Episode 496: Make it Simple, Make it a System, Then Scale

Hey everyone, welcome to a Friday solo episode of the Above the Business podcast where we help people to get above the business, become the architect of their business, and have a business blueprint. So in today's episode, I want to talk about make it simple, make it a system, then scale. Look, I mean, everybody in business, whether it's a business consultant, a business thought leader, talks about scaling. But before you try to grow fast, there really is an important order in order to do so, an order of operations, so to speak. And look, I don't think that make it simple, make it a system, then scale is just some sort of a cool saying. I think it's the one of the best ways to be able to grow, let alone scale. Your business so that we're scaling simplicity and scaling systems. We're not scaling complexity, and we're not trying to scale you. It's really important. So first of all, let's talk about, as I just mentioned, the difference between growth and scale, or the difference between growing and scale. I, I think that Growing means your business gets bigger each year at a steady pace. Scaling means your business gets much bigger, much faster. So here's a specific example to give some of you like myself that needs kind of some numbers around this. If your business grows 26% year over year, it will be twice as big in 3 years. Just do the math, whatever your revenue it was in 2024, if you multiply that times 1.26 or 26% growth 3 years in a row, it will be double. It doesn't matter if you're starting at $200,000, it'll be $400,000. It doesn't matter if you're starting at $2 million, it'll be $4 million in 3 years. It's just the way the math works. And sometimes whenever you share that with people, they, they don't realize like they could actually double their company in 3 years by just growing 26%. Year over year compounded. But if it grows at 42% or more each year, I believe you're scaling, because at 42% compounded growth, you'll double a company in 2 years. Much bigger, much faster. So scaling, look, sounds great, but it's really honestly not where you begin to start. I think many business owners chase this idea of scaling way too early. And this is admittedly where in 2024 we did the 2-Day MBA. One of our guest speakers was Dan Martell, and the theme of that 2-day event was scale or scaleable. How do we become scaleable? Well, the reason I think that business owners try to scale too early is that that business can get really messy. They can waste money, and then they simply get burned out in an effort to try to scale before they have simplified. So step number 1 is you have to be able to make it simple. Easy to say, hard to do. I mean, I think this begins to— you have to start kind of cleaning up every part of your business. How does your team work? Getting rid of jobs that nobody needs. And making sure everyone knows exactly what it is that they own and what they do. I think how you pay your people, keeping pay plans easy to understand and compensation plans easy to understand. That's one I see quite often is very complex compensation plans. Number 3, I think how you make money, like really focusing on what brings in profit. For many of you that, that may be in a certain industry, I see that people are training on products that they sell like 3 or 4 of in a year versus the main 1 or 2 products that bring in 90+% of the sales in a given year. I think another one would be how you give customers what it is they want. So how to make it as easy as possible to do business with you. Your goals, like what is it that you really want? Being very clear and transparent and written down about what it is that you want, how you find and sell customers, making your messaging and your steps easy for people to be able to follow. That's one of the things that we're definitely working on within Blueprint is to make things simple. Simple grows big, fancy fails. Simple scales, fancy fails. You've heard that one. But making things simple is not easy enough by itself. It's not just about make it simple, then go scale it. Could work, but the next best step is one that's in between there, and that is to make it a system. How we make it simple first, then we make it a system. A, a system ultimately becomes a set of steps that you can repeat over and over. So how you sell, how you find customers, checklist and tools— we call those systems and processes. Having those documented so everybody everybody follows what it is that needs to be done. So step number 1, make things simple. How can we make this simple? Step number 2, how can we systematize this? And then step number 3, now we can go about trying to scale this business. But I think if you try to add fuel to a business and you try to step on the gas with your marketing efforts before we simplified it, you're just going to add so much complexity into the business. And quite frankly, You're gonna stress yourself out. I mean, the number of times I've seen— I just was on the phone yesterday with a business owner that he shared with me openly. He said, uh, yeah, I hired 5 people at once. I said, 5 people at once, all together? And this is somebody that had not successfully onboarded 2 people at one time. Now, if you have somebody like a David Peterson that has— builds people within cohorts, and he's obviously, you know, built a way to be able to do that and scale onboarding of new team members. That makes sense. Okay. But he's built the capacity to do that. Whereas this person hasn't, you know, has even had trouble kind of onboarding one person. That's not to be derogatory. It's just facts. Let alone bringing on 2 or 3 or 4. Why don't we just do 5 at one time? How do you think that played out? Not very well. As a matter of fact, almost all of them have already left. That is certainly smashing around a lot of Rolexes. I think it's also important to realize that things can get messy, even though that you try to say, I want to make it simple, make it a system, then scale. Just think about the business is no different than, you know, the junk drawer that you have in your kitchen. You clean out the junk drawer, you clean out the console in your, in, in your truck. And it's all organized. You throw away 90% of the stuff that's in there— receipts from, you know, a Dick's Sporting Goods shopping spree, something like that. You bought some coffees, throw the receipt in there. And then you go through and you clean it out for 30 minutes or so. Well, guess what happens 2 months later? It's back to being messy again. And that's the way business is. So it is a constant thing that you're always— how do we make this simple? How do we make this a system? Now, how do we scale? So as an example, every time I do a coaching session with a private client, we have a fairly elaborate system that we follow to make sure that we send out the recap. We let them know about their next session that they're going to have, that we, you know, put all of our coaching notes in certain places, etc. Well, Before we even tried to make it a system, we need to try to simplify some things. And so my EA came with some suggestions and said, you know what, I, I think this is a little redundant. What if we cut this out? But what if we added this to make this part of it a lot more simple? I was like, I love that. And we were able to simplify some things. Then we were able to make it a system. The way we made it a system specifically is she follows a checklist for every one of my private coaching sessions to— she knows what she needs to do. She doesn't have to try to remember. She's not trying to think, okay, wait a minute. Now what do I do? Where do I put this? She's following some literal things in Asana. We happen to use Asana, but she's checking off what those things need to be so that she does not have to remember what it is. We made it simple first. Then we made it a simple, uh, made it a system. Now you can begin to go and scale, start doing more of those coaching sessions as an example. So make it simple, make it a system, and then scale. Obviously, um, it's easy. It sounds easy, but here's where the application of this comes into play. It's a mental model. It's something that before we start anything now, in the back of my mind, and even not in the back of my mind, I will now verbalize this to the team. How do we make this simple? How do we make it a system? And then how do we scale? As a matter of fact, uh, as this podcast is going to drop on Friday, September the 12th, we are just about 2 weeks away from, uh, our quarterly that we ran. And we would love for you to be able to register if you go to blueprintos.com/assets, you'll see the ability to register for the quarterly. You'll see the link in there to be able to go to it, come to it. It'll be totally free. We'll look back on Q3. We'll plan for Q4. And even as we are going through some of the Jam sessions for that, whether it's the workbook for it, whether it's the slide deck, whether it's just our outcomes, whatever it is, There's been discussions. How do we make this simple? How can we make sure that we turn this into a system? And now how can we go about and scale? But I think it has to be in that order. So anytime you are about to embark on a new, uh, on a new project, maybe on onboarding a team member, really great mental model to think, how do we make this simple? How do we make it a system? And how do we scale? The 3 S's. Hope this served you well. Love to see you at the quarterly, totally free event, blueprintos.com/assets. blueprintos.com/assets. I look forward to helping you to be able to plan your best quarter of the year, Q4 2025. I look forward to seeing you there. All right, everyone, see you next week. Lead well and go be great. Hey, if you like videos like this, click below. We'd love to have your support, like and subscribe so we can begin to grow this channel. We have big plans going into 2026 to do more things specifically for our audience on YouTube. Would love if you would like and subscribe and maybe even share this with one other person.