“You have to show up every day in any business, even through the bad keep getting up, keep showing up. You’re not gonna win every battle, but if you win on seven, you tie on two and you lose on one. I have a feeling you’re gonna come way ahead at the end. That’s what life’s about. You’re showing up, giving it a shot.”
Randy Cohen knows firsthand what it’s like to scale and business and what it means to keep showing up, fighting to win, even when everything around you feels like it’s falling apart. As the founder of TicketCity, he grew a scrappy ticket brokerage, launched in 1990 with just $1,200,into a company that sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of tickets.
Then, a few years before COVID, he did something bold: he stepped into the restaurant business by buying Z’Tejas, a beloved but bankrupt Tex-Mex chain in Texas and Arizona.
“I bought all the assets to Z Tejas without having a restaurant background,” Randy admits. “And this thing was hard.”
His learning curve was steep, and the lessons he pulled out of the fire are universal. Here are three tactics every entrepreneur can take from Randy’s story about how to scale a business. Tune into the full conversation on the Beyond a Million Podcast.
If You Want to Scale a Business You Have to Show Up Every Day
The first reality check hit Randy early: you can’t scale a business or anything if you’re not present.
“You cannot own and run restaurants if you’re not going to be in them, I think, almost in any business,” he says.
Randy had initially tried to lead from afar, investing, hiring managers, letting them run day-to-day. But restaurants are too complex and too fragile for absentee ownership. He realized that culture, systems, and standards only stick when leadership is visible.
“You got to show up and live and breathe it,” Randy says.
For him, that meant spending time in the kitchens, on the floor, and in the trenches with staff. It wasn’t glamorous CEO work, it was about setting a tone and proving that leadership wasn’t detached from reality.
Before You Scale Perfect One Location Before Expanding
In the restaurant world, margins are razor-thin. Randy compares it to stacking pennies and warns against chasing scale too fast.
“This is a business where you’re trying to make pennies, stacks of pennies,” he explains. “Don’t open up a new store until you prove that you’re successful in the old one and you have that down.”
That meant holding back on expansion plans until Z’Tejas could consistently deliver at one location. Only then could he think about adding another. He drilled into the numbers, audited every vendor, and made cuts where necessary.
“You have to be thinking penny mindset from the moment you step in. Where are you saving money?”
It’s a mindset that applies far beyond restaurants. Scaling a software company, an agency, or an eCommerce brand works the same way: validate one working unit, system, or funnel before you try to clone it.
How to Scale a Business by Turning Crisis into a Trust Builder
Not every scaling lesson comes from success, some are forged in chaos. Randy Cohen lived this in the middle of the Super Bowl.
TicketCity had built its reputation as a trusted ticket marketplace, but when outside sellers failed to deliver their inventory, thousands of fans were left stranded. “Here you are going to the Super Bowl, and TicketCity is a successful company, and there’s no tickets available yet. They bought them from your site… and so we have to figure out how to make good on these tickets,” Randy recalled.
Instead of hiding, Randy and his team called every customer before they traveled, gave full refunds, and added $2,000 per ticket to soften the blow. For those who couldn’t get into the game, they hosted a party with food, drinks, and a place to watch. “You can’t be an ostrich sticking your head in the sand. You got to do the right thing long after the feeling leaves you of doing it,” he says.
It was costly in the moment, but it saved TicketCity’s reputation and turned furious customers into loyal ones. That’s the lesson: when a crisis hits, face it head-on, over-deliver, and protect long-term trust at all costs.
Want the full, unfiltered version of this wild Super Bowl story? Tune into Randy’s episode of the Beyond A Million podcast for the behind-the-scenes details.
The Bottom Line
Randy Cohen’s journey from TicketCity to reviving a bankrupt restaurant chain shows what scaling really demands. Presence. Proof before expansion. Integrity in crisis.
Or in Randy’s words: “Keep getting up, keep showing up, and have confidence in yourself.”
If you want more stories and tactics like these from founders who’ve scaled into the millions and beyond, make sure you’re listening to the Beyond A Million podcast and subscribe to the Beyond A Million newsletter to get the next set of playbooks straight to your inbox.
