After you’ve been in business a while, you will hit a point where it seems like you’ve stalled. This happens to everyone. And it might be true- you might level off or even go backwards. I’ve struggled with this myself and even now- when I know better- it still is something that I have to remind myself.
The problem is this creates doubt in your mind about things. You doubt that you’re on the right path. You doubt that you can keep growing. You doubt the way you are doing things now is the best way to do it.
If you go too far with it, bad things can happen. You start looking at other businesses to start. You actually start other businesses! Or you start looking at changing things up in your current business- significantly. Maybe in a way that breaks it even more than it already seemed broken.
But the thing is, you’re very likely wrong that your business can’t scale past whatever point you happen to be feeling like you can’t get past. How do I know? Because there are virtually always other businesses out there doing exactly what you are doing.
That means you don’t have ALL the customers that there ever could be and that means there is more room for you to grow. It may have to happen by taking customers away from those other businesses, but that’s the easy part!
Once you know that’s all you have to do, then you just have to figure out what it will take- more exposure, a better experience, better pricing, more value, whatever it is that will be able to pull them over to you. But now it is no longer that you can’t scale, only that you need to decide how.
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Or maybe the scale issue is on the supply side. You have enough customers, but you need more people to serve them. Same thing- if that’s your problem then you’re in good shape because that’s a solvable problem.
You need better recruiting, better training, better processes or maybe all of the above, but if you can define the problem you can then solve the problem. Unless you’ve hired 100% of the people in the whole world who can do what you need (hint: you haven’t) then there are more out there you can get.
Maybe the issue is capital. This is a great one because it really is just math. The first thing to know is there is ALWAYS money available to invest in something that makes money. Here’s where most people go wrong though if they aren’t able to get enough capital- what they want the money for isn’t profitable or isn’t profitable enough to justify getting the money, or at least they can’t prove that it is.
We see this in ecom quite a bit. A seller says I need more money to buy inventory. And so the lender or potential capital source says OK- how much do you need, and can you demonstrate with certainty that this inventory will sell for enough to repay the investment with a good return? And the answer is no, they can’t, and so they don’t get the money (which they shouldn’t if they can’t show it’s going to produce profits) or they end up borrowing from a source that doesn’t care (like credit cards) and end up in a debt spiral.
If all your business needs to scale is money, then all you have to do is make sure the money you need will return a positive ROI. If you do, then you will be able to find capital.
What you can’t do is tell yourself you can’t scale, because it simply isn’t true. Scaling may be hard and a lot of work, and take a lot longer than you’d like, but that’s not the same as not being possible!
What You Need to Do to Scale
Step one is to define clearly what the actual roadblock is. For example:
It’s probably not: Need more customers. It probably is: need a marketing channel that consistently delivers customers at a lower cost to acquire than the customer’s lifetime value.
It’s probably not: Need more qualified employees. It probably is: need to design a recruiting program to pull qualified candidates into a training program that then creates successful employees who can follow a full range of detailed SOPs to generate the results we want.
It’s probably not: Need a loan. It probably is: do a deep dive financial analysis on our current products to discover the minimal acceptable margin required to cover all costs including returns and product losses to still provide an ROI that is at least double the available interest rate we can borrow at and scrap all products that don’t meet the criteria.
Step one makes it clear that in order to even tackle the problem of how to scale you have to be honest about the size of the problem and the kind of solution required. This is hard.
Step two is doing the work to build the solution. If you thought step one was hard, it’s going to seem like a walk in the park compared to step two.
Business is hard. Scaling a business is hard. It takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. You may in the meantime start thinking you should just start a different, easier business that wouldn’t have all the headaches of the current business. But guess what- the new business will have it’s own set of problems that may be the same or may be different but won’t be easier. So you might as well stick with what you have that is already working and work on the parts you need to change and fix to get to the next level.
And by the way, at the next level, there will be more problems. Different, probably, but not any less challenging. Make peace with it, find your patience, and work on the problem- the real, actual problem- a little bit each day until you’ve got it solved. Your business can scale and grow, and there isn’t likely to be a ceiling you’re ever going to hit. Unless you quit. Don’t quit!