The One Thing You Need to Scale Your Business

This will be the last newsletter of 2024! I hope you’ve enjoyed them so far. Now please take the next couple of weeks to enjoy some time with family and friends and the remainder of the year so we can come back all fired up to knock 2025 out of the park! 

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I think about business a lot. Not because it’s what I do for a living, but what I do for a living is because of what I think about all the time!

I’ve been thinking about starting my own business and starting businesses in general since I was a kid. I didn’t actually do it until I got to my late twenties, but it wasn’t then and isn’t now ever far from my mind.

What I realize in hindsight though is that the starting a business part really isn’t hard at all.

You might assume that’s easy for me to say now that I’ve done it many times, and I realize the bias. But I really do think most entrepreneurs, including myself, overthink it. Starting isn’t hard. It’s growing it that is hard!

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You can make some sales and support yourself and maybe a helper or two without having to learn too much. You can even make decent money within a few years of starting most businesses if you’ve picked the right one and really apply yourself.

The challenge though is getting past that point where you do everything, and the entire business relies entirely on you showing up every day. And what often happens is people get to that point and then they are so busy doing their business they have no idea how to get past the point where they do it all and so they just keep going.

Then, they burn out. And sell the business or just close it. Or let it fall apart.

This is because growing it past this point is something that is much harder than starting it and doing it yourself and hustling to make it work. And it’s not something you probably learned anywhere or got to practice. It’s not a skill you learn doing anything else. It’s not a skill a lot of people ever learn.

But the good news is it’s not any harder than just grinding away at something small. In fact, it’s a lot easier and can be a lot less work. Or at least different work.

All it takes to scale your business is one thing.

The One Thing You Need to Scale Any Business

Essentially, what you need is the right mindset.

The work isn’t harder- it’s just different. It’s not like CEOs work four times more hours than brand new entry level employees. They just do different work. 

So the way to get there is to ask yourself: what would it take for this business to run without me here and yet still be able to thrive and grow?

Why? Because chances are a business that doesn’t need you for anything is a much bigger one than you currently have and it’s also much more valuable and producing a much better living for you. 

So if you can get there you’ll automatically be much bigger than you are now. And just because you do get there doesn’t mean you stop coming to work (although you could!) but more likely it means you spend your time growing more rather than doing all the other lower value add tasks you’re currently saddled with. So the right mindset is what sets you up for growth. But it is of course not quite that easy. 

That simple question likely yields a pretty complicated answer. At first it may even seem like an impossible ask. You say to yourself, well jeez, just for starters to do that I’d need:

• Someone I could trust to handle the deposits and pay the bills
• Someone I could trust to run payroll without blabbing to everyone else how much people make
• Someone who could quote jobs and make sales
• Someone who could do the ordering
• Someone who could interview and hire employees
• Someone who could manage the crew and deal with all their nonsense·         And probably a ton of other stuff I haven’t even thought of yet!

It might seem like a task so big it wouldn’t even be worth trying. It certainly would be way too much to take on all at the same time. But that’s OK.

You don’t do it all at once. You pick one thing and one person to train and start small. Suppose it’s placing orders. Find the person you already have who seems smart and detail oriented and ready for more responsibility.

Then walk them through how you place an order.

Expect them to ask a lot of questions. Document what you are doing. Then let them try one with you sitting there. Spot all the info you know but didn’t realize you know and write those things down as well. Let them try another one. And another one.

Pretty soon, they are putting them together and you are just spot checking. Next thing you know, you don’t need to do the orders anymore, you’ve got someone who can do that. Now pick the next thing. And so on.

Probably the last thing you hand off is sales and handling the money and payroll. But soon you’ll see even those tasks are pretty process driven and mechanical and if you do a good job hiring and training people as you grow then you’ll have the right person in place to hand that off to as well. Your focus will be more and more just on doing what it takes to grow. You’ll have more time to focus, and you’ll spend less time running around with your hair on fire trying to do everything yourself.

It can be done. I’m doing it. I know lots of other people who have done it or are doing it. And you’re better off- less stressed, less likely to burn out. You can take time off and not worry everything will come crashing down. The business will get bigger, you’ll earn more, it will be worth more. You will be able to attract great people because they will work somewhere they can grow because the business itself is growing.

It doesn’t even take that long. All it takes is starting with the mindset that it can be done, and you can do it. If you don’t believe that, of course, it will never happen because you’ll never try.

But I promise it can be done, and you can do it, you just have to want it. I hope you do. And I’m looking forward to doing it with you in 2025!