How to Plan for EXPLOSIVE Growth in Your Business

Hey everyone, it's Mike and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. Today we're going to be talking about how you can plan for explosive growth in your business and five things you must do to make sure that your business is able to and going to thrive in an environment where you grow it fast. Before we get into the show though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp you can get a 90 day free trial instead of the usual 30 days that they give everyone from their main website. So as a Business Bootcamp podcast listener, you can access an entire quarter of a payroll system that is going to make it easier and cheaper than any other software out there to run your payroll and give the benefits that you want to your employees. Go to gusto.combootcamp and make sure you check out their QuickBooks Sync3 feature. Alright, so today we are going to be talking about how to plan for explosive growth. And I'm a little bit like hoarse and my voice is kind of messed up and I got like a sore in my mouth. We just finished the three days of our first franchisee training here at Augusta Lawn Care. So it's been a lot of long days and a lot of talking, but it's been a lot of fun. And so everyone is just leaving today, just wrapped up last night for the training and so it was, you know, really, you know, monumental kind of thing for our company. And you know, our next training for the next 12 franchisees is going to be in February. So mark these dates down, February 20th, 21st and 22nd. If you want to be a franchisee of Augusta Lawn Care, go to Augusta Lawncare Services.com franchise and see if it's something that's right for you and you can book a call directly with me. But today we're talking about explosive growth because it's really what we're going through at Augusta Lawn Care, like growing really very, very fast. And a lot of people have asked me like, do you think you're growing too fast? Do you think this is going to be sustainable? All those sort of things. And so I want to talk about the things that I've thought about in making Augusta Lawn Care have a plan in place that is ready for explosive growth and scales with the business as it grows. The number one thing for explosive growth, I got five of them today. The first one is cash is the fuel of growth. Don't run out of fuel, alright? If you're trying to Travel anywhere, whether it be on an airplane or in a car, on a boat, on a train, does not matter. You need fuel to get to a certain place. Especially if you want to go really fast. You definitely need to have a lot of fuel. If you want to go anywhere, you need fuel. And if you're going to have a business that is going to be explosive growth and just grow very, very fast, you must have fuel. If I'm driving a vehicle down the road and I'm just going from like 60 to 61 to 62 to 63, like a slow accele that doesn't take a huge amount of fuel, My economy is slower than just plateauing. But if I'm going to rev my engine and go from 0 to 60 in a matter of a few seconds, it's going to take a lot of fuel. Whether that's electric energy or whether it be gasoline powered energy, it takes a lot of energy and fuel to make that speed come that quickly, that acceleration. And when it comes to the acceleration of your business, whether it be sales, the number of people you hire, the number of stores you have, whatever it might be, if you're going to be having explosive growth, you must have cash, because cash is the fuel. And if you're going to accelerate really quickly, the same way as in a vehicle or in a plane or whatever, you must have a lot of fuel in the tank, that is cash to grow your business fast. Far too often people literally will grow too quickly for the cash reserves that they have in place and will run out of cash. And therefore, even though the business might have been profitable, even though it might have been going in the right direction, even though it might have been going at a great speed because the acceleration was too high and the supply or the demand for fuel was greater than the supply of it, that is the supply of cash was not good enough for the demand that was needed to continue that acceleration, they literally peter out and die. And so you do not want to do that. You want to make sure you have enough cash in the bank or you make sure you're profitable enough, fast enough so that it can be a self fulfilling machine. Like same thing with a solar energy vehicle, for example, you can keep driving with that vehicle because bringing energy in from the sunlight, assuming that it's sunny outside, the same way for a profitable business, if you want to use the profits from your business to accelerate growth, that's a very, very sustainable way to move. All right, It's a very sustainable way to grow because you're having your profit that is the sun. You're taking that energy and plowing it into acceleration. If you have no sunlight, if you have no energy, if you have no cash, you have no fuel to make sure that that acceleration continues. So the number one thing is cash is the fuel of growth. Do not run out of fuel. You must either have cash reserves on hand as you go into that explosive growth, or you must make sure that you become profitable fast enough to make sure that the, the growth of the business becomes fueled by the profits that the business produces. Number two, planning for explosive growth is leadership and coordination of the team. All right, this leadership probably going to fall on you. It's going to fall on your team of executives or management. And you've got to constantly have that leadership and that coordination of the team being focused on the why. Why is this business existing? Why are we growing so fast? Why? What's the mission or the vision behind this company? So for example, even at franchisee training, the very first slide I showed was talking about the vision and the why of Augusta Lawn Care, which is a change, the level of professionalism in the landscaping industry. I did that because I know that as we have explosive growth and we start to get hundreds of franchisees in the next couple years, there's going to be initial franchisees that begin to wonder why I'm doing certain things, why I might make a certain decision or make a certain strategic move. And what they need to know is that the why of the company is our set, our North Star, the thing we're driving towards. If I can't keep them focused on that, I get them focused on short term profits or like beating competitors. If those are the finite game that we're playing, if those are the short term decisions that we're making, we are never going to be able to have explosive growth, become sustainable and become a way that everyone can thrive in the environment. So making sure that leadership and coordination of the team is focused on the why, the mission, why this business is growing, why we want to grow. Like if you don't have a why behind, if you don't have a reason for the growth, the massive growth that your business is having, it becomes absolutely not sustainable because the team and the coordination of that team and the organization begins to fall apart when people start questioning decisions that are made during that time of growth. The third thing you must do if you're planning for explosive growth is more of a warning. I guess this one is, and that is don't over anticipate, don't allow delusional thinking. To cloud your planning. All right? So, for example, we're growing really, really fast. We have what we call a command center, where for our franchisees, we can take all their calls, we can set them up for estimates, we can answer estimate request forms from their website, we can answer chatbots on, on their website. We can do all of that for them in house. So we have all these franchisees doing their thing and we can take all their calls and all those sort of things for them. It's a huge resource for the franchisees. However, as we grow really fast, my decision I have to make is how big of an office space and what kind of infrastructure are we going to build now and how long is that going to last us? Because I'm going to look at office space tomorrow for like 10 or 15 different offices, right?

Ranging wildly in cost and square footage. Now, in one regard, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to plan for explosive growth, so I'm going to get something five times bigger than what we need right now. Well, this is when planning is so important, because five times bigger, maybe I don't need five times bigger, but I definitely don't want to just get what I need now because we're going to outgrow it within six months. So then it becomes another very important thing. Not to be delusional, all right? I am not going to think, okay, we're gonna get to 2,000 franchisees in the next 12 months. That's delusional. If I was planning for that type of growth, if I was delusional in that regard and over anticipating the demand for my product, my service, if I was doing that, I would go out and get a building that was 40,000 square feet, had enough room for 300, 400 employees. That's not where we're at. And that'd be a very good example of over anticipating and being delusional simply because of early fast growth. So if you're planning on explosive growth, that's one thing. But do not over anticipate and just completely give over to the fact that everything's gonna continue going exponentially, everything's gonna keep growing and growing at the same rate. You don't know if there's an economic recession. You don't know if there's gonna be some sort of legal thing in your industry you from growing. You don't know those things. So to be delusional or risk the farm and bet the farm on the fact that your explosive growth continues for a long period of time is not wise. Make sure that it's going to obviously sustain the growth by being big enough, for example, like our office space, I want to make sure it's big enough for us to stay in it for a couple years at least. But I'm not planning for 10 years down the road. I'm not planning for something that I feel might even be achievable but is going to put us in the hole for a long period of time. Alright? So don't over anticipate the demand for your product and services and don't allow delusional thinking to cloud your planning that should be used for this explosive growth. Number four is kind of also a warning too. And that is steps to growth is safer than explosive growth. Alright? So if I'm trying to get 100 stories high, there's two different ways to get there. I can either take steps and it takes me a little bit longer. But I'm usually on like a building. I'm on something that's been built on concrete and rebar and steel and has a foundation and has been tested. And so it's a lot. It's much more safe for me to go on steps slowly to the top of 100 flights than it is for me to take a rocket, like a rocket and shoot up 100 stories high. It is safer for me to be on the stairs and walk up the hundred stairs going step by step by step by step. It might be cool. I might get more pr, I might get more fanfare if I take a rocket. But taking the rocket, it's gonna be faster too. Getting the top of that hundred flights of stairs is going to be faster in the rocket, but it's gonna cost more money and it's going to be much more risky. All right? So I much more prefer rapid growth. I'd rather be running upstairs and increasing the amount of energy I put into running up the stairs. But having mechanism, the tower, the stairs being built on concrete and rebar, that would be firm foundations of systems and procedures and making sure it's concrete instead of just taking a rock and be like, I can get there faster. I can get there, you know, I can pour a bunch of money into it. It's gonna take me a lot more money to take a rock at 100 stories high than just to walk up the stairs. The same thing goes for a business. Trying to get there faster is gonna take more money, it's gonna take more risk. And so I am much more of the opinion that I would much rather take a tried and true with systems and procedures to get to the hundred flights of stairs and I'm going to channel my energy, my work ethic, my leadership style. I'm going to try to channel that to get there faster. Not just pouring on more fuel of cash to try to get to the top as fast as possible. Generate a bunch of publicity, generate a bunch of people watching me, generating a lot of I'm the best person in the world because I used a rocket. Just use the stairs, use the tried and true and put your energy and time into making sure you just move faster and be lean and nimble. Alright? So that kind of goes in our number five. The fifth thing of planning for explosive growth and is flexibility of the plan and the team. Alright? So it could take you a lot longer to walk up those stairs than it is to take that rocket to the top of the tower. Okay? But like I said, it's safer and it's cheaper and requires less resources to go up the stairs. However, I want to still have really great growth. I want to grow the business really quickly. What am I going to do? I'm going to have flexibility, okay? Instead of going step one step at a time, maybe I go two steps at a time. Maybe there's a way that I can have someone help me get up the stairs faster. Maybe I can have resources like a water bottle or I can have an oxygen tank that is going to help me somehow get to the top that tower faster. And so flexibility of the plan and the team is what's going to allow you to continue to have explosive growth, even in a safer mechanism that has systems and procedures. Like we're talking this analogy of the tower versus the rocket, okay? So the flexibility of the team is very important. If we're gonna have a really explosive growth in your business, you're going to need a team that is able to change quickly. Because if you're having explosive growth and you go from five employees to 20 employees, to 50 employees, to 200 employees over the course of several years, you are going to completely be changing your business model every year. Like five employees do not operate like 20. It's a completely different dynamic. There's more hierarchy at 20. There's different strains and pressures on leadership. You have to have mid level managers. Like it gets bigger and you go at 50, then you go to 100 and 200. The more employees that you have and the bigger that the company becomes in revenue, the more suppliers you have, the more office space that you have, the more overhead that you have, the more vendors you have, the more relationship you have. With your community, all of those things are happening. And it requires the team to be flexible and have constant interactions and iterations of the plan. So you might have a plan to go in a certain direction. And you say, following this plan, we are going to have really fast growth. But if you actually are going to sustain the explosive growth, you have to have a team and you have to have a plan in place that's flexible enough to change and adapt and be malleable. All right, we've all heard of the experiment where there was marshmallows and toothpicks put in front of a bunch of kindergartens, college students, and then people with their MBAs, and they were asked to, basically they had, I think it was like 10 minutes to build as high a structure as possible that would be freestanding. And the worst, the people who operated the worst were the college students. The people who made the best. The highest structure were kindergartens. And the reason they said that they were the best, the most successful at building these structures out of marshmallows and toothpicks is because right when they got their materials, they just started putting stuff together and trying to build it. And they would fall over and then they'd do it again and fall over again. And then they learn a little bit more and put it together again and fall over again. And what were they doing? They were allowing their plan to be flexible. They were allowing their team to be flexible. They wouldn't necessarily have a CEO. Okay, Mr. CEO, on this table we have these marshmallows, we have these toothpicks. You are the one person that's going to govern where everything goes. That's not how they operate. They were flexible in their teamwork and they were flexible in the plan of creating the structure. Therefore, it allowed for more iterations of that process. And so if you're going to have explosive growth, if you're gonna build the tallest building, you need to be constantly be trying new things. You're constantly gonna be changing the plan and the growth trajectory of your business. And maybe right now you have a five year plan, a ten year plan. But if you're gonna have explosive growth, you need to have a team and a plan in place that's flexible to change and is going to be willing to experiment with things and allow things to fall down and break and pick them back up and learn from it and keep going and be strategic in their planning and being flexible in that plan. And so those are the things you're going to want for explosive growth. Number one, cash is the fuel of growth. Number two, you need leadership and coordination of the team that focuses on why and really does not allow other distraction to get in the place of that. Most of the time, that short term thinking and a lot of times when you look at publicly traded companies that have explosive growth, their demise is Number two, their leadership and coordination of the team is not centered and focused around the why the vision of the business and why it exists. Number three, don't over anticipate and don't allow delusional thinking to cloud your planning. Number four is steps to growth is safer and cheaper than explosive growth. Okay. Funnel your time and energy into your work ethic to get up the stairs faster instead of just taking a bunch of resources and a bunch of attention and trying to shoot up to the top with some rocket and going there super, super fast. Number five is the flexibility of the plan and the team allows for more iterations and flexibility that plan to get to the place you want to go and it's absolutely required if you're going to continually have explosive growth in your business. If you don't have any of those five things, I'd love to talk with you, see what your thoughts are on this. If you want to join the Facebook group Small Business Owners of America and you'll see in parentheses Business Boot Camp, I'd love for you to join on there. Ask your questions about these five steps. What are you working on? Where are you struggling with? If you're a landscaper, by the way, and you're listening to this podcast, you really need to listen to Landscape Business Course. A lot of you have been listening and trying to join Small Business Owners of America and I'm trying to keep the landscapers out of Small Business Owners of America. You need to join Landscape Business course and the Facebook group there as well as listening to the Landscape Business Course podcast. So Small Business Owners of America is more for all the other industries that we don't serve with Landscape Business course and everything that we do there on that Facebook group and podcast. So anyways, until next time guys. Be great. Nothing else pays. I'm Mike Andes. You're listening to Business Boot Camp podcast.