Why You Need to Scale

Mike Killen: Hey, there. And welcome to the first video on why you need to scale and what’s preventing you from scaling. So why do you need to scale? We’re going to talk about how to scale your business, why you need to scale, and what’s preventing you from scaling to profit. A lot of the time, consultants and small businesses, micro businesses, entrepreneurs, they feel they can’t scale out their business that they have to be the ones delivering it. I want to show you that there is a better path and there is a better way to run your business without having to rely on you being the only person to deliver results. Here’s the problem, you are limiting your income. This is why this is so important. You’re literally putting a limit on the income that you can generate and the hours you need to work. I’m going to explain why that is.

But the reason you need to look at scaling your business and not just saying scale is something that larger businesses do to get even larger, it’s something that small individual micro businesses do to create a brand and to give themselves more time and to generate and attract more income. We’re going to go through why you need to scale and how to do it. First of all, looking at the fact that we have to do everything in certain businesses, also you can only increase your price or time if you don’t build scale into your business. I’m going to prove to you that you don’t necessarily run a business, you actually just own your job, which is an extremely dangerous position to be in. You’re also limiting the number of people that you can help if you refuse to scale your business. We’re going to look at the Three Laws of Scale from my book From Single to Scale and we’re going to talk a little bit about the fear of letting go, which is predominantly the reason that businesses like yourself, and consultants, and single person businesses don’t scale their business.

So as consultants and entrepreneurs, single person micro businesses, it can kind of feel like we have to do absolutely everything. This includes working on admin, this includes delivering work to our clients, it can be very difficult to balance out, creating income, and creating demand, and doing lead generation, and talking to customers, and closing deals, and then delivering the work. Often, if we are the ones having to deliver the work, it means that we’re not able to go out and attract more income. And there’s a little bit of a feast and famine cycle where we’re concentrating on finding customers, one minute which brings us in a lot of work, fantastic. We go away, we do that work, but because we’re doing the work and dedicating our time to the work, and then the admin, and the support tasks that inevitably come with it, it means that we’re neglecting to fill up that pipeline again, we’re neglecting to find new leads and find new customers.

If you are a business that’s running at the moment and you’re a consultant, and you’re the one delivering the results, you only have two options, you can either increase your price, or you can increase the time you work. If you’re anything like me, you’re already working all the hours godsends, so you physically can’t increase the amount of time that you’re working. It could be that you’re already working, you know, 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and even doing 20 hours’ worth of client work is absolutely exhausting. It’s, it’s completely unsustainable to do that. So there is literally a limit to the amount of time that you can work on customers and, and, you know, have available to you to work. There’s also a limit to the amount that you can charge per customer. There’s physically a limit to the amount of income that you can generate from your . . . from your prices and from your time. If you charge per day or per hour, there is going to be a limit.

I honestly do believe that you can charge $10,000 an hour for consulting, some people do. But in order to be able to do that, most of them have actually scaled out their business beforehand to make their time extremely valuable and way more valuable to get that one-on-one time, so you’re kind of only left with two options. So here’s the dangerous position that you’re in. Many people believe that they have a business and that they own and run a business, when in actual fact what we find, is that most people just own a job which is an extremely dangerous place to be in. If you’re paid per day or per hour or you’re paid for your time and you’re the only person delivering work, can you go on holiday and still earn?

Now to most people that sounds absurd, it even sounds ludicrous to say that you could go away and earn. Or in actual fact, I have built my business where I can go away. I can go away for extended periods of time and still generate income because I’ve learnt to scale my business profitably and in a way that means I don’t have to be around. The problem is that if we’re only getting paid when we work, we basically own our job, so it doesn’t even come with the security of having a salary or a paid, you know, job at a company, it means that we not only have to find the work, we have to find all the jobs, and the customers and the leads, we didn’t have to do the work. And if we stop doing that, we don’t eat basically.

A lot of businesses as well even struggle to handle more customers. If you’re already working all the hours that you can on one particular project and with one particular customer, if another customer approaches you, that’s going to send cold shivers down your spine, because you’re not going to be able to work with them, because you’re already working at maximum time. It’s possible that you can enter a bidding war and say to your customers, “Okay, well, both of you want to work with me, one of you has to pay a $100 an hour or $125 or $150. “The reality is, one, that rarely happens. Two, hardly anyone has really got the gumption to be able to do that especially not the, uh, the arrogance perhaps even to do that. But more importantly you want to help as many people as possible and you’re limiting the number of people that you can help if you don’t scale your business.

Another final point is can you wake up to more sales without having to deliver anything? Even if you’re able to go on holiday and still earn from residual income, you’re able to wake up, literally earn money while you sleep through scaling out your business because you’ve attracted customers, you’ve closed deals, you’ve closed customers. I could go on holiday and still earn simply by, you know, just kind of sending out a few emails once . . . every one . . . now and then, but can I do it when I’m asleep? Can I do it when I’ve got literally no brain capacity to drive towards the business and still generate income without having to deliver anything myself? That’s what we’re going to try and build in this, in this video course.

One of the reasons I think people should scale their business as well is because you have a moral obligation to help as many people as possible. If you’re running a business that helps people, whatever it is, if it helps people lose weight, if it helps people generate, uh, more income for their business, more secure software, whatever it is that you help people do, you have an obligation to help as many people as possible. And if you’re only helping one group of people at a time because you’re the only person who’s able to deliver those results, I would argue that you have a moral obligation to then help as many people as you can. Now, in my book From Single to Scale, there are the three laws of scale which we’re going to be covering in this course. The first law is, do I have to deliver it? If you have to deliver the work, it means your business model isn’t scalable. And we’re going to show you or I’m going to show you how we can get around that.

Can you handle 1,000 orders tomorrow? Most people couldn’t even handle one customer, yet alone a hundred or a thousand customers and orders, and deliver them, and generate the same results over those customers, and within the same timeframe. If you had a hundred people approach you today and say I want to book some time with you, yes, you would be able to book yourself out maybe for a hundred weeks. But the reality is, unless you can get all of those customers the same results at the same time, a lot of them are going to drop off and also it’s kind of an unsustainable business model. And finally, the third law is, is the process repeatable? This is absolutely critical unless you have a process that is repeatable for your customers and for your business, you’ll struggle to become profitable, you’ll also struggle to scale your business and you’ll be trapped.

This is probably the biggest fear that many of my customers and clients have when we talk about scaling out their business. It’s the fear of letting go everything from hiring staff to finding other people to do it for them, to making sure that they’re the only one who can deliver it because we feel that if we can’t deliver it ourselves, then that’s a big part of our identity. I’m going to teach you throughout this process how you can learn to let go. I totally understand why many people feel this, but I’m going to show you some strategies and tactics that we can use to be able to allow ourselves to let go of the fear and let go of that need to control when it comes to scaling out our business.

Now, a lot of people approach me and say to me, “Well, Mike, to be honest, as a consultant, or as an entrepreneur, or as a developer, or a designer, or whatever, my business can’t be scaled or replicated.” And I hear this a lot, and the reality is with some focus and some change in perspective, it absolutely can. If you want more time back and spending less time at the office, spending less time in your . . . in front of a laptop, spending less time with customers, spending less time doing admin, and more time with your family, and more time with your friends, more time traveling, more time doing the things that you want to do, and giving yourself the freedom, scale is going to be able to help you do that. You’re going to need to scale. If you want to increase your income past the level where you are now, you must scale your business. So what you need to do is ask yourself, do you want increased income and increased time or are you happy with what you’ve got?

If you’re happy with what you’ve got already, there is absolutely no point in me teaching you anything, and I’m really happy that you’re in the position that you’re in. However, if you want more income, if you want more time, and to increase your time to income ratio, then you absolutely need to scale and you need to let go of this initial phase, you need to let go of these initial objections in order to be able to scale business efficiently. Here’s the problem, if you don’t do this, if you don’t get over your fear of scale, if you don’t learn how to scale your business, you will only ever exchange time for money. Essentially, scale is the key that unlocks you from a job that you own. Unless you want to keep the job that you own where you have to find the work, you have to find the customers, you have to deal with the support, you have to deliver the work, you have to deliver all the payments, you have to deliver all the invoices and all that admin, fine.

But if you don’t want to do that anymore and you want to break free of that, you have got to scale. So to sum up, as entrepreneurs, we do have to do everything, I completely understand that, but we’re going to flip that model. We’re also going to break free of on our, uh, only restrictions on increasing either our prices or our time. There is another way to increase our income. If you can’t walk away from your business, and if you can’t go on holiday, or if you can’t go to sleep and continue to generate income, essentially you’ve got a job that you own. You’re also limiting the number of people that you help, which I would argue you have a moral obligation to increase as much as possible. There’s the three laws of scale which are, do I have to deliver it? Can I handle 1,000 orders tomorrow, and is the process repeatable? And if we can answer all three of those laws, then we’re unable to scale our business to its true profitable potential. And also there is a fear of letting go.

In the meantime, I will see you on the next video and thanks very much for watching.