Start Small | Scale BIG in Business

Is it better to start small or think big? And my answer would be both. I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, Peter, who's trying to start a gym and he's unsure of if he should start small, rent from other locations and build up from there, or think big and create his own place from scratch exactly how he wants it. And continue to launch new businesses from there? And my answer really is to combine them. So what I would love for you to do is start small, but then also have that big vision, big picture in mind. Here's the reason, okay? This is real talk. This is important because a lot of entrepreneurs think they have to start big, and it's possible, and you can, you can have success doing it. The challenge is when you start right away big, your chances of failure go up dramatically because you don't know what you're doing. You have a concept in your head, and that's great, but things are rarely— they rarely work out as you think they will. Every time, every successful entrepreneur who's built a business plan, that business plan changes 1,000 times before they end up hitting their success. Because the assumptions that you make are wrong most of the time. So if you've never done this before, if you've never built a huge business and you start by going big, you're probably going to make a lot of mistakes. You're probably going to have some incorrect assumptions, and as a result, your business will fail. And the reason why it's so important is because if you're investing your life savings, you know, if you're mortgaging your house, if you're taking on investors, You can't afford for it to fail. At least I wouldn't if it were my business. If I was taking out a mortgage or borrowing money from my friends and family, I would want to make darn sure that that business had the best shot of success. So I always encourage entrepreneurs to start small, to test, to test your thoughts, to test your assumptions, see if what you think will work actually works. 'Cause you don't know until you actually get out there and start doing something. You test small, you show that it works, you keep making improvements, you listen to your customers and keep building up, keep investing back into your business, and then when you have something that you know works, you can raise the money you need to blow it up. You know, if you can get one gym working really effectively, And that starts from renting from these other gyms and then building yourself up. If you can get it to the point of one gym being amazing, then you can raise money to expand. You have a formula that works and it's built on something real, and it dramatically increases the chances of you being successful. Here's a quick example that, that can really relate to what you're doing. I'm an investor in a salsa dancing business here in Toronto. The company's called Toronto Dance Salsa, and how it started was was just renting from gyms in their off hours. So they teach people how to dance salsa, and it'd be like 6 to 9 at night type of thing. The rent was super cheap, and the founder didn't have any business experience before this. She worked in hotels and had a great corporate life but had never been an entrepreneur. And so she'd learned the ropes on a small scale by building up classes from these gyms. And she got to different locations and she tested her model, and she, she not only improved herself as an entrepreneur, learning the skills that you need to be successful, but also learning what it takes to build a successful salsa company. How do you teach students? What's your methodology? What's the sequence you're going to teach them in? How do you make sure people come back and stay motivated? All of that you can't tell until you actually go out and start doing it. So she did it on a small scale, then worked with different gyms, opened up different locations, still renting, still only paying an hourly fee. And she got to the point where she could expand. She had confidence in the model and went out and got her own location in a mall. That costs over $100,000 a year. So instead of paying James $40 an hour, she's now spending $100,000+ per year to have her location. But it works. The business takes off. She teaches 5,000 to 6,000 students a year how to become salsa dancers. But if she went out, took out a huge loan, talked to her family, tried to go to investors to get that $100,000+ just for rent. It wouldn't work. There's too many things that would have gone wrong in the business. All the trial and error approaches that she took to get that far wouldn't have been there, and she would have had to shut down and maybe be in debt for the rest of her life. So start small. Test. See if it works. And keep your big picture in mind. It doesn't have to take you that long to get there. But keep the big picture in mind. I don't want to see you struggling doing this thing part-time for the rest of your life. You know, at some point you need to see momentum and progress. And I know it's hard. I know as entrepreneurs we want to see things happen. You know, we hate being down in the details and the operations, and we have big visions, and it's hard to wait for things to happen. But it's so important. And it really comes out of me wanting you to be successful and not having to be in debt maybe for the rest of your life and make one of the biggest regrets of your entire life by going big too soon. It can happen, but your chances of success go up dramatically if you start small and build up. Believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, thumbs up below. Thank you so much. And I want to hear from you. Please leave a comment underneath if you like the video or if you have a question for your own company. I love hearing from you and I'll make a video response. Thank you so much and I'll see you soon.