Mike Andes says early customers and employees fall in love with your business at its current size and resist the changes that come with growth. As you scale, hands-on service becomes impossible. Founders who lose sight of why they're growing will abandon it when pushback hits.
Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is that as you grow a business, there are other stakeholders in the business that might not be fit for the size of business that you're building. And they fall in love with the stage of the business that they joined at. And so whether it be employees or whether it be customers, they're going to fall in love with the business at the time that they joined. So let's just talk about customers for a second. Someone joins your service, you're the only person working, maybe one employee, you're able to have direct communication with them all the time. They have your personal cell phone number. If they need anything, they come directly to you. And customers, when they join, they joined because of you. They joined because of the business at that stage and that size. And so what naturally happens, business begins to grow. And no longer are you on their property. Now when they call in, they have an office person that answers the phone. Now they never see you on the property. And when they want to get a hold of you, they, you actually have systems in place to prevent them from actually being able to get a hold of you. And what can happen is we grow. And now instead of having 20 customers that we can have really personalized service towards, we now have 200 customers, we have 300 customers, we have 400 customers. All of a sudden now you're never actually doing the work. You're working on the business instead of in the business. And what can happen is these first 20 customers that joined when you were so hands on, they start to get unhappy, and they rightfully should because, because the business has become something different than when they joined. And you're going to get a few really, really bad emails, a few really, really unhappy customers saying that you've changed, quality is way less, and a whole lot of other things that actually, theoretically could actually be true. However, the question is, could you actually perform that same level of personalized service that they fell in love with for 400 customers? And the answer to that is no. And so as you begin to grow the business, realize that you're going to lose customers based upon the fact that they fell in love with the size of business that they joined at. And you're going to have to shed some of them and it's not fun, it's not exciting. And a lot of times they're very accusatory, that quality has dropped. They can't get a hold of you. No one does the job just like you did. And in that moment it can be very tempting, like, oh man, they're right. And you can actually see, like you have now, proof because you have so many employees of things where things fall through the cracks, but where they don't do a great job, they make a damage case, they make a callback, they don't do the job exactly the way you'd want and you have evidence to actually back up their claims. And in that moment, it's very easy. Like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to restrict, I'm going to go back to being small again. And you start to doubt yourself. Do you have the fortitude and the confidence in your mission and goal and why you are growing the business? That's what it comes down to. You're just growing the business for the sake of, you know, having happy customers. You will be very affected. But the fact that when Mr. Jones, your second customer complains because now you have 400 customers, they're not getting their personalized service, just making customers happy isn't a great why? In my opinion, because what's right for the customer is not necessarily what's going to make them happy. Now, today, hear me out. Because if you got hit by a bus and they fell in love with you and the way you do your business and all the rest of it, now they're in the lurch. Now they have to find another provider. What if you get sick? What if you get hurt? What if you can't do service anymore because of a family issue and you have to be away for several weeks and now they, their property and their job can't get done. And so it's actually best for the customer usually is actually create systems, scale up and achieve your why that's outside of the business. It could be providing for your family. It could be able to make the business big enough so you don't have to work out in the field. It could be that you provide more jobs to the community. Whatever your why to the business is, stay laser like focused on that and ask yourself, in order to accomplish that, why do I need to grow the business? And if the answer to that is yes, you'll be more okay with the fact that you're going to have to shed off so of those early customers that hate the fact that you've changed employees. The same thing is true when employee joins. They went from another place of work and they joined you. They did because they are in love with the current state and size of the business. Which means as the business grows and you double, triple, quadruple your size of your business, there's going to be big changes, and they're no longer going to have that direct connection with you. And maybe you hired them, you were the one that actually interviewed them, gave them the questions, you onboarded them, you trained them up, and they fell in love with you. And now all of a sudden, there's 30, 40, 50, 60 employees, and you don't have the time to spend that much attention with them. You don't have the time to be able to coach them through things and talk about their weekend and them text you several times each evening and go over each of their jobs. You don't have the time for that. It can be very tempting when you have an employee that's been with you from day one or early on leave and say really mean things on the way out the door. It's very easy. But really question whether or not you should keep growing the business. And this is why it's so important to understand. Why are you growing the business? Because if you don't know the answer to that question, you will doubt yourself and you'll revert back to going back to the business being smaller. When customers and employees that fell in love with a previous stage of the business begin to have murmurs and say negative things about you, et cetera, it will happen. And so figure out why you're growing the business so that when this happens, not if, but when, because customers will leave, employees will leave because you've changed, the business has changed. When reality they fell in love with the stage of business when they joined as a customer or as an employee, they fell in love with that size of the business, and that's fine. They might not be able to move and improve their skills or change themselves as employees to be able to adapt to the bigger size, adapt to what you need them to become as a manager or to stay as your number two. But you have to stay like laser, like, focused on that mission. And why are you growing the business? If you don't know that, you will question yourself. And because customers will leave, employees will leave, they'll complain and they'll say they want it the way that it used to be. Hopefully that's helpful because I went through all those situations. Stay like laser, like, focused on that mission and you'll actually know why you're growing the business and not doubt yourself.
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