How I Scaled To $30M Without Burn Out

If you're stuck at $100,000 a month and you are exhausted, well, here is exactly why. Most founders are building a job, not a business. So as my businesses have scaled, the things that I'm still doing right now is, is marketing and the strategic direction over the companies. So making sure I'm the one that comes to the business with the right ideas at the right time, saying no to probably 90% of the things that I thought we could be doing or the team thought we could be doing, but we, we're not going to do because it's not going to generate the right profits or revenue. Trying keep the business simple. So most of my time, 80 to 90% of the time, I'm working on the business. I'm not doing any delivery working in it. There's times, yes, you need to firefight, but the majority of the time is marketing, overseeing still some of the sales, and just the strategic direction of the company. So my job in the business is to make sure the team's good, the culture is good, but also that we are keeping the business simple as we scale. So every time that you go up from 100K months to 200 to 300 to 400 to 500K months, you will get bloated. So you'll hire a bigger team, you'll get a lot more complexity. And then your job as the founder CEO is to try your best to keep it as simple as possible, to have less chains of command all the way up the different hiring levels, and to make sure that you are still lean. You don't want a fat-bloated business. You want to make sure that it's lean, highly profitable, can maneuver fast, especially with this AI evolving market right now. You've got to be able to adapt very fast. So being on the pulse of the business all of the time and having your free time so you can move and think strategically very fast is one reason why as a founder it's very important to get out of the weeds of the business as fast as possible. If you're in every single conversation in all of the departments of your business, then you haven't scaled. So how my delivery team looks now and what it looks like at Skill is we have a team of customer success managers, so they are on the pulse with each client. So that's in my education company. The, the CSMs are very, very strategically important because they do two things. They make sure the client's happy, they get good results hold them accountable. And then they also act as an upsell. So they actually turn into sales reps on the back end of the business and they turn into, instead of being a cost to the company, around about $50K-$60K salaries, they're actually generating revenue and normally 3, 4, 5 times their cost of a salary. So the CSMs are very strategically important. We have our executive assistant. I have a personal assistant. I have— we have our head of operations. And then we have our head of delivery, we have coaches, we have the sales team, we have the setter team. So around all of that on the delivery side, there's a lot of moving parts here. So in terms of the delivery, then also in our recruitment business, we've got our recruitment team and then we've got our head of academy for RemoteAssistance.ai who actually trains the remote team. So there's a lot of moving parts within that team, but each leader has a responsibility. They have a KPI. Set of KPIs that they need to hit in order to hit bonuses and certain revenue targets. And I always try my best to make sure every single employee in the company has a target to hit and can contribute to revenue. So even on the operations side, they are targeted in terms of saving time for me, saving time for the team, but also being able to upsell current clients into additional, whether it's programs or services. So we always try and make sure that every single person in the business has got a good outlook, which is the business. If the business does well, they do well. If the business does great, they do great. And if the business doesn't perform on a certain month, then they're still okay, but they don't earn as much. So it's very important as you scale over time to make sure that all of your delivery team is aligned with your goal, especially when you're creating what I would call like a high cash flowing business. If it's not going to be building enterprise-level value in terms of a company, but you're, you're making good cash on the business, you need to make sure that there is good financial rewards for everyone in the company, not just financial, but also personal growth. So making sure they can cross over departments. So someone in operations might turn into marketing. There's a lot of different maneuvering opportunities within the company, and that's— that can be all grown organically. As long as your team is tight and you've got your good systems in place, the right SOPs and the right leaders in each team. And when I say leaders, they're not managers. Okay, so we don't have any managers in the business. I like it that way. And I don't think that every time I've hired a manager, they haven't lasted long and it's very hard to get them bought into from the rest of the team. I just make sure that everyone in the team comes to work batteries included, which means Like a Duracell Bunny, they come and they are motivated. They know what they need to achieve and they're not expecting me every single day to get up and motivate them. So that's one of the most important things when you're hiring, especially even if it's C players or B players. Obviously, A players already come batteries included and everything else, so you protect them. But the B and C players, you need to make sure that they've got high levels of conscientiousness and they've got a can-do attitude of like batteries included every single day when they turn up for work. More people doesn't necessarily mean more money. And I learned that the hard way. So in my group of companies, I scaled all the way up to just under 50 employees, and then we scaled it back down to around about 25, 26 is where we're sitting at right now. And things I learned there is when business is going really well and you've got fast growth, you've got high profits, and you just hire people. Okay, so, uh, you go through a point where, uh, if sales are flooding in, you need delivery. So you need more on the delivery team, and then you need more on the sales team because you want to handle more fulfillment, you want to handle more leads. And there's a point when you cap out where it's a point where when you get to a certain level of cash flow per month, you need to maintain profit margins. Now, in all of my companies, they've all been service-based companies, and I'm always about maintaining a hygiene standard. Minimum, minimum is 60% profit margins. If we ever fall below 50%, then something is wrong. And that's when I'm diving straight into the business, cutting costs. Do we have too many bloated employees? Have we got too many overheads of like software tools? Like we went maybe a little bit too much. Did we have too much freelancer work that we were passing off? So making sure that you have a hygiene standard that you will accept in the business. But as you scale, there's always going to be seasons. Okay, so there's going to be seasons when you have really high profits, everything's great, you've got a good group of the team, but then maybe someone leaves. Okay, or you have a problem where an employee leaves to try and take clients with them and then you have to go and sort all of that out with lawyers, and there's a lot of different moving parts, okay? Then there's other times when there's a big opportunity in the market and you go very aggressive, maybe with ad spend, and you get a lot of leads, you build up the sales team. So there's always different seasons, okay? So when you, when you're growing and scaling, it's very hard to balance the profitability and the peace and the freedom and simplification in the business. So you've got to make sure that each season is going to be different. You might have a growth phase where you hire big, you start spending big, you start spending more on ads, and then that's going to have a trailing effect for eventually the profits further down the line, maybe in month 5 or month 6 or month 9. But then as you scale, you'll see there's maybe a ceiling point in one of your companies that it's very hard to break through. So you'll realize that you might need to wind back down a little bit in terms of the team structure and size. And there might be certain employees that you hired and you thought, well, such and such can do that as well as this task. So one of the key things I always spot is, and this works really well with a fluid remote team as well, is people like variety in their role. They don't just want repeatable SOPs and a boring role where they're just doing the same thing every single day. So that's why sometimes it's, it's good to cross-roles between someone doing social media marketing and then they might be doing some CSM work, they might be doing some delivery work, account management work, some coaching, they might be doing some finance. There's a lot of different variables, especially now where with AI, and I teach all my employees to make sure that they know how to use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gamma and all of the different AI tools that they can use. So they can work faster and more efficient, and it means we can get more done with less people. So, and that gives people an opportunity to grow. So it means that if we have a good tight group in the team, we don't need to hire more. It's like, well, how can we be more efficient with your role? We'll pay you slightly more, but you can take on more bandwidth. And especially with AI now and being able to automate a lot of the processes, having an employee that's conscientious of that and knowing they could probably take 2 hats or 3 hats instead of 1. They earn slightly more money, they get more variety, they get more excitement, and it's way easier for you as a founder to manage. And once you've got good employees that are with you for 18 months, 2 years and beyond, there's a different trick on how you keep them. So quite close with my employees in terms of I'll speak to them on Zoom, over Slack. I'm trying to meet them in person. So I'm actually flying half of my team out here in Marbella and next week as we're recording this. And that was just random, you know, I thought actually sunny weather at the minute, there's a few of them in the UK, Portugal, Dubai, a few different places. And I thought, okay, look, I'll get them out here for 4 or 5 days, we'll work and collaborate together, take them out for some dinners and keep that community. So I think once you've got an employee that's 18 months to 2 years, you need to make sure that you're setting a vision that you are growing as an entrepreneur and a founder. So one thing I've found that works really well is It's always exciting in terms of like, I'm taking things to the next level or a new direction or something's evolving. And I'm always keeping them excited, even on team end of week team meetings of what's happening next so they can see a future, they can grow into certain roles and making sure that you pay them fairly. Okay. Like, I don't overpay my employees for sure, but I don't underpay them either. I think I'm very fair as a boss, and that's definitely reflected in some employees have been with me 7, 8 years. Some have been with me for 5 years, the majority, and that's definitely testament to being on the pulse with one, giving them freedom and autonomy. I'm not a boss in terms of like I'm telling them off. They don't have a manager. They get treated as adults and it's like their own mini department business within a business. So when you've got someone that's been with you 18 months, 2 years, they've proven loyalty, they've proven deliverability, they've got their high conscientiousness, they're wanting to grow. Them, then however else they want to grow in the business, it's up to them to come to me and say, James, I've got an idea. I want to learn this more. I want to do this more. Okay, great. You put together a plan. You show me how you can generate more revenue and how that brings more profit to the business or more optimization, and then you can roll it out and own that project. So giving them more responsibility to do that is very important. But it also comes back to the hiring as well. I don't hire entrepreneurs. Now, that might be controversial or not. I don't I don't want entrepreneurs in my business. The reason being, I don't want them to just come in for 12 months, 18 months, because I've tried this, come in for 12, 18 months, and then they just leave. They take out all of the IP, your knowledge, and how you do things, and they're going off to work on their own. It's not a bad thing, okay? It's like entrepreneurship. I'm an entrepreneur, like I teach many entrepreneurs, and that is great, and all of you are, but you and your business, you just want a lot of C and B players, and then some A players. Because it's going to be very, very hard to keep entrepreneurial people in your business because they'll either want to share your business, they'll want to start off maybe another department. It gets very hard because then it's going to take your bandwidth onto another project because you're going to have to please them just to keep them and retain them. And then you end up having another arm in your business that you didn't even want and need, and it wasn't part of your plan, but you're having to do that to keep that type of entrepreneurial person. Whereas if you interview them at the start, you spot the trends, if they just want to come in for 6, 9 months or 12 months, learn some things and go off on their own. Some business owners say, yeah, that's great, but for me, no, it's not worth the energy. So I make sure that I try not to hire entrepreneurs in the business. So what do you see in a business that is doing over 7 figures a year? Well, most people don't see the sleepless nights, the worrying about certain employees, the having to file lawsuits on certain employees that are taking IP data, CRM data, setting up on their own. They're not seeing the stress of like having big ad spend and big over- ahead and then sometimes struggling to make payroll. They're not seeing the sleepless nights with your family and friends and loved ones where you're present but you're not really present, where you never switch off. As entrepreneurs, especially 7-figure founders, 8-figure founders, we don't switch off. It's Saturday, Sunday, we are reading, we are planning, we are looking into the business, we are seeing what's going to happen next Monday, and we take a lot of stress on, even if it's subconscious stress. So as a 7-figure founder, you need to make sure that you get your mindset right, you have good balance. So having God, having meditation, reading, for me reading the Bible now, but making sure that you understand how your mind works. So for me, Reality Transurfing is a great book and I've recommended it to many people. I've read that 4 or 5 times now. That really changed the framework in my mind around the energy fields not getting sucked into pendulums, not getting sucked into drama, trying to maintain a calm standard throughout. Because when you go from a million a year to 5 million, then up to 10 million a year, you have to be able to take a lot of stress on but not react and not get emotional about it. You have to be very logical and very calm as a founder. Okay, so hope you enjoyed it. There it is: revenue is never the goal, freedom was. And the two do not come at the same time unless you build it by design from the start. So hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you on the next one. And for those that enjoyed it, drop a comment. Let me know where you are in your business right now, where you are month-wise, and what you're struggling with, because I want to make sure that I'm giving as much value and content as possible moving forward. So drop a comment and I'll see you on the next one.