To Scale Or Not To Scale?

To scale or not to scale? That is the question. Hey, Polk County, we're back for another episode of the Elevate Polk podcast. Hope you're as excited as we are to be here and hoping you're having a wonderful week. My name is Chrissanne Long and I'm here again with my co-host Nate, who's always here to be a part of these great conversations about entrepreneurship in Polk County.

Boom, boom.

Here we are.

Here we are again, Chrissanne Long.

To scale or not to scale, Nate, let, why don't you open this? Because what we were sharing before we started the show was really kind of, you're the, you're the inspiration behind this topic.

Yeah, for sure. So we were talking and basically one of the things I was thinking about is there was, there was a time when there was some individuals coming to me and talking about scale. And then Chrissanne and I had the conversation a little bit earlier talking about, you know, really what does that mean and what does that entail? And when I think about scale, there's a whole bunch of different things that come with that. It's like, I want to scale my business, but you can peel back the layer and say, really what you're talking about is I need a sales process or I need a marketing process.

Yes.

Or I need a business plan.

Ooh.

Or I need an operational plan, or I need some type of resource that I can go to in order to figure out how to structure my business the right way.

Oh, wow. Okay. So you wanna scale and scaling means what? I mean, what's your definition of scale? Like how do you define it?

How do I define it?

Yeah.

To me, when I look at it, It's a streamlined process that takes your business from point A to point B, and that individual can have different forms in their head of what that point A to point B is. For me, it's growth, but the growth is usually attached to a sales process and a marketing process built on top of a business plan.

So an outcome. That's tied to either profit or some other revenue-generating outcome.

For sure.

Because if you need more resources, you need more money to be able to afford those resources, whether those resources are members of a team or equipment or software or whatever it is that might actually be a part of that next step, what point A to point B looks like.

For sure.

Yeah. Okay. And so say that again when you said, I love what you said. You're like, So what you're really saying is you need a marketing process.

Yeah.

You need a sales system. You might need a business plan.

Yeah.

So what you're, what you're suggesting, Nate, my friend, is that there are businesses out there that don't have marketing systems, that don't have business plans, that don't have sales funnels or, or, or processes. Is that what you're sugge— is that what you're suggesting?

Maybe, maybe just a little bit. Maybe just a little bit. Yeah. Well, I think, I think what's really happening is I've said it before, entrepreneurship's popular.

Yep.

It's just—

Definitely trending.

It's trending. And when it's trending topics like scale is trending too.

Yeah.

But because a lot of individuals don't necessarily know what that actually means, it kind of get lost in the sauce and it's like, okay, I want to scale. And then it just like, people just see like the chart of their business going from, you say it's $10,000 to $100,000 to $1 million to $5 to $10 to $15. But understanding the nuances of what that means in order to get there.

Yeah. Well, how do you even know that you're ready to scale?

Or exactly to your point, when we were speaking a little bit earlier before we started this, do you, do you need to grow?

Right.

Do you need to scale and grow your business? Because if you did, would that— because one of the things I thought about when you said that is there's some models that don't necessarily need to do that because that would affect their entire business model and what makes it special.

Right, right. I mean, if you're a boutique, if you're, you know, if you're in that very small boutique, you know, because what you're, what you're talking about with Mike and Mike's.

Yeah.

And, you know, trying to, in your case, you are working actively currently to scale.

Yes, correct.

And in creating a recipe that can be scaled.

Yeah.

Requires that you can do it in, in mass.

Correct.

Right. Massive production. Mass production.

Correct.

If you're a boutique like our amazing friends, the scones ladies, the Happy Hour Scones ladies, you know, You know, that conversation hasn't started for them yet, and maybe they're not ready for that part of the, of the plan for their business and their journey.

Yep.

But, and maybe they won't, maybe they'll just completely be content in, in, in being very, very boutique, very, you know, using the kitchen space that they have and doing things at that, at that scale.

Yeah.

Versus the scale that you're, you're kind of going for mass production.

Yeah, for sure. And, and that's the thing too, that there's some models that I feel are very strategic. There's a, there's a, there's a clothing line, it's called Johnny Cupcakes. And I'm pretty sure he does like 2, 5 a year. It's a clothing line called Johnny Cupcakes.

I'm not familiar with them. I'll have to check it out.

And it's a very unique brand. And basically what he does is whenever he drops, and I could have been way off by his revenue, but whenever he drops, he only drops a certain amount and that's his whole model. So say he'll make 200 shirts and he'll put 1 of 100 or 1 of 200. And then that's how he labels it.

Oh, on the individual garment?

On the individual garment. And that's how he strategically has grown his brand is he'll do like exclusive drops. That's cool. And that's his model. And so it's, it's very unique. It's very niche. It's not necessarily— I don't really think he's looking to scale his business to hundreds of millions of dollars. He just, he has a very strong fan base and he structures a model in which each drop is very unique. And once he drops this exclusive shirt, it's never seen again.

Right, right.

And it's a model that works.

And it's a way to control production.

Correct.

So you're not overwhelming yourself with too many things to do in a given period, whatever that period is.

Yep.

And it's, it's also drives that scarcity of, okay, there's only this many, so I better hurry and take action and buy it now or it's going to be gone.

Exactly.

And then it also seems like it would evolve into this really cool, like, I want to get the first one. I want to get one of 100, you know, everybody's scurrying out there to be the first to adopt the next, you know, the next drop.

I mean, it's a really good marketing strategy. And so again, kind of what we were talking about earlier, you, an individual business owner, or an entrepreneur, you have to kind of look at, first of all, you as an individual and determine what ultimately am I trying to do? Am I going for more boutique or am I going for the farmer's market? Am I going for something that I'm trying to scale to the moon and grow from a $5,000 project to a $10 million project? And then understand based on what and which way you go, you're going to have to— you'll structure your business a certain way.

Right, right. And, you know, I think that that lends me back to going through my thoughts of my journey. Um, and so you also have to be careful who you listen to.

Absolutely.

So if you're not clear on your goals and you're talking to someone who has different goals than you, and you haven't necessarily written down your own goals, then you're going to get swayed by somebody else's version of what they think you should do.

Yep.

Or what you should be doing or how you should be doing your business. And I find like that is probably one of the most dangerous, that's a slippery slope because what ends up happening, you open up your heart, you share something, a challenge maybe as you're kicking off your business and you're super excited about this new thing that you're doing. And so you share, you share with your mom or your dad or your cousin or your brother or a friend or whatever, or somebody maybe who's been in the business a little bit longer than you and they've gotten, you know, but they had different goals or they have different goals. And so they speak into you their own desires, their own goals, their own outcomes, the things that they want. And then you either decide, okay, I should be doing that. And I always say, don't should on yourself.

Right?

So I should be, if that's the mindset that you're in and you don't know what it is that you want, go back to square one and write that down. And it doesn't matter if you're in day one of entrepreneurship or day, you know, 1 million and one, you've got to, to remember your why and remember where you're coming from and what you want to do, because there are people who don't want to scale. And being a marketing agency, I have had those conversations.

Yeah.

Because if I turn on a marketing campaign for someone, they better be ready for the phone to ring.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And if they don't have operators standing by to take those phone calls, then the marketing is going to be wasted. But also customers are going to get pissed.

Mm. Man, you hit the nail on the head on that one. Wow. Yeah, I think, I think that's huge. I think that's huge because a lot of people, when they, again, you can play these scenarios in your head of, man, I want, if I can just get to 1,000 customers a month or 1,000 clients a month that are paying for my service or paying for my product on a regular basis, I'll be good.

Right.

But until you are actually there and understand that there has to be an infrastructure in place, —and we've talked about it before—handle that growth. Yeah, that first impression with your customer. If there hasn't been expectations that have been set, man, you're really setting yourself up for a disaster. So you have to have those pieces in place. And again, it goes back to what you were saying—you have to know your why. Yeah, you have to know why you're doing what you're doing and how you're growing your company and structure in a way to where your customers know that and understand. So if you did start off as boutique, but then you saw an opportunity and realized, well, I can really grow this thing. You set up expectations with your customers to let them know that that's what you're going to do.

Yes. Because you don't want your customers— you don't want Johnny Cupcakes customers— don't want to have him sell out. Correct. To them right now at this moment in time, if he decided I'm going mass production, they're going to all be disappointed. Exactly. You know, he might find a completely different audience and that's okay if that's the plan. Yep. But you can't sell out just on a whim, right? And it's almost like that workflow, you know, you have to decide, okay, if this, then that, and if this doesn't happen, then what, you know? And if this does happen, then what? And so for me, it's a lot of the data. Like, I am all about data-driven decisions. And so you'll know if you're in that pivotal position of, okay, it's probably time for us to talk about scale. If it's still crickets on your website and you haven't looked at analytics in 6 weeks and you see, you know, 300 visits instead of, you know, 5,000 visits, um, you're probably not ready to scale. Correct. Or maybe your time, maybe it's time to start working on that marketing plan so that you can increase the visits. Because if you want, I mean, it's really a numbers game. It is. Your conversion rate. I mean, conversion rates are what, what it's always going to boil down to. Correct. And in order for you to have a conversion rate, that's going to increase your revenue. Your numbers have to be large enough for that increase to actually start to be moving. The needle has to move. So if my numbers are 1,000 visitors per month and I can see the phone rings, you know, 100 times per month, well, if my, my, my variation in my, my visitors, I'm just drawing correlations haphazardly, right? Like I'm just trying to say there is a correlation to people visiting your website and calling you. Absolutely. And if you can draw that correlation and you go, okay, well, if I get 100 calls for every 1,000 visitors, I want 200 calls, so I need 2,000 visitors. And then if I want 300 calls, I need 3,000 visitors. Well, how are you gonna get to the visitors? Correct. How are you gonna get to the people to come to you so that you can get those other calls? The calls aren't gonna come without an intentional focus on getting whatever. Again, we talked on another episode about the X and Y axis. Yeah. You know, it's like you need an increase in visitors so that you can get an increase in calls.

Mm-hmm. And sometimes, and sometimes it's, it's looking at your bank account and saying, I don't have the money, so I have to be a little bit creative, which goes back to the point that we were making earlier. Well, maybe you're not ready. Mm-hmm. Or if you absolutely believe that you are and the data shows that the value's there to do that, then maybe you need to look at the process of what it takes to raise capital, or there is an infrastructure in place where you need a little bit more resources to understand whether or not you're ready, find the resources to structure your business the right way so that you know what next step to take. Because again, I think what's interesting is you're right, data and numbers never lie. And a lot of times people make assumptions based on assumptions versus based on actual data. So look at, like you said, look at your Google Analytics. It's not that hard to set up Google Analytics. Look at your Google Analytics on your website and you can determine very quickly how much, how many customers or how many potential clients are coming through your website. Also, you'll be able to determine very quickly if you do need to change your business model based on how hard you're working. If you find yourself working harder and harder every single day because you're trying to keep up with the orders, you're trying to manage your clients and your workflow, then you have an opportunity to say, okay, I either need to one, set up a— because I think, I think that there's a multiple-step process before you just step out and say, I want to grow my business.

Let me put the accelerator on and go. Exactly.

You have to, first of all, you have to figure out, wait a second, there's some processes that I need to build on the backend of my business in order to have a better workflow. So when I add to it, it doesn't crush me.

It doesn't break. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that's the big key. I was thinking a few minutes ago about the importance of selecting the right software or the right tools that are equipped to scale with you.

I agree. Right.

You know, we talked, we've talked in the past about, you know, my desire to encourage more and more businesses earlier on to go with WordPress as opposed to a scaling, you know, one that doesn't scale as well, like a Wix or a Weebly or a Squarespace. Yeah. They, they're, you're, you're going to be fine until you're not fine. And when you're not fine, you're going to have to go back to square one because there's so many things that you're going to have to do to get it to be fine again. Um, and you'll know when it is, when you get there, but you've got to trust the people who've been there and down the path a little bit before you just say, well, you know, she's just trying to sell me a WordPress website because that's just what she does. Well, no, I'm really not, but it's okay for you to think that. But when you get to that point, I'm not going to tell you I told you so. I'm just going to help you. Right. But at the same time, when you get to these, these, these moments where you've reached the ceiling of what you can do under the current situation, the structure, the infrastructure that you have, you're going to crush— like you said, it's just going to crush you, whether that's because you don't have someone to answer the phones. So what does another 100 phone calls a month actually do to you, the individual, who's currently taking all 100 phone calls? You know, are you gonna bring your wife in to answer the calls or are you gonna hire somebody? And what does that look like and how are you going to prepare for that?

Yeah, it's funny you say that because we were having a meeting the other day and we were talking about what did a certain model look like? And we were throwing some numbers out and we're like, man, okay, what does that infrastructure look like? Because again, you can say numbers all day and you can reach those numbers, But what does a working model actually look like so that you can reach those customers or those clients on a regular basis? Because again, I think that's the biggest, I think that's the biggest Achilles heel to any entrepreneur is your mind can always trick you on what you think you can actually do versus what is actually possible. Not, not saying you don't be optimistic, of course be optimistic, but be reasonable as well. Yeah. And say to yourself, Okay, I have this great idea. I have this great concept, but realize your mind is always going to make it to where, okay, I'm going to do this and 5,000 people are going to buy it 100%. But realize maybe not. If this thing and model doesn't quite work the way you think it's supposed to work, what are some things that you can put in place to offset that? And you have to do that. That's one of the things that I'm starting to learn more now than ever is You have to have processes in place and you got to, and you got to go a lot of times you have to go a little bit smaller scale, right? And set expectations a little bit lower at first to test and to see and to be optimistic and not really set, you know, high expectation of, oh, 5,000 people are going to— it's like, no, I'm going to go out to the market, see how the market responds. And based on the market's response, I'll adapt, change, and grow my model.

Absolutely. You know, and you're speaking like it's resonating with me at this exact moment because I recently launched, you know, my strategic growth coaching and I did a masterclass and, you know, everybody was like, how was it? It was— and I'm like, it was fantastic because I went through the process from beginning to end and I intentionally said, I don't want this to not work for an enormous audience. Like I didn't promote it on my personal profile very much. I didn't push it out into the 10,000-person group very much. I mean, it was like this was more of like a select group of people. Yeah. If you're into this coaching that I'm going to do on this free masterclass, sign up and be a part of it. And thankfully it was a small enough group. So some of my technical difficulties, I didn't feel that panic of, oh my God, there's 100 people and this isn't working. What am I going to do? Yeah. You know, and so it's like you've got to be willing to play with that smaller number at first to go through the motions and then say, okay, now what can we automate? What can we delegate? What can we just get rid of? What didn't work? And then go back and iterate to the next version 2.0 and start to create something better. And so it's constantly to me, it's like, for me, ultimately what I'm trying to do is create an amazing customer experience, right? I want the customer experience. So I intentionally chose a brand new software, not Zoom, to do my masterclass. And that meant that I had to learn a new software, trial a new software, test a new software, and find out some things today, yesterday, or right at the moment of the class that they weren't gonna work, right? And so to me, it's just like, you've gotta be prepared to do the hard work, do the hard things first. The easy thing is for me to use Zoom, everybody's familiar with it, it's easy, but it's blah, it's boring, everybody's Zoomed out. So pick something that's maybe a little bit different was what was in my mind and do it that way. But now I've gotta, get everybody educated into this new platform. There's a lot of risk involved in that.

You got to get them on board to a willingness to download whatever the new software is as well.

Right. And, and, and do certain things that are not maybe the run of the mill, right? Everything else that everyone else is doing isn't necessarily how you want to do things. If you want to do things your way, the way that you're going to provide that exemplary customer experience. Yeah. Like this Johnny Cupcake. I'm fascinated. I'm going to go figure him out. Yeah. Because I just love what he's doing. Because when you fall in love with the brand, Now you, not only are you just super excited about the next drop, but you're telling everybody, which then makes it harder and harder to get the exclusive, you know, number of product. You know, it's like you almost don't want to tell anybody because then it'll be harder for you to get what you were trying to get.

Exactly. It's a very fascinating model. But when, when you said what you were saying with the, the, the new software, I thought I was, that was really interesting to me because it made me think about a lot of times, and I'm pretty sure I'm stealing this coin from Silicon Valley, but some of the, some of the founders over there, they would often say, do things that are unscalable at first. So things like downloading a new software that nobody's necessarily familiar with, it is a risk, but there's opportunity in it because like what you said really resonated with me. Yes, people, I mean, Zoom was everything during the pandemic, right? And because it was the only thing that we could use, It was almost like we used it for like 3 years. Right. Because it was just over and over and over and over and over again. And when you're in a space where that's all you're doing, that's all, that's the only form of communication. So it's not just with business. Right. It's with family. Family. Yep. It's with friends. Yep. Like we, I'm talking about, I did business calls. We played, I played games on there. Birthday parties. Birthday parties and Netflix watch parties and all this other stuff. And so when you, pitched what you were pitching, that honestly makes sense in the form of doing things that are, that are, that's different. It's unique. It's coming from a different perspective.

And doing it for a smaller audience.

Yeah.

You know, like not, not going for scale, not going for, you know, massive numbers right out of the gate. A, I told you when I told you about the class, I said, you know, if I'm gonna fail on a stage, I wanna fail on a small stage, not on a big stage. Yeah. You know, and, and it wasn't setting myself up for failure. It was just being intentional and realistic about what I was trying to, to to do, going through that iterative process from the beginning and knowing that eventually it's going to get to another point and then it's going to get to another point. But what that growth looks like is, you know, efficiency, right? I can do it faster. Yeah, I can get more people. I can do this, I can do that. And then the next efficiency.

And you're— and that's the thing that I think an experienced entrepreneur knows, like yourself, is you're not— you're, you're setting up realistic expectations for yourself. Because what can tend to happen is you, you, a person will launch and they'll stress themselves so far that when one person comes to their table at the market, right, they're crushed and they're just like, I did all this work. I, I came to the market and I put all this time and effort into it and no one came. I'm a failure. Yeah. And then they have this self-fulfilling prophecy and they feel like they failed. But in actuality, it's no, you just set expectations that were so far-reaching. As opposed to starting small, being okay with that. And really what I've learned is don't, you don't really have to really set expectations. Just make sure that you look the right way, that it's professional, that you're presenting yourself the right way and see what happens. Right. Right.

And I think that's, that comes to like back to our scale, back to our discussion of scale. So for me, this is a new product. This is a new service, right? So when you're bringing it, you might have, you know, thousands of hits or thousands of sales a month on your existing products and services, right? That's just already, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's revolving, you know, it's just going and going and going and it's on autopilot somewhat, you know, for, for the most, for the most part, but you're bringing in a new product. That new product isn't going to be at the same level as your existing product overnight. So you've got to treat that like a new product. You've got to treat that so that you can introduce it to the, to the audience. It's fresh, it's new. They're not ready for it. Maybe they don't even like it. Maybe they won't want it. So if you decide to buy, you know, 5,000 units on a thing and you sell 10, well, that's on you because you didn't start with that small, like scalable. It might not be needing to be scaled. And if it doesn't, if the market doesn't support it, then it doesn't need 5,000 units and you can just move on to the next thing and not feel like, okay, now I have to liquidate all 10, 5,000 units that I bought because I was wrong.

Yeah, that, that, or too many SKUs, right? Yeah, people, people, it's because that's, that's, that's what I'm, I'm, I'm glad that I'm learning that is you have to start not just small but with one or two things, no more, no more, no less, and focus on those things and hone on it. Because what tends to happen is individuals will have these ideas and they'll have a lot of ideas kind of spread out in there, like, okay, what about this one? What? Okay, all right, let's, let's, let's have a meeting about this and this whole this whole process of how we're going to launch this one and then we're going to launch that one and we're going to launch that one. It's like, it dawned on me. It's like, wait a second, I'm not getting paid to have all of these meetings about how we're going to be launching these products. Not yet. Yeah. We're not in a place where we can do that yet.

We can't, we can't support ourselves with all of that.

We can't support ourselves with that. We need to launch these products or services first. And once those are in the market and those are hitting and hitting on a consistent basis, then we're getting paid from the company to create new products to launch into the market. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, maybe the ones that you're sitting around talking about right now never see the light of day because the data is going to tell you otherwise. Otherwise. And you're going to say, wow, it's a good thing we didn't launch that other thing because this is the new thing or the next best thing that we're going to take and move into.

And I think that's what, you know, again, when we, when we look at when we're talking about the subject of scale and growth and growing your business, why it's so important to MVP, minimal viable product. When you, when you launched with, with what you, what you said, that was your MVP, your base model, and you, and you had a test market, right? And you saw the response and based on the response, you're going to either continue to do the same thing or change and tweak a couple of things. And maybe instead of the 10 people it was this time, it'll be 25, right? And then 30 and then 40 and then whatever number you feel that it needs to be at in order to get to where you're trying to go with that model. Right.

And the numbers of the conversion, like, all right, do I need 30 to convert 10? Because really all I'm trying to do is sell— right now I'm doing small group coaching, small group coaching, and the maximum I need in a small group coaching class is 10. I don't need 30, 50, 100 people for that to work because it's going to— the experience of the other members of the class is going to be diluted with too many people in the room. So it's like, okay, well, do I need 20 people in the room to sell 10? Do I need 30? Do I need 50? You know? And so it's, it's top of the funnel through, you know, through to the next opportunity for the, for the, for the product to sell. And, you know, I'll say this, I'll say a couple of things. One, I didn't learn this overnight. Yeah, I've learned by making tons of mistakes and launching things before they were ready. Yeah. And putting all— being that person at the farmer's market that shows up and only one person comes in the door. And so I, I, you know, you've gotta go through that. You've gotta, you've gotta experience it. You gotta make those mistakes. Hopefully you won't make the most expensive mistakes. Mm-hmm. And hopefully you'll know that maybe in order to have that scale conversation, you need to be looking at some of this fundamental stuff before you start spending money or energy on something that may or may not work. But the point of entrepreneurship and innovation is doing things that may not work. Correct. So you've gotta take that risk, but take a mitigated risk. I mean, mitigate it as much as you possibly can by, doing some test marketing, maybe doing some— you know, the biggest thing that hardly anybody I know does is when you, when you have your pilot, when you have your product not even finalized and ready to ship, running Facebook ads or running some digital ads on the product to see if the market is going to actually respond. And hardly anybody does that. You know, they're— we're so— the horse is out of the barn and we're now like trying to close the gate and saying, okay, you know, now we're trying to figure out how we're going to sell this thing. And the reality is, if the market isn't going to buy it, then you don't need to sell it.

Yeah, from trial and error, that stuff like that scares me, scares the fire out of me when I see businesses doing stuff like that. It really scares me because again, you have no idea if the customer that you think is going to buy the product will buy the product. So again, we're caught like, this is like, I appreciate you saying that, Chrissanne, because again, same. I, we're talking about from experience. I, I've, I've failed on my face plenty of times spending too much time on a product or service, launching it and getting zero reception and saying, man, I just spent the past 5 months in the leads working on this and the market doesn't care at all. That's why it's so important to work on things that aren't so hard to chew. And again, being self-aware, it's how big of a team do I have? Is it just me? So, I want to do all these things. Is it possible or even reasonable for me to say that I can do this and launch in a month? If not, let's cut some of, some of, some of this fat off so that I can launch in a month with a basic simplistic model. And again, it's, it's tough sometimes because you have this end goal of this is what I want to do and this is what I want to accomplish, but you have to break it down into smaller pieces. Right.

In order for all of the pieces to amount to what the goal is.

What the goal is. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, and going back to software and tools and, you know, making decisions about things, you know, that part is probably the most labor-intensive part of business and not enough time is spent on it. Sometimes it's like, oh, so-and-so is using that software. What is the— are they using it? Do they have the same kind of business that you have? How are they— how do you know that it's working for them? Or do you just use it because somebody said to use it? Because I think one of the hardest parts, I mean, for me, if you don't have complete visibility into your business, if there's some sort of closed API, and I'm speaking technical language, but if there's a closed API that you're not able to see the data straight from, you know, I don't know, you can see your Facebook Insights, right? And so you go to Google Analytics and you know, you got this traffic from Facebook because it shows up in, in as a source. But when you're sending traffic to your website, that then sends traffic away from your website. You don't have the visibility of what's going to happen there. So that's like when you're selling things on Amazon, you're depending upon Amazon's, Amazon's insights to tell you the story of how well everything is going. Now, as long as the sales are popping and everything's good, but how do you know what to accelerate and what not to accelerate?

Yeah, I think that's key. And I've spoke about this before, that's, that's why I don't necessarily recommend Amazon to individuals that are trying to start a business because some of your greatest tools and resources that you need in order to understand how to get better conversions or who your market is or who your customers are that, that are buying your product besides just the name and a state— gosh, that's not a lot to work with. Nope. You need more than that to be able to understand your metrics because when you start to understand your metrics, you start to understand your customer. And when you start to understand your customer, You can know what they're looking for. You can— things that you're really skilled at, SEO, what are they typing and what are they searching for, and creating blogs specifically for that. So when you're talking about growing your business, you're realizing, okay, there's a mom, there's mom— the majority of my customers are moms, central, centrally located in North Dakota, just, you know, just a random example. And this is their behavior and this is where they shop at and this is where they go to on a regular basis. And you can start catering content specifically for that. And then roll a product into that that they're going to buy on a regular basis. But like we were talking about earlier with Amazon, you don't necessarily have that. You just have to have a very robust marketing sales funnel that you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on, and the average person just can't afford to do that.

Right, right. And, and depending on that third party now will require you to rely on that third party for a very long time. Yeah. Or you're going to have, you're going to hit that moment. It's kind of similar to the same idea of Squarespace and Wix and Weebly. You're going to get to a point and you're going to say, okay, I want to stop doing this. Yeah. I don't want to do this anymore. How do I turn it off? And then you look at your revenue and you realize that 80% of your revenue is coming from this third party. So if you cut that off, you're losing 80% of your revenue overnight. Yeah. So if we're, I'm always talking about owning your own assets, you know, if we're putting, and there's been more and more conversation, thank goodness, about not putting all of your eggs inside of a Facebook Facebook basket or inside of your social media channels, because those are all third-party softwares. Those are all third-party— they own your data. Yeah, this whole blow-up of iOS's update isn't necessarily about— it's about privacy, but it's about the fact that we're giving away our data to these, to these third parties. And as people, as individuals, we want our privacy back, right? And so if we get our privacy back and you're mad that now you don't have the insights that you get or had before they made this this huge iOS update, the reality is you're depending too much on a third party. You need to own your own assets. So what does that look like? That looks like not having this third-party software that you're sending traffic to, like an Amazon or a software that, you know, does your booking or does these other things for you, but figuring out a way to do that on your own native website.

I think that's why WordPress, like you're saying, is so important because I mean, you're talking about digital real estate right now. I mean, if you don't— if, if you're literally— and again, it's— I think about like with Amazon, it's like, it's like you'd be on a shelf at Publix, but at the end of the day, they determine where you're located and who sees you and who doesn't see you. It's the same thing with social media. So if you— if, like you said, if sometimes a lot of it, a lot of, a lot of businesses, it's like 90%, 90% of their business is not their own real estate, right? And their customers are landing in Facebook, and sometimes they're finding their competitors on there and all this other stuff that— and there's a whole bunch of distractions and all these other things that they have to deal with. So it's important to, like you're saying, make sure that you have places that they can go to that, that's yours and yours alone. And obviously that's easier said than done. It takes a lot of work, but it's worth it in the end, right?

Right. Well, and that, that kind of goes back to us discussing like strategic growth. I mean, I mean, as I mean, I picked strategic growth coach for a reason, you know, because it's not just about growth. I want to turn on the lights and see myself, you know, growing because, all right, so another example of something that we do with our clients from a search engine optimization, from a search engine optimization standpoint. So there used to be a time in the golden age of Google when Google's analytics would reveal to you the keywords that got people to your website. And then I don't know, maybe 5 years ago they cut that off. And now that's like this huge top-tier way that if you want to pay big bucks to Google to get access to that insight, you can pay. But that's like, you know, ridiculous. It's like, I don't know, $20,000 a month or some craziness. I don't know. I'm probably exaggerating, but it's a lot. So now all you have are the tools to basically resort yourself to paying for search ads. Okay. Which is fine, but do it in an MVP way, you know, All right. So I want to get insight as to what keywords people are actually searching. Well, how do you do that? You take $100, you put it into a search campaign and you look at the results and you say, all right, well, I put 400 keywords into my search campaign and these were my top 10 performing keywords. These are the keywords you focus your search engine optimization on, not the other 390. Yeah. So now you know where to start your search engine efforts so that you're writing blog posts, you're producing videos, you're, You're using these keywords in your content, and then that also determines the demand. What people are searching for, they're interested in buying. So when you put the content out there that's relevant to what people are searching for, they will buy. So how does that all talk to scale? Well, if you don't know what people are searching for, how do you know what to scale or what not to scale? Yeah. Or if you're ready to scale. And so it's like you go back to what you said at the beginning, which was so brilliant. And that's why I was like, yes, I'm so glad we're going to have this conversation because you start talking about scale and you're talking about your numbers, right? You're talking about, I want more money so I can have more, you know, more things and I can do more things with the money. Yeah. But if the infrastructure, the marketing system, the sales process, the business plan, the product development, the pitch decks, the things that you actually need to get yourself to where you want to go aren't there. Yeah. You're going to, you're going to bust. Yeah. And so maybe it's Let's hone in on what you need to do to be a strategic— in strategic growth mode. Yeah. And then once you're in strategic growth mode, then maybe 6 months or a year from now you'll be ready to scale. Or maybe you'll go through the process and you'll go, you know what? I thought it would be fun to scale, but maybe not. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's okay. Yeah. Because again, I think about the fact that thinking about scaling sounds fun. It's a whole nother thing to be immersed inside of building and growing a business and the nuances of it. And it can be a challenge. It's a lot of, it's a lot of work, right? So understand, like, when we're saying this, it's, it sounds great. And not to say that you shouldn't do it, just think about the things that you need to do in order to get there. And sometimes it's, it's simple changes and simple fixes. And then again, to Chrissanne Long's point, sometimes it's, no, this is, I'm either not ready or my business model doesn't require me to scale. Because I've seen lots of businesses that, that model just didn't work for them. It wasn't the model that they operated in. They tried to grow their business from one location to five, and their one location did better than the other four combined. Right. And when they put all their other resources back into that one location, it did even better. Right.

And, and, you know, I think there's a lot of ego at play when we talk about scale. So you have to be in the right mind. You know, I love that you're always so self-aware, right? So as entrepreneurs, that's— we have to be self-aware. We have to consider, am I getting in the way of my own growth? Because that's, that's common. I mean, I used to say get out of my own way was like my mantra. Okay, Chrissanne, get out of your own way. It was more like overthinking things that were stopping me from moving forward. But in some cases, your, your I know it all attitude, you know, the, the, The 4 most dangerous words in the English language is I— 3, 3 most dangerous words are I know that. As soon as you say I know that, you've shut the door to learning or trying to understand a new possible opportunity or, or idea. Yeah, right. I know this, therefore that I don't need to listen to. Yeah. And that's where scale— it all comes back to are you ready to risk losing? You know, it might not work. And are you ready to do the hard work that you're going to have to do to get it to the position that it is actually legitimately ready to scale for a sustainable period of time? Yeah, because what you can see a lot of times is like this person you were describing, you know, one, one location to 5 locations. And instead of strategic growth going, okay, one location to 2 locations, let's normalize. Let's see if everything's good. All right. Are we good? Do we need to go to the third location or are we just good at 2? Or maybe do we just go back to 1? Because from 2 to 1, isn't a big huge like, oh, you know, ouch, it hurts a little bit, but at least you learned that lesson not overnight. Yeah. And then, you know, if that strategic growth takes you from here to there to there to there to there to the next, then that's healthy growth, right? A lot of times you, or maybe you got an investor and you said, hey, if we do this, look at what I can do with one location. Yeah. If you want to be an investor, we could do 5 locations and I can 5x our revenue. Yeah, not necessarily. Yeah, exactly. Because there's a whole lot more headaches with 5 times the locations than with just one.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. It's the nuances within the business that you have to think about. And again, understand the industry that you're in, because we did this for our team. We did a SWOT analysis. What are your strengths? What are our weaknesses? What are our opportunities and what are our threats? And understand that every single business, and not just within the business, but within the industry, has certain strengths, has certain weaknesses, has certain opportunities and certain threats. And there's certain things that as you start to grow, you'll leak into different threats that weren't there before. Yeah. It's like, well, where'd this come from? Mm-hmm. But it's within the nuances of your business. Yeah.

And sometimes the threats are just something that you need to be aware of. Mm-hmm. And you move forward anyway. Or if you're honest, you might see, like I said earlier, you are a threat. You are your threat. Yeah. You need to delegate more. You need to hire somebody else to do this thing because that's not your skill set. Yeah. And if you can't look at that honestly and answer the question, you know, am I a threat to my own growth? Um, it, it, it— you're gonna, you're gonna see it. Yeah.

Yeah. Being, being willing to, to know that you can only do so much. And I was talking to someone the other day, we, uh, Oh yeah, we did a photo shoot for our new website that we're going to update. And the girl that did our photo shoot, she did an excellent job. And we were talking about it and she said, I said to her, I said, yeah, thanks for doing this so much. I said, I've learned a very long time ago not to do things that are not in my skillset, because I'm gonna have to pay for it anyways down the road.

Oh yeah. That is wisdom personified right there. You're going to pay for it one way or the other. You know, and we have stories. I mean, in Maximizes, you know, library or war chest, I guess it is. They're just stories of things that you just want to say. And that's okay. So let's talk about what do you do if you think you want to scale and you don't necessarily know if you're ready, you know, you can reach out to Nate. Nate can, can talk you through, maybe ask a couple of questions and, and do that, or hire a coach, you know, a strategic growth coach. I'm not necessarily pitching, but I'm also saying maybe there's an opportunity for us to explore is this a good time for you to scale? But there are a kajillion other experts, mentors, people to go to to ask these questions. But don't be— don't fall into the pits of Googling things and expecting to get all of the answers for your specific use case. Yeah, because you're going to— it's generalized. You're very specific. You're a unique business. Treat yourself as such.

I think that— I think that's huge because a lot of times, and there's nothing wrong with any of, any of the individuals that, that are in that space. But to your point, it is generalized. And when it's generalized, a lot of times people like, or people, though, people will say, oh, that's for me and my business and my industry. Right. But not necessarily because again, every industry is different and there's com— and we're in a place right now where things are changing so much and things with COVID on top of that didn't necessarily help that the industry is very different. And so when you're watching something on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube and it sounds motivational and great and you're like, oh man, I'm going to do that because they said this, realize that there is a business model that they're operating within as well and understand that. Yeah. So to Chrissanne's point, reach out to people and individuals that are experts in the industry. And I don't think it's a selfless plug at all to say reach out to Chrissanne because that's what she's working on. She's working on a model to help businesses that are trying to understand what they need to do in order to build their business successfully and strategically without stumbling too much. Yeah.

It's the most important next step, right? Like you're, you're here at this point in time. You want to, you want to scale. What's the most important next step? It's not, you know, go seek, you know, thousands of dollars of investment dollars and just throw it away. The most important next step is whatever that next step is. And then you get to the next step and then you get to the next step.

Correct.

You know, it's kind of when you were talking about the internet and, So it doesn't matter what side of any argument you're on. If you go to Google and you want to find a biased opinion about something that corroborates where you want them to be, you're going to find somebody who says it, you'll find it, you know? And, and so that's why I'm like, I get it that people are going to keep doing Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly because there's a kajillion articles out there that say, oh yeah, Wix and Weebly and Squarespace are fantastic. Just as many about WordPress being a better solution. But it reminds me of the dress. Remember the internet sensation?

Oh yeah. I remember the dress.

The white is the white. Is it white or blue? Is it blue? And so you'll have just as many people thinking that it's white as you have thinking that it's blue. And you're never going to convince them that it's different.

Yeah, it was the left brain versus the right brain, wasn't it?

I don't even remember. I always saw it as a white dress. What color did you see it?

Pretty sure I think I thought it was blue. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I thought it was blue. Yeah.

I only saw white and I was like, I can't see what, I don't know what every, all right, I have no time for this. I'm trying to build my business back to work. So I took a brief moment from it, but it was like for a while everybody was talking about this stinking dress. Yeah. So anyway, as we wrap up, I don't know if you have any final thoughts or things you want to say to say to scale or not to scale.

Yeah, I guess, I guess I would just finish with make sure that who you're, who you're listening to, who you're getting your information from, they have at least some experience in the nuances of businesses that you're trying to operate within. Yeah. Whether it's they're really familiar with processes and you need help with processes, or they're really familiar with company culture and you need help with company culture. They're really familiar with alignment and helping your business stay aligned with you and your team and your, and your team members and partners within the business. I think that's, I think those are key things that any individual, individual needs that they can have someone, whether it's a board of advisors or strategic partner or strategic relationship with someone that has an organization like Chrissanne Long's or someone else's that they can come alongside with and have someone that is with them on a regular basis that they can go to. Because in business, things are always ever-changing. And sometimes we can get so stuck in our business that we need an outside perspective that is familiar with this industry or familiar with the process in business that can help us and guide us along the way. Because sometimes we can be so stuck in the weeds, we're getting stuck and we can't see outside of our own selves.

Right? Absolutely. 100%. I think the only thing I would add in, in wrap up is just to, um, okay. So when you think about to scale or not to scale, I think the point we basically made in this episode is really, it's a lot more complex of a question to answer. Yeah, just, yeah, I want to grow. I want to be bigger than I am, you know? And so that may mean hiring a person. That may mean getting a brick-and-mortar location. That may mean getting a new brick-and-mortar location with more square footage. It may mean, you know, bringing on new products and services, whatever that scale looks like to you in the time that you're in, in your business. Make sure that you explore it with someone with an intentional focus on your business and where you are And don't make those decisions based on assumptions, make them based on the data that you currently have, or start working to get the data so that you can make that decision and be safe making— oh no, safe isn't a good word, but be secure in making a decision that's probably going to work out. Well, that is a wrap. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you'd like to help us get the word out about the Elevate Pult Podcast, check out the post on our Facebook page, share it, or better Better yet, comment with your favorite part of the episode. We're looking forward to learning what you loved about this conversation. If you have some ideas for upcoming episodes, we'd love to hear from you. We'll see you next week, Polk County. Woo! Boom!