In my career, I’ve advised countless businesses on how to scale up. Through the years, I’ve learned there are five general points to consider and cover if you’re going to scale successfully:
1) Think big
2) Don’t celebrate
3) Know the difference between “is” and “on”
4) Get the highest returns
5) Use leverage
Let’s look at each one of these in a bit more detail. …
- Think big
This is a very simple concept, but very few people do it. It doesn’t take much to fill somebody’s appetite for growth, and, even if they do think about it, they usually don’t do it continuously.
Sometimes people say, “I’m a bigger thinker than my friends” and believe that is what’s required. But being a bigger thinker than your friends—or anybody else for that matter—doesn’t mean you’re a big thinker.
You might do pretty well in your business as you are, and, if you’re happy with it, that’s fine. You deserve respect no matter what level you are with your business; however, if your business is going to scale and have a life of its own, you need to think BIG.
Apple happened because there was a product expert called Woznick, but behind it there was a driver called Jobs who was a big thinker. Amazon has a big thinker in Bezos.
Wherever a business is scaling well, there’s a big thinker there.
- Don’t celebrate
People get one victory, one new buyer, and they start thinking, “OMG, we’ve got this big client that’s going to give us $600,000 of business per year. Let’s go to the pub now or the Eagles’ game to celebrate.”
That is way too much celebration. A big thinker doesn’t necessarily celebrate the big vendor coming onboard—they’re expecting that to happen because they’re thinking big. A small thinker’s lifespan of celebration is way too long, and that is why they rarely scale successfully.
The moment a small thinker makes $50,000 a month, in their mind they’re getting paid way more than what they’re worth. Their entire goal is tied to money, and, once they achieve it, they often lose the drive to scale.
- Know the difference between “is” and “on”
You have to spend time working on your business but knowing when is the key.
In the beginning, you need to spend the majority of your time working “in” your business and then, gradually, probably within 6 months to two years, you’ll be able to spend more time “on” the business. Eventually, you’ll be working more and more “on” your business than “in” it.
Every business is different, but the bottom line is that you have to pay attention to timing. Sometimes people go “on” too early, and sometimes people never leave the “in” because they’re too controlling or don’t plan well financially to grow, so they can’t experience scalability.
- Get the highest returns
When I was a CEO running my own firm, many times we’d run into a problem. We would have a meeting, and I would ask my team, “How can we solve this problem?”
And then we would make a list, process it together, maybe make another list and then say to each other, “We can do this, we can do that, and, if we do this, then we can do that and it solves the problem.”
This sounds perfect, doesn’t it? But the truth is that the solution we came up with was not the optimal solution. … It was a solution, but not the best one.
An optimal solution is one that puts you in a position not to have to face a particular issue again six months from now. Are you simply putting a band-aid on this problem by coming up with a solution that’s less than optimal?
When you’re the leader of a business, it’s a given that you’ll face issues. All too often, I see people trying to build a business with band-aids rather than sitting down and asking, “What can I do to make this pain to go away?”
That is the answer you really need to look for because who wants more issues coming out later?
Think about investing money back into your business. It’s a great idea, right? If you can do it here, there and a few other places and then hire three new people, your business will keep going onwards and upwards. Awesome job, everyone, coming up with solution!
Is it, really? Or do you need to think about what can be done to get the highest possible return?
That is the optimal solution—to come up with the best way to scale the business to the next level and not just throw money away on something that would give a six percent return!
What if you spend another hour in a meeting and try to find out what’s going to give you a 13% return? Or maybe sleep on it and tomorrow work out what can be done to get a 19% return.
When scaling up is the goal, you don’t settle for just any solution—you’re looking for the optimal one.
- Use leverage
Knowing how and when to use leverage takes a while to learn—it’s a true art form. If you don’t embrace it, though, you will lower the chances you have of scaling.
So, how do you leverage? The simplest way is to start by noticing when you don’t have all the answers and then bring somebody in who’s the opposing strength of you. If, for instance, you are a profit-and-vision-oriented type of CEO and you’re terrible with operations, don’t try to be operations. Leverage somebody with operations expertise to help you with the systems.
On the flip side, if you’re an operations type of person and you’re not a great driver, then you need to bring in a driver to be able to drive the company.
At the end of the day, leverage is all about partnerships—finding the right people who are going to come to you and help you scale your business. So, start thinking about what you can do to leverage time, business, vendors, partners, your executive team, etc. This doesn’t have to translate into aggressive hiring or firing—it’s more about learning to think, “What is needed to scale the business to a whole new level that I couldn’t possibly do myself?”
This ties into an earlier post on how you spend your time with the business—are you focused on the predictable side or the scalable side? Are you focused on products or personality instead of systems?
Once you’ve locked down the answers to those questions, then you can start asking yourself how well you’re doing in the five areas above and begin looking at how you can scale up.
One of the best ways to gain leverage across the business is to have an advisory board. … We’ll discuss that in another post
