie and two additional executive partners. About 80 percent of Catalyst's work is with franchise brands. Catalyst Group