What does it really mean to scale a small business? It’s one of those buzzwords that you hear all the time. But when you are in the trenches of running your own service based business, it can feel really abstract. Scaling isn’t just about getting more clients or growing your team. It’s about creating a business that can handle growth without falling apart.
Sneak Peak Into Scaling Your Small Business
Scale is one of my most favorite topics to discuss and teach about, because it’s not something that is innate when you start your business. When you start your business, you have a passion for what you do. You love your craft. You have a passion for your community. You want to continue to grow and provide for your family and just not work for someone else.
That’s really where a lot of people end up starting as entrepreneurs. A couple years in, they experience growth and they realize, “Okay, I can actually take this and build it to be bigger than myself.”
When that kind of transition happens, this is something that I love and fell into. Most people didn’t go get a business degree and know how to run a corporate company with the level of scale that Apple has, or any of these big giant corporations.
So, we just do our best. We take it day by day, step by step, and almost experience this success by happenstance, this growth by just working as hard as we do with the passion and fervor of what we love and to continue to continue to see that growth happen over time.
And what happens is… demand increases.
You start getting sales, you start getting clients, you start getting employees, and things start to break a little bit. It becomes a little bit too much where things drop off.
- You forget to do things.
- There’s not enough time in the day.
- People are not doing things with the same quality that you used to be able to do.
You become the bottleneck where everything has to run through you to be able to survive. You can’t take a vacation or time off or catch a cold anymore because your business needs to still run and function. And so what happens with these small businesses is they get stuck. Their growth plateaus and becomes stagnant from that point.
Scaling is being proactive instead of reactive. It’s about really leaning into questions like,
“How did your business get here today?”
“Where do you want to take it tomorrow?”
“What does that future look like?”
Once you have that vision, it’s all about being able to understand what needs to exist inside of your company—to be able to take you from point A to point C—and not crumble under the pressure.
As you know, I love talking about scale. I think it’s fascinating. It’s the art of growing a business and the concept of how you prepare your business to be bigger than yourself. The sooner that businesses can know the definition of scale and be able to put these little building blocks in place, the faster they will be able to grow their business exponentially. Not just experience a tiny little revenue growth, not even experience a 2X growth, but 10X think about what your business can accomplish as it grows and scales.
So, let’s define scale. What is essential for your long term success and how do you prepare for scale without getting overwhelmed? Whether you’re a roofer, a massage therapist, a dog groomer, we’re going to walk through the systems, the team building and financials that will help you build a business that’s ready to grow and thrive.
If you’ve felt like your business is teetering on that edge of growth and you’re not sure if you can handle it, this episode is for you.
So, what does it mean to scale a business?
By definition, scaling a business means growing your revenue without having to substantially increase your costs. You are meeting demand while optimizing your resources. It’s a beautiful parallel situation where you’re experiencing growth.
At the same time, you’re laying your foundation so you don’t have to experience a massive extraction of cash from your company to meet demand where it’s at. You’re able to grow your revenue and sustain your business, maintain that growth, and remain profitable. It’s a beautiful thing when this actually happens.
But it’s not always easy to get. So, I have a scenario for you to help put scale into perspective:
If you were to double your client load today, could your business handle it?
Think about it: What would happen to your team?
Would they be able to deliver without sacrificing quality?
What about your systems? Would they buckle under their pressure?
What about you? Would you be running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to put out all of the fires and make sure that it can still happen the way you want it to happen?
What would happen to your business on the inside? Would you have to turn people away?
Would you have to hire new employees?
Would you need to upgrade your technology?
Imagine and sit with that scenario and see what would happen. I talk about this because it happened to me. It actually happened to me this year, and we have been scaling our company for a very long time.
Mistakes to Avoid When Scaling Your Small Business
I’d like to bring in this example to show you guys what this means and how this is an ever-changing process inside of your business. This summer we had a huge increase of website clients that we got inside of our business, Succeeding small.
We met our revenue goals. That was exactly what we wanted to see happen and how many websites we actually wanted to build. It was perfect from our goal perspective. We hit our goals. We did what we wanted on the inside.
However, on the inside of my operations, we had too many projects going at once. My website designer was maxed out on her hours. She was scheduled for sometimes 90 hour weeks, multiple weeks in a row, because we had so much work planned out.
We needed to start turning down websites and putting them on a longer timeframe because we needed to finish what we could. We were breaking from the inside out. Our clients never felt that and we were still able to deliver what we could, but it was the cost of burning out my employees, having everybody just kind of panic a little bit like what is happening.
We started needing to make sure that we had everything in a line so that balls didn’t get dropped. It was a very stressful, very chaotic time. I needed to go and hire someone. In a very urgent scenario because we needed to be able to deliver and I needed to protect my employees to make sure that we could still get the websites out with the quality that we work on.
We had to put everything on hold. I had to jump in and build some websites and take over some work. It was this messy situation, which we did not expect to happen because that was our goal. We expected to hit that goal and we expected to be able to deliver them appropriately, but inside our systems broke.
The Importance of Systems When Scaling Your Small Business
What we had to do is we had to think about what we wanted.
How do we build our systems internally to make sure that this doesn’t break us again?
So, we had to overhaul our web design system. We had to think about how we time out every single task that needs to happen to build websites.
How do we make it better? How do we tweak things to make them more optimized? How do we remove manual labor and be able to make things more efficient? Where can we add in automation? Where can we add in more communication? How can we optimize internal meetings to be able to maximize time and make sure that people can get started and collaborate faster?
We analyzed all of these different situations, and that is a prime example of what scale is. It’s tweaking. You look at what you do and what you have, and you tweak, you tweak a hundred little things to be able to make sure that you can withstand the demand and growth without necessarily increasing your costs or being able to optimize the resources that you do have so that they perform more efficiently and add value inside of your business.
Most small businesses realize that they need to scale when they start to break. The demand is there, but the infrastructure, whether it’s people or processes or resources, that can’t handle the pressure. And so when that happens, you get stressed, your company is overworked, and in most cases, you just kind of stagnate when it comes down to your growth.
You have to stop accepting clients, you have to push out that job, you have to go on a waiting list, you can’t, you kind of have to go in a standstill to be able to make sure that you can handle what is going on right now in that present moment.
Scale is about becoming proactive rather than reactive.
And I’m going to show you some of the things to consider when it comes down to this, and what you need to prepare for. That way when the pressure hits, instead of crumpling from the inside out, you are ready to expand and grow. Scaling isn’t about just doing more of the same thing. It’s about fine tuning every aspect of your business from service delivery to team management so that each individual element is optimized and working at its best.
Scaling Your Small Business Operations
Let’s start with the concept of operations. This is the backbone of scaling. How does your business actually run day to day?
Every service based business has a core set of operations that keeps things running smoothly. These usually include things like:
- booking jobs and managing appointments
- handling client communication
- managing your staff or contractors
- onboarding and offboarding
- those people doing marketing to be able to generate leads
Think about how your business actually runs. What do you do every single day?
What are business operations?
The definition of business operations is simply the activities that you do on a regular basis to generate revenue, increase profit, and add value into your business. If these core activities aren’t streamlined, your ability to grow is severely limited.
Scaling means that you need to make sure that your operations are airtight and ideally as automated as possible. So ask yourself these questions:
Is what I do on a daily basis repeatable?
Are they efficient or do they rely too much on manual labor or oversight?
Do they break when your workload increases?
One key to scaling is creating repeatable systems for things like lead generation, client onboarding, service delivery, follow up. These systems should run smoothly with minimal intervention from you, allowing you to focus on strategy rather than firefighting. You want to make sure that you have repeatable systems in your operations.
These are SOPs.
FYI: I just did a fantastic podcast episode with a landscaper who credits the growth of his company to the SOPs that he built. Now, he’s able to grow, take on more clients, take on more employees, and he has playbooks for all of the services that he delivers so that they can go and learn and do and execute with the same level of quality that he would do himself.
The result: He’s able to take on more growth, without having to worry about the risk of hiring more people and them having no idea what they are doing. He isn’t worrying about if they’re going to mess it up. Or thinking about how he needs to go be on the job to teach them. There’s zero micromanaging to make sure that everything comes out perfectly. He doesn’t need to do that anymore.
Instead employees can read the playbook. Execute it, make sure that that manager has some checks and balances in place, and then move on to the next job. It’s a beautiful example of scale done right. So, if you haven’t yet, make sure to listen to that episode. If you want some insight into SOPs and systems inside of your business.
Lead Generation for Scaling Small Businesses
Speaking of systems, let’s talk about lead generation.
You can’t scale without consistently bringing in new leads. You need revenue to grow your business and get more customers in a sustainable way. That is the KEY to unlocking serious growth.
Most small businesses are still fighting for customers. They are still doing boots on the ground.
In fact, the business owner is often the one getting their own sales and their own customers, and it is not sustainable. Relying on word of mouth alone is not sustainable. It gets you to a very certain point and usually requires a whole lot of your work to make sure that you keep that wheel turning. Scaling your business is being able to experience that growth.
So, being able to make sure that you can funnel people in constantly without an exponential usage of your time is going to really help with the growth that you want to experience. Think about how you get your customers and how you want to be able to continue to do that in the future.
Are you running ads?
Do you invest in SEL?
Are you doing social media?
What efforts are you putting towards the marketing of your business to drive in customers?
Do you have processes in place to capture, track, and follow up on those leads?
Are those processes automated where they can be and free up your time for higher level tasks?
When your lead generation system is reliable, scaling becomes a matter of just adjusting the volume, and turning up your marketing efforts. And you know, that new business will flow in, but if you don’t have a dependable way to generate leads, you’ll struggle to scale because the growth will be inconsistent. So make sure that you have a marketing plan in place.
You know what you need to do. You’re firing on all cylinders to be able to drive customers in. That’s not dependent on your time. You’re able to attract new leads through your marketing efforts. And if you automate them from a pace of operations, then you’re going to be able to grow much faster and not be able to crumble when that growth and that pressure hits.
Scaling Your Small Business With The Right People
Now, let’s move on to another critical component of scaling your team. Who is working inside of your company, and who needs to be on your team to be able to let you experience the growth that you want?
So a really good place to start is by building out your organizational chart. Imagine all of the different roles that you need inside of your company to be able to accomplish that vision of success and scale.
Who needs to be there? What skills do they have? What kind of job titles do they have?
Now, compare that to the team that you have right now.
Are those the right people to do the job? Do you need to train them to be able to be that type of person to help you? Do you need to take a look at your team and see this person doesn’t need to be there anymore because they don’t have a place in the organizational chart?
A great place to start is with job descriptions. This is something a lot of businesses do not have in place, but is essential to be able to scale. Think about who is on your team and make sure that they have a solid job description for the roles and responsibilities that they need to accomplish.
Speaking from that, just basic building blocks of people is a really good place to start. If you were to run that scenario of being able to increase demand, how would your company be able to grow and scale with the people that you have now? What needs to exist to be able to help you do just that?
Usually that reveals a gap in training and skillset. Sometimes that reveals a problem, a gap that you have in your organizational chart.
Maybe you don’t have a marketing person.
Maybe you don’t have an office manager.
Maybe you don’t have this expert technician that’s going to help you take this company to the next level.
Stop Working In And Start Working On Your Business
So, it’s interesting to think about who. Where you are right now and where you need to be and try to make those two things mesh together. Another really big aspect of scaling and meeting your people—you. You cannot do this alone by any means, because you will just run out of time. To be honest with you, you run out of time, and you run out of energy.
You cannot do it all yourself. So whether you have contractors, whether you have employees, whatever it may be—you need to make sure that you have the team in your back pocket. That’s going to work for your company and help you get it to that vision of success. A big part of scale with people is cultivating the right people.
It’s taking them and molding them into who you need them to be. It’s providing them with a safe, incredible space to be able to grow and thrive and be held accountable to the work that you need to do. Scaling with people means that you need to provide them with clear systems so that they can deliver your service the same way.
Every single time you have a responsibility as a leader to be able to help them perform, grow and thrive. And in exchange, they will be able to take on more responsibilities. Deliver exceptional service and help your business scale without you being on the day to day and grinding away until you have nothing left to give.
This brings me to an important aspect of scaling, changing your identity within the business. When you are the owner, the CEO, the manager, and the employee all wrapped into one—you are limiting your potential for growth. You’re stuck working in your business instead of on your business. And as you scale, you need to transition from the person doing all the tasks to the person leading the vision.
Your role as the CEO is to focus on strategy, big picture goals, and ensuring the business can continue to grow sustainably. You are there to help make decisions that will push the company forward, not to micromanage every detail of daily operations.
Is Your Small Business Profitable?
The final building block I’m going to talk about today is the concept of knowing your numbers. Scaling isn’t just about making more money. It’s about making sure that your business is profitable as it grows. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. This is what it means in order to accomplish this.
You need to know how your business actually makes money. You need to know your numbers inside and out.
So ask yourself, how do you make money? Truly. You don’t just sell things.
How do you make money? What are your different revenue streams? What does it cost to deliver your services? This includes labor, materials, time, overhead. What are your operational costs to run the business? Do you have software, marketing, office expenses? Think about how you actually make money.
What I had to do a few years ago was realize what goes into every single thing I deliver. What am I charging and what needs to happen in order to be able to do that? What I was trying to solve was the concept of profitability.
The truth was: we were not a profitable business. We were putting way too much work into what we were getting paid. I was having an increased amount of labor costs because I was paying people to do the work. We had softwares, which had a cost. Not to mention, the cost of goods sold was at an all time high and our price points were quite low.
We had to be able to optimize those things so that they would even out so much so that I could have a profit. That was a combination of reigning in scope, and making sure that we were not doing too much work for what we were charging. We had to figure out our hourly rate and how we should price our services.
That meant we needed to increase our pricing. We had to find ways again, to automate, systematize, take out the bottlenecks from what was being able to happen to be able to meet this happy middle grandma ground of profitability. It’s not just about selling a thing and making money from it. You actually have to dissect how you make money, how your business works, and be able to track those things.
That way, you know, when you’re on track and when you’re not, when you are profitable and when you are not, this really helps you be able to build a sustainable company that actually grows when you grow. And not just experiencing this kind of vanity thing of you’re making a bunch of money, but on the inside, nothing is happening.
So knowing your financial numbers is so critical to scale. I recommend that you have systems in place to be able to look at your numbers, and pull up your profit and loss statement. Break down all of those different aspects of each service, each person, how your business functions and operates, and how can you tweak those to make them better and better. Partner with your bookkeeper or your tax CPA, they often offer financial advising services within your own numbers and your own company.
You can also hire a fractional CFO to come in and analyze your numbers and see where the gaps are.
But at the end of the day, once you understand these key financials, you can start identifying ways to cut costs, how you can increase your margins and ultimately become more profitable as you grow.
Scaling a business isn’t just about growth for the sake of growth. It’s about sustainable, intentional expansion. It’s about making sure your business can handle the increase without sacrificing quality, profitability, or sanity. When you invest in systems, empower your people, know your numbers, and step into that CEO role, you’re building the foundation that can withstand the pressure of growth.
That way, you’re not just reacting to success. You’re preparing for it!
Until Next Time,
Keep Succeeding Small.
