Scaling is selling more.
I’ve had multiple dialogues with small business owners, who wanted to scale up, meaning, increase sales. The scaling up challenges are pretty similar and consistent.
It usually begins with an excellent professional. It can be a lawyer at a firm that decided to become independent, a talented mechanic, a consultant, a PR person, a dentist, an accountant, a plumber, nearly anyone that basically thinks, “Wait a minute, I’m creating most of the value at my workplace and the owner enjoys most of it. I will be better off becoming independent and receive more appropriate financial compensation and personal reward.”
When this frustration increases, in many cases they will decide to start their own company and become a service provider.
It will often start with an initial clientele base. The gardener will reach out to her most recent customers and tell them the story – “I just became independent, and guess what, you can get the same service without the overhead of a large company…” – and start to do the same work as before but getting paid more.
After a while, comes the next thought – but how do I scale? And the realization that once you were employed at the firm, you didn’t need to deal with all that. At that point, the thoughts will be about hiring an office manager to take care of the back office, and a para-legal to free up my time to take care of the real deal.
The second phase of scaling is when you realize that now you have one employed lawyer, one office manager, a couple of paralegals. You can add more lawyers to the firm and pretty soon become a 10-people operation that can deal with the back office pretty well, one very experienced lawyer, a couple of young lawyers (and you can easily replace the word lawyer with gardener, mechanic, dentist, consultant, web developer etc.) and you want to scale up.
You even hired a marketing agency to bring you leads and a web developer to build you a website and you are ready to scale… but it doesn’t happen.
You are still a ONE-MAN SHOW, you can scale only if someone else can do the SALES!
As long as you are needed to close all deals, as long as you are the only person with salesmanship, you cannot scale.
My state of mind is that you have to bring salespeople way earlier, so they can bring more customers, take care of them, do the job that they are paying you for, and deal with the back office. Everything else will follow if you have more customers.
Start with sales – the rest will follow.
