Allison Maslan outlines five phases of scaling a business, from solopreneur to visionary founder. She shares how one client grew from $500K to $6M and how Jan Arnold sold Creative Nail Design to Revlon for $600M by delegating and empowering leaders at each stage.
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We've all heard how important it is to be constantly growing and moving forward, especially with our businesses. Yet at times, our growth stalls and we get stuck, and then we get unstuck and we move forward again and experience amazing growth, and then we get stuck again. What if there was a way that you could smooth out those ups and downs, the highs and lows, and just keep scaling up your business? That's certainly worth more than $250,000. That's where your team comes in. And as you know, you don't do it alone. This is a lesson Alison Maslin learned many years ago in her new book, Scale or Fail, which is coming out literally in about a month. Alison shares many of the powerful ideas on building businesses that have helped her create 10 successful companies. Starting when she was just 19 years old, Alison founded the Pinnacle Global Network in 2010 to pay it forward and help business owners scale their companies and live a great life. Alison has been featured in Success, Fortune, and Forbes magazine and is a regular contributor to Entrepreneur magazine and is a featured expert on abc, cbs, NBC, cnn, and Fox. Across the US Allison also hosts her own weekly video podcast, Ally and you'd, the Business, Success and lifestyle show. And Alison's title is Scale or How to build you'd dream team. Explode your growth and let your business soar. Please help me welcome. Thank you, Mary.
Thank you so much. Oh, my goodness. Thank you to all of you and to Joe. You all are like family to me. It only took me three years to get up here, so I feel that scaling has been kind of the theme for the weekend. So I feel like this fits perfectly perfectly. And the question that I want to answer for you all in this 10 minutes is, how do you get off the hamster wheel and scale your team so that your company can ultimately run itself? How many of you would like to see that happen? Raise your hand. Awesome. Good. All right. Well, I know that many of you are building big companies. Some of you already have a big company. So I want to share with you a little bit of my journey that will hopefully help you avoid some of the pitfalls. I started my first business. I was 19 years old, and I was doing greeting cards for companies. And they would say to me, you know, Ali, we really love these greeting cards, but do you do brochures? Do you do radio commercials? Do you do television commercials? Do you do public relations? And I would hear my dad's voice in my ear saying, ali, if someone asks you to do something and you feel like it's worthwhile, even if you don't know how to do it, just say yes and then figure out how to do it. And so I pretty much, does anyone have that philosophy out there? I pretty much used that strategy to get my company off the ground. It took off very quickly and by the time I was 25 years old, I had built a full service advertising and public relations firm called the Borali Group in San Diego. And I was making a lot of money. I was traveling all over the country. I had clients like Ben and Jerry's and Supercuts and Allstate. And you would have looked at me back then and you would have said, wow, young lady, you have got it together. And outwardly, yes, I did. Inwardly, this was me. Can anyone relate to this feeling alright? I was miserable. I was working 24 7. I had absolutely no life. I felt like I was trapped in my own success. You see, I didn't know how to scale a business. I had a team. I didn't know how to delegate. I was a boss. I didn't know how to be a leader. I thought it was all a up to me. And from the stress of it all, I ended up having a terrible car accident that it was a miracle that I survived. So when I walked away from that, I also walked away from this very successful company and I walked away from a difficult marriage. And I set out into the world as a single mom. No money, no idea what I was going to do with my life and happier than I had been in years. And I made a decision to take a year to figure out what was I doing wrong and what was I doing right so that I could do it differently moving forward. So why do you think so many businesses get stuck at that 1 million, 5 million or $10 million level? It's because you're sucked into putting out fires, right? Taking you to what is urgent instead of what's really important. To take your business to the next level. And we are creatures of habit. That's what we are as human beings. We do what we're used to doing. But that will only get you so far. If you're using the same mindset to scale your business that you did when you were starting your business, it's not going to take off. If you're using the same marketing strategies or operational strategies. It's not going to get you to that next level to take the leap from entrepreneur to enterprise. What got you here will not get you there. What got you out of Egypt is not going to get you to the promised land. So to Scale your business. You literally have to reconstruct the business from this higher level. Once you're here, you need to build a new company that will scale. Otherwise, it's going to be like a ball and chain. It's going to keep you small, it's going to keep you stuck and only have incremental growth or even worse, going backwards. So Fast forward over 35 years, I went on to build nine more companies that I've had an absolute blast with. And what I found are there are five phases that a business must go through to truly scale, to make a lot of money and make an impact. So you can also have a life, too. So phase one, you are the seeker. You're the solopreneur. You're passionate. You're out there, you're ready to make it happen, but you're doing everything. Phase two, the pioneer. You are forging your own path. You're getting your hands dirty. You're building a small team, maybe an assistant, a marketing person, a bookkeeper. But again, you're still approving everything that goes in and out of the business. Some of you might be there. Phase three, the ringleader. Why? Because it's a circus out there. In phase three, you are beginning to build teams, but you're holding on too tightly. Some of you may be control freaks. Anybody here? Right. Phase three, though, you're also getting clear on your vision. You thought you knew what your vision was in phase one, but you really didn't know what you were doing. In phase three, you start to see a vision and what the possibilities are. You, you start to put processes and systems in place. You start having meetings. But the truth is, your team is still frustrated. You might have people in the wrong roles. They always feel like they're disappointing you because you're always jumping in and correcting them. Right? Does anybody have that experience? And I know this is true because as was discussed earlier, 70% of employees are disengaged. And my guess is that some of those 70% are your employees. You can die in phase three. It's a dangerous place to be. You have to go through it. But there's hope, because there is Phase four, but you have to be willing to take the leap, like I do and have done on the trapeze for the last 20 years. You have to be willing to let go of that bar and be in the air so that you can be caught by the catcher. And some of you are like, well, I can't let go, Alison. It's a scary thing. What if they make A mistake. What if I fail? But oh my darling, what if you fly? Because there is hope. There is Phase four. Phase four, you are the co creator. You are working with your team and your team starts to step up and you see the leaders shine or you recruit leaders in and they start asking important questions like how do we increase profit? How do we create a better customer experience? They start to own it and run with it, which moves you into phase five where you are the visionary. And that's the ideal situation, like we were talking about earlier. You can step back because they've got it and you need to trust it. And your biggest tip here is, is to shut your mouth. So my client, Christine Sanchez, she came to me, owns a cold storage construction company. She'd been running it for 10 years and was stuck in phase three. It was chaos. She was the bottleneck. We moved her to phase five. Within two years, she went from 500,000 to 6 million. The best part is she finally has a life. Now. There's a woman named Jan Arnold who founded a little company called Creative Nail Design. For you ladies, it's the shellac on your nails. She sold this little company for $600 million to Revlon. And she spoke at one of my events and she said a quote that I feel like sums all of that I'm saying up. And that is, for me, it's all about finding the right people that are passionate and have a love for the brand. My job is to sail the moon. If I can get them to see that it's there, it can be ours. And once they own it, we can do anything. So when you scale your team like this, you can own the moon. You can change the world and have a life too. Thank you very much.
