28 Jan 2026 · 6 min
Bill Gallagher coaches on scaling businesses by starting with your end goal and breaking it into steps. He uses the moon landing and a tech firm case study to show how long-range planning works, and reframes a company sale not as an ending but as one move toward a bigger vision.
Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Well, if you've got inspired people on your team and partners and customers and they've said yes and they're taking action, the next thing that you've got to deal with is planning. And when you're planning on growing a business, that's never been done before, when you're scaling something, when you're creating something completely new or dramatically different in your business, when you're going to 10x it, even if it's been done by somebody else before, you haven't done it. You've got to do what Stephen Covey taught us. And that's begin with the end in mind. We start planning from the future state. Looking back at how we got there, I've shared with it many times before, but if you think about the planning for the moon landing, the moon landing happened in 1969, but planning begun under the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s led by Wernher von Braun, the former German rocketeer who came to the US and helped NASA to develop its rocket program and then was taken over by President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson and didn't actually even happen until 1969. Much later, right? 24 US astronauts would visit the moon before the end of the Apollo program in 1972. It was an extraordinary accomplishment. There are all these kinds of things that we might want to do that are maybe not quite so historic, but are still all important to us and never been done before in our world. And the first thing to do is start thinking about, okay, if that's the mountaintop, how did I get there? What's the next stop after that, and the next stop after that, and the next stop after that. We start with the end in mind and we imagine how did we get there. Right? We've seen this happen again and again. And one of the Most useful things that you could do is plan very far out. I worked with a guy fairly recently, a tech firm in the Midwest, and their whole orientation was around the sale of their business that they'd been working on since their startup, their founding. But as I heard him talk about it, I realized that that wasn't going to be very compelling for potential buyers and investors. I had him reframe this whole thing and leave the recapitalization, the sale of the business as an interim step and create something far beyond that so that the leadership team and the employees and everyone else was engaged in something all the way through that sale of the business. And it didn't just stop with that. They hadn't imagined anything else and then left all of the imagination, all of the vision to the people who would buy it. See, if all you're selling is what you've done so far, that's not nearly as interesting as selling a vision for the future. Hey, we want to sell you this big thing. We're going here, this is what it looks like, and you're coming in here. I'm talking about somewhere in the fairly near future where this transaction would take place, in the far future where we've imagined the growth of the business. That's a lot more interesting, kind of a pitch to make to investors and acquirers. And in fact, that's what they did and it changed their valuation, it changed the engagement, and all of the leaders got way more interested in the business as a result of that. So the the key thing to do is to begin thinking far out into the future. How did you get there? What did you do that? And if you have something that you're particularly attached to, like an end game, try to go beyond that so that your end game is something you're actually playing through, or what had been your end game is now merely another step on the way to something enduring and perhaps even never finished. Anyway, I hope that's helpful for you. It certainly helped me and lots of the clients that we've worked with over time, and I hope you use it to great effect to begin doing your planning better. We got more on planning and leadership coming up in our next episodes. My name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this Scaling Up Business podcast where we bring our shows to you every week, at least once a week. So like them, subscribe, get notifications, share them with somebody else so that they can also benefit as well. And keep scaling up. We'll talk to you again next time. Foreign. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins. You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.
