The Difference Between Growing and Scaling
If you follow us on social media, you might have seen that we have been on quite the podcast roadshow! One theme that kept coming out of our conversations is the things that service providers need to think about before scaling. We realized we need to take a step back and talk about it: what is scaling actually?
A lot of business owners misconstrue scaling and growth. Today, we want to talk about the actual definitions of these two processes, and how you can apply them in your business. You can have one without the other. You can have both. You can have neither. What does that really look like, intentionally, in your business? We talk about this often with our clients, and you can tune in to find out!
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What it really means to grow your business
It’s important to remember that revenue growth can be completely separate from the inner workings of your business. But for growth to be sustainable, usually other changes need to happen. We’ve talked a lot about how creating sustainability and maintaining a business is often as hard, if not harder, than the growth phases of a business. We could even argue that it is much, much harder! Your role shifts so much in that phase, and your mindset has to change too.
The positive responses of others can be so encouraging during the early stages of building a business. It can be hard to find the motivation you need as you move forward and the response begins to dwindle. If you’re looking at a business trajectory, in an ideal world, it would look like a staircase. You would have a period of growth followed by a period of maintenance, where you create that sustainability. In reality, it has peaks and valleys.
Why you need the right architecture to scale
While growth is about growing revenue and growing the bottom line of the business, scaling is about creating the structure, framework, or scaffolding that’s holding up your business. We refer to it as architecture. It’s the inner workings, the operations, the people, the actual arrangement of the people in your business and how they are organized and managed. All of that works together to create a foundation because, at the end of the day, we’ve seen a lot of people grow their revenue.
When you grow too fast and too hard, and forget to do the scaling part of growth, then typically, you run the risk of falling pretty hard. In some cases, you can even lose your business! When you see a spike in growth, it’s important to ask yourself if that kind of growth is something you want to maintain. If it isn’t, then your architecture needs to look a little different. But you also need to recognize that the growth is not going to be that high again, and that’s totally okay!
Scaling in order to grow
If you want to, you can build a giant business, but it’s always going to be a case of diminishing returns. You can add more people, but you may go from 40, 50, 60% margin to 30, or 25, or 20%. The questions you need to answer are: how do you want to make your money? How do you grow in a way that’s responsible? You’re not looking for flash-in-the-pan results. We’ve been there and we don’t recommend it! We would much rather take growth at a slightly slower pace, where you can create sustainability and figure out where you ultimately want to maintain.
Business owners often think that growing and scaling are the same thing. Scaling has to be a part of the conversation if you are seeking growth in any shape or form. There is a missed conversation about the business owners who are doing it without the burnout, who are seeing the same growth that they are comfortable with year after year. And that only happens if you scale!
Why we’ll take slow and steady growth every time
When you’re running a business, but you really want a company, that’s going to feel extra hard! Seeing the shift in our clients from running a business to building a company, with the support and resources they need to carry it through, is really cool. It’s going to feel like you’re up against a wall, and we don’t want you to feel trapped in any way. We want you to feel that you have the freedom to choose, and the freedom to move around.
Don’t sell a vision that you can’t maintain! We’ve seen business owners build businesses and hire a huge staff, only to have a third or less of them a year or 18 months later. We’ve also made mistakes and had seasons where it was hard to predict what was next. But we want to help you to do this in a way that you feel aligned with, that can grow and evolve with you as a human.
Maintenance in the messy middle
There are a couple of things that need to be addressed right off the bat. The first thing we do with all of our clients is a pricing audit. We want to see how you’re currently selling, where your leads are coming from, and what you are pricing comparatively to your capacity as a company. What levers do you need to pull to make additional income?
Once we’ve addressed the pricing structure, it’s time to look at how you, as the founder, are spending your time. If you don’t have the ability to maintain what you have today while shifting your focus, there’s a much bigger problem at play. You may have to be prepared to make the same amount of money while doing more work than you ever have before, but the long-term effects of setting this up are worth it.
All of this is for the longevity of your business. We would rather have you make a little bit less money for 25 years than spike for three years. The slow and steady approach makes more money in the long term, every time! We want to guide you through this process, and we would love to talk to you about what phase you’re at.
Quote This
If growth is about growing revenue and growing the bottom line of the business, scaling is about creating the structure, framework, or scaffolding that’s holding up your business.
Highlights
What it really means to grow your business [0:09:02]
Why you need the right architecture to scale [0:11:10]
Scaling in order to grow [0:14:06]
Why we’ll take slow and steady growth every time [0:18:18]
Maintenance in the messy middle [0:24:50]
Today’s Guest:
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
The Strategy Hour Podcast is a twice weekly show hosted by Abagail Pumphrey and Emylee Williams, the founders of Boss Project. Join us for semi-ranty biz conversations for service providers looking to ethically grow their agency businesses. Episodes cover everything from lead generation to leadership mindset to team culture and beyond.
Key Topics:
Growth, Scaling, Revenue, Pricing, Maintenance, Teams, Planning, Strategy
