How to Grow, Scale, and Future-Proof Your Business
You’re Focusing on the WRONG THINGS to Grow Your Business
This sales-first mentality has been popular for a long time.
It’s the pitch that if you just get the right system in place to run ads / do more webinars / perfect your sales scripts / write a better sales page / etc. your business will grow at a record rate. Business books, thought leaders + especially business coaches have built empires on the idea that all you need to do is sell more to grow and scale your business — but this is only HALF the truth.
Selling is related to growth + scale, but that’s not the full picture.
Yet, time after time, business owners who follow that plan
end up either growing too fast — and their customer experience begins to suffer when they can’t handle the capacity…
or they can’t seem to grow and scale fast enough — and they just keep hovering on the edge of real success without being able to break through.
And solving these problems is rarely a case of needing to do more marketing + more selling. It’s more often a case of needing to dig deep to understand how your systems are affecting your business, your ability to grow + scale, and where the real bottlenecks are in your business.
(SPOILER ALERT: Your biggest bottleneck may not be in acquisition, ie: sales + marketing…)
The 6 Ways to Grow Your Business — Are You Focusing on the Wrong One??
Not all business growth is created equal. Some strategies will be more efficient and require fewer resources, while others will be less efficient and require (a lot) more resources in order to scale.
You’ll notice we’ve created a little Run Like Clockwork efficiency scale with our life preservers [🛟]. We’ve ranked the list from most (5 life preservers) to least efficient (1 life preserver).
Take a look:
New Models 🛟
Choosing a new model is the least efficient and most resource-intensive growth strategy. It’s about reimagining how you go to market by creating new revenue streams, new channels, or completely new ways of delivering value in the business. This isn’t just a small pivot; it’s a completely new way of doing business. It’s the most expensive in terms of resources — and the riskiest. Just like with a new offer, a new model is untested and unproven.
New Offers🛟– 🛟🛟
Make new stuff! This strategy requires you to develop a completely new product or service. You can find new needs to solve in your existing market or find a new market. This strategy will require a high amount of resources, and the exact amount required will depend if you’re creating a new offer for the same market or going after a new market. (That’s why it gets one-to-two life preservers on our scale, depending on whether you’re finding a new market for your new offer or not.)
It’s a much higher-risk opportunity and one of the least efficient ways to grow. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, just that it’s much more “expensive” in both risk and resources.
Sell More to New Markets 🛟🛟
This strategy requires that you expand your market or audience, but you’re going to sell the same offer or product you already know how to deliver to this new audience. New customers always require new research and development and new marketing, so it will require more resources to find and speak to those new people. Because it’s a resource-heavy strategy, this is also one of the least efficient strategies on our list, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good strategy for a business that feels their current market may be changing or tapped out.
New Features 🛟🛟🛟
Instead of creating a new offer, this strategy involves adding new features or improvements to your audience. Ask yourself: what can we add or improve that would make this appeal to people already in our audience who haven’t yet purchased? It requires more resources than the first two, but not as many as creating something new. But you will need to dedicate resources to figuring out how to deliver the new features.
New Experiences 🛟🛟🛟🛟
With new experiences, you’re selling more of the same things to the same people, which will increase retention and create more connections with customers. You’re improving retention, getting customers to reinvest, or creating a new event or experience to introduce people to your offers. This strategy doesn’t necessarily work with every business model, but you can consider if there’s a new way to approach how you’re selling or presenting your offer.
New Processes 🛟🛟🛟🛟🛟
Instead of creating new offers or going after a new audience, you’re just going to create or audit your processes around your existing offers. This is the most efficient way to grow your business because we don’t have to create anything new. This is a great option if you have little to no budget to invest in growth this year because it helps you save money (and other resources). It’s the idea of continuous improvement of what you already have.
SURPRISE! The easiest and most efficient way to grow your business is to focus on processes and operations around your existing offers and marketing.
You’ve Been Lied to by Business “Gurus.”
The Internet marketing bubble may not have burst just yet, but veteran digital business owners are seeing:
Lower conversion rates
Higher ad costs
Dwindling webinar attendance
Declining email opt-in rates
And consequently, lower sales.
Business owners are putting in the same input they always were, but getting a vastly different output.
And the reason is: You cannot build lasting success and meaningful growth on sales + marketing alone.
“We do not rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.” — James Clear
The “experts” have sold you a solution to only a fraction of your actual business challenges.
They have ignored (or don’t understand) that the majority of small business owners actually have BUSINESSES to run — not just an email funnel. And these experts will be scrambling, too, when their operations can’t deliver on their promises with excellence.
One client came to me after she had joined an “operations” mastermind that was solely focused on showing her ways to automate everything. The only problem: She runs a BAKERY.
That’s a very different proposition than automating something like an email marketing funnel. She needed to work with people, supply chains, complex logistics, and forecasting… and she was hugely disappointed that the so-called “operations” program she’d bought wasn’t delivering what she needed.
That’s because automation is NOT the same as operations. And marketing is not the same as a growth strategy.
But we can’t blame it all on the digital marketing machine. Some of the problem is (unfortunately) on you, the business owner. (Don’t worry — it’s easy to fix!)
Why Most Businesses Fail at Scale
Scaling too quickly causes problems.
We’ve all heard the stories of the $500k launch that cost $450k.
Or the sold-out product from a feature on the Today Show — that the company didn't have the ability to ship for months, or didn't have the manpower to answer the tens of thousands of customer support emails.
(IMPORTANT NOTE: This can creep up slowly over time as well, when you can generate leads and sales, but your customer load is such that you can’t actually deliver. This is a brand reputation NIGHTMARE!)
These horror stories happen because the business owners in question were solving the wrong problem.
The problem isn’t your customers.
I’ve never loved the metaphor of a sales “funnel.”
Sure, it works from a visual standpoint. You cast a wide net at the top to get as many interested people as possible into your community, then filter out the uninterested ones until a minority become customers at the end.
But what the funnel metaphor doesn’t advertise is all the HOLES it implies in the sales process.
A real funnel eventually puts all the water or beans or glitter or whatever into the container; a sales funnel is full of holes that allow potential customers to escape — or more often, get lost and forgotten along the way.
Pouring MORE customers into the top of the funnel doesn’t address the fundamental issue that operational problems and inefficiencies are leaving potential customers out in the cold.
One of our private clients hired us because he said NO AMOUNT OF MONEY was worth the stress his exponential growth had caused him as the owner.
The problem isn’t your product.
Often, when business owners start to feel friction with growth and scale, they decide to add new products or revenue streams…
A new course
A different product
A new affiliate agreement
In other words… a shiny object. Rather than perfecting the existing product or the processes around marketing and selling it, they just switch to something new.
But in many cases, the problem isn’t with the product, and switching to a new product won’t solve the actual problems.
The problem isn’t your team.
More times than I can count, I’ve talked to business owners who complain that they can’t find the right people, that they keep making “bad hires” and having to replace team members over and over again — but they know they can’t grow if they continue to do everything themselves.
That’s when red flashing lights often go off in my brain. One bad hire can happen to anybody. But a string of bad hires, until it seems like nobody can do the work well enough?
That tells me that the boss is the problem.
In those situations, the reason they haven’t grown fast enough or smoothly enough isn’t because their team is incompetent, but because of the boss’ failure to create systems + autonomy for their team.
In fact, they are the ultimate bottleneck to their own success.
The problem is your FOCUS.
When you focus ONLY on revenue growth:
It causes a disconnect for your team and your customers — especially if you say you value things like customer service or a quality product, but your focus isn’t on delivering those things.
You experience staffing problems that put the wrong people on the team, or people in the wrong roles because you’re hiring to solve the wrong problems or hiring too quickly
You can’t take the time to properly interview and vet your candidates and end up hiring the wrong person for the position.
The team can’t operate without the owner, because the systems haven’t been developed to allow them to act autonomously.
The systems that do exist are often labyrinthine, archaic, or duplicate efforts because they were slapped together without much thought or with the mindset that you don’t have the time to build + create the systems.
OR, every department or individual is trying to create their own systems, but nothing is integrated to support the overall goal (because nobody knows the goal, or the goal doesn’t exist).
All of these problems crop up when a business starts growing too fast. If you’ve ever had to stop your incoming leads because you couldn’t handle them, you’ll recognize this bottleneck.
At any given time, a business might be experiencing a bottleneck in one of these four stages:
Attract
Convert
Deliver
Collect
Attraction is all about marketing, getting more people to see your message and get interested in your brand.
Conversion is about sales, getting more of the people in your audience to make a purchase.
Delivery is all about operations + efficiency — in other words, your capacity to deliver on what you sell.
Collect affects your ability to solve any of the above three because you can’t invest in a solution when and where you need it.
But if you follow online business coaches and experts focus almost exclusively on the first two, sales + marketing, or how to attract and convert more people to grow your business.
But nobody is talking about the third bottleneck: your ability to deliver on those promises.
What would it actually look like if you doubled your business “overnight?”
Focusing on sales + marketing to bring in more leads is a dangerous lever to pull if you haven’t tightened up your backend (and no I’m not just talking about taking a spin class with a booty burn).
Any business that reaches multiple six figures knows how to generate leads + sales. The question then becomes, do you have the time + systems setup to be able to deliver your products + services at SCALE with EXCELLENCE?
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” —Bill Gates
To scale with excellence:
You have to be able to get people REAL results
You have to be able to deliver to your 1000th customer with the same or better experience than your 1st customer had
You have to be able to trust your team to make decisions + support you so that YOU are not the bottleneck to growth + delivery
You have to do better than hiring $5/hour outsourced help + duct-taping together systems, praying every day that they won’t spring a leak
You have to create systems so that your team can be five steps ahead of you + YOU have the brain space to create.
This is where I see so many business owners get stuck. They want to grow, they want to scale, and they want to start living instead of just working all the time.
But because of bad advice, they keep trying to solve the wrong problems.
If you’re not growing fast enough, doing more of what’s not working (ie: sales + marketing) won’t solve the problem either.
In fact, when you keep doubling down on these tactics, the problems just continue to multiply.
But I have a better way.
How to Grow (and Future-Proof) your Business with a Counterintuitive Approach
Everyone in the online business community seems to be saying that you need to do this thing or apply that blueprint or use this framework to improve your sales + marketing in order to grow and scale.
But we’ve shown that focusing exclusively on sales + marketing isn’t the answer — and, in fact, can create more problems than it solves.
If the problem isn’t about finding more customers… or making a new product… or hiring a new team… then what is it about?
The real problem is in your ability to deliver on your brand promise. It’s that third bottleneck that everyone ignores.
Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things. —Peter Drucker
Depending on what your business looks like, that might manifest as…
Trouble producing a quality product fast enough and keeping popular products in stock,
Trouble with capacity for your service; you never know when you’re going to need all hands on deck, or have people sitting around, which means sometimes you’re missing deadlines and sometimes your people are twiddling their thumbs,
Trouble with delivery of a specialized consultation or service that only one expert in the business can deliver,
Trouble with your sanity because you can't keep up with the questions flowing to you from the team,
Trouble with your systems, because you can't systematize something that is inconsistent,
Trouble with the quality of the product or service, because you're so busy just selling all the time,
And so on.
And at the heart of your ability to deliver are your systems and processes. A business cannot grow and scale successfully without strong systems and processes to support it.
👏🏼 Say it again for the people in the back!!! 👏🏼
A business cannot grow and scale successfully without strong systems and processes to support it.
Now, you may be thinking… “I have systems…”
…But in reality, your version of systems mostly live in your head because you’ve never bothered to get them down on paper. Or maybe you have systems that kind of work, but they often require duplicated effort or sometimes things fall through the cracks.
Or maybe you’re thinking… “I don’t have time to create systems…”
…Which is the WRONG mindset to have. Systems are a MULTIPLIER: if you create them once + then work toward reducing errors, then you are able to transfer that task off your plate + never have to personally do it again.
So whether you have zero systems or a million systems that don’t actually work that well, optimizing your delivery — the actual work you do in your business — will save you time and money.
Opportunities for Efficiency = Saving Time
When was the last time you actually took stock of how you spend your time during your workday?
If you’re like most of us, you haven’t really thought about where your time goes since you had to punch a clock or fill out a timesheet for someone else.
But as a business owner, it can be eye-opening to track your time for a week or two and see where you’re really spending most of your time and energy
Most of our private clients are initially resistant to the exercise of manually tracking their time, but the data it provides can be revolutionary.
One of our private clients grudgingly tracked their time for a week, and we discovered that they thought they needed to hire another accountant (high-level service-provider hire), but when they tracked the team for five days, they realized they had 140 admin hours between their five accountants. So instead of hiring another accountant to increase capacity, they hired two admins, which was actually a cost-saving, because they didn't need to spend as much on the hire, and a revenue driver because ALL of the accountants now had additional capacity for more clients.
Another client found 18 hours a week spent on internal meetings. (This is a small team, so that was just straight bananas.)
Or the client who realized that most of her time didn't fall into any of our four productivity categories (doing, delegating, deciding, and designing) — it fell into a 5th one that we have since discovered since writing Clockwork: DISTRACTED. She was wasting tons of time just because she had no idea how to get back into focused work after so many interruptions.
Or the client who realized that more than 60% of her day was spent answering questions from team members. There’s only one word for that — inefficient!
It’s safe to say that each of these clients was shocked by what they learned from tracking their time — but they all also saw significant opportunities for cost savings once they realized where they were wasting their days.
Opportunities for Cost Savings = Money in the Bank
The truth about business is you’re never too small for bloat. Even if you don’t have a big team or big business, there may be opportunities for cost savings hiding around any corner.
In fact, small businesses need cost savings MORE than their corporate counterparts, in my opinion, because they run leaner and have more cash flow problems than multibillion-dollar companies.
And, because you’re so close to your business, you may not even see where your company is bleeding money until you start specifically looking for opportunities to streamline and improve
One company we worked for was outsourcing its marketing to an agency. They paid the agency $40,000 a month to write blog posts, post on social media, run paid ads, and do other marketing tasks that were necessary for the brand and growing the company.
But when we looked at this line item, it simply didn’t make sense. Between the consulting fees + hours spent on ads + copywriting, it was WAY more cost-effective to hire someone. I suggested they hire an in-house marketing team to do the same tasks on salary. Even by hiring two people at $50,000 a year each, the company was able to save almost $400,000 a year on marketing costs. And, as a side benefit, the tasks were more streamlined and effective than they ever were communicating with an outside agency team.
Focusing on cost savings as part of an overall efficiency and operations audit allows you to take home more money at the end of the day (week, year, whatever), or potentially have more freedom to get out of the office more often.
It also affords you better cash flow, which as we said in the last section, is the fourth bottleneck that sometimes prevents companies from solving one of the other three.
Make your Business Run Like Clockwork
The answer to growth and scaling problems lies in the distinctly unsexy world of efficiency + operations.
There’s really nothing very splashy about systems, which is a shame, because they’re the solid foundation that all growth, expansion, and scale must be built on. When your business runs on rock solid systems; when you can see your metrics at a glance and know immediately what your next steps should be to improve any aspect of your business; when every member of your team is empowered to bring their highest contribution to the company… That’s when your business is ready and able to grow and scale without all the headaches and hiccups.
When you focus on creating operational efficiency, it also means you’re:
Saving money, because you’re never just throwing money at a problem to try to fix it
Saving time, because everyone is working to their best capacity
Saving energy, because you don’t have to make every single decision for the entire team
Saving brainpower, because you’re not reinventing the wheel every time you encounter a problem.
A company that’s built on solid systems with operational efficiency in mind is the kind of company that continues to run and grow whether you’re sitting at your desk or not.
It’s the kind of company that keeps on producing at maximum efficiency, even when you’re on vacation.
It’s the kind of company where team members don’t just make decisions, they make the right decisions that benefit the company.
Imagine a system that could set you up to be able to take a four-week vacation whenever you please… and the company runs just as well (or maybe better?!?) than it does when you’re at work.
“A workaholic is a label for an unproductive person.” —Mike Michalowicz
We Call this the Run Like Clockwork Framework
If you’ve read Mike Michalowicz’s book, Clockwork, some of this may be familiar. That’s because we worked with Mike both in the development of the book and to create a program that would go well beyond where the book leaves off to help business owners implement the suggestions and revelations made in Clockwork.
We start with time management and look at what kinds of tasks are eating up most of your time as the business owner — and what your team members are spending their time on. We call this the 4D mix, and we break down your week into time spent doing, deciding, delegating, and designing.
From there, we want to know what your business’ Queen Bee Role (QBR) is — that is, what’s the thing that must happen in order to be successful? From there, we can drill down and identify your Queen Bee Role in the company and the QBR of each of your team members, which provides the clarity and focus you may all be craving.
Once we have this information in hand, we can start to rebalance the team. We want to examine whether we have the right people in the right roles to serve their highest purpose and the business’ highest good.
At this point, we want to look at your systems — or begin to set them up if you don’t have any. We’ll identify metrics and create dashboards that can help you and your team know at a glance whether or not the business is on track to meet goals. We’ll even show you how to create a structure based on the four bottlenecks to help organize and streamline your systems. That way, if you ever run into a failure again, you’ll be able to almost instantly identify where the problem is and even how to fix it.
And finally, we’ll reexamine your business bottlenecks. The bottlenecks are cyclical; once you solve your delivery problem, you may find that you open up new capacity and need more leads. But by understanding the systems that create the foundation of your business, you’ll be well-poised to move through the cycles more efficiently and have the information you need to make well-informed business decisions.
Are you ready to set up your system to Run Like Clockwork
Click the button below to learn more about the program and join us!