Episode 040 - Ways To Scale Your Small Business

Don't look for that, we want to get to like a million in 5 years, right? That's too far away. It's where are we at now? What do we want to go to next? So if it's like, you know, $5,000 a month in revenue, we'll use that, and you want to get to like $10,000, right? That's the first step. And let's try to get to that. What can we do to get that? Those little steps are going to be, you know, a lot easier to obtain. All right, here we are, episode number 4-0. 4-0. I know this is gonna be better than when I turned 40 because that was a bad time to do that, which was this year, just so you know.

I turned 20.

Oh, you're half my age. So we wanted to, to come up with an episode that was kind of, I don't know, Monumental, important, and I tasked you with that.

Yes, yes, you did.

And what are we talking about today?

Today we are talking about scaling your business and the difference between, you know, business growth and scaling.

All right, so what is the difference between business growth and scaling?

So, you know, growth obviously is, you know, more revenue, you're seeing more clients, but scaling is finding a way to make that easier on yourself and being able to take on more than you could in the past. So basically creating systems, softwares, hiring employees, whatever it is to make that, that business operation more efficient.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you look at it as you have a team of, let's say, 5 people and you're, you know, you want to grow your business, right? So you can find more clients, which means you have to grow your team, right, if you keep the things the way they are. But if you're more efficient, you have more processes, systems, templates, that kind of stuff, which means that existing team can actually do more in the time that they have and the resources that they have. So you can scale without actually increasing your overhead and, you know, having to take on more people yet.

Right?

So it's what I refer to as let's scale effectively internally first. Right? And that's where we're in that process right now in the business is we're trying to scale our social media services in a way that, you know, you and I can bring on in service and create better experiences for clients with the resources that we have.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, With every business, the fear of growing and scaling is maintaining the same amount of quality and the same value because when you think about growing, a lot of people can even be stubborn about growing their business or scaling their business because they're used to the way it works now. They have a good reputation and their clients are happy with them, but having that aspiration and that ambition to you know, grow and still maintain that same quality, you have— when you think about it, something has to give, right? So you either have to, you know, invest in people and technology or whatever it might be to make sure that you can maintain quality, value, as well as, you know, take on more.

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that a lot of small business owners run into when they start to scale is they can't get out of their own way, right? They they cannot relinquish that control, especially if they built that business themselves. It's been them for many years. You know, they, they then have a team and they know that they want to scale, they want to take on more. But in order to do that, you actually have to delegate and entrust your team to be able to, to do the things that you were normally doing, right? And if you don't want to give up that control, you are the bottleneck and you will never scale, you know, as effectively as, as you will. And, you know, if you're in a business where you're trying to scale and you aren't doing that, you may notice some some team turnover that's happening, and that is because people want to feel empowered, they want to feel that they're valued there. So when you say, okay, I want you to do this, but then you're micromanaging and you're always like on top of them that way, it's just not a great work environment to be in.

Exactly, and that's why you really have to take time and effort in considering applicants and, you know, the employees that you hire, because if you hire somebody that you don't fully trust or intend on delegating the stuff that they're hired for, then, you know, you're just wasting your money, right? And you're wasting your time, which we know is the most important resource we have in business.

So let's talk about the different things that you can do in business to kind of start to scale, right? I mean, you hear, I mean, if you did a Google search, like ways to scale your business, you'll see like a whole bunch of different articles that are gonna come up about that. And a lot of them are like how to scale from, you know what, 10,000, to like a million, right? That's a huge leap. That's a huge kind of hairy, audacious goal that you just, it's too much, right? But it's like, okay, well, if we are able to take 5 appointments in a day, right? How do we get that to 10, right? What can we trim? What are we doing that's kind of eating up our time? Is there parts of the whole process that you need to actually like, automate, right? Systematize so that you are making better use of your time. And that's one of the things is looking at listing out— have your team do that. Like, list out everything that you do, right, in that run of a day, a week, or month, or whatever that is, right? And then start to, as a group, categorize that as to, you know, can we put something in place? Can we cut it? You know, do we not need to do this, right? I think that's going to be, you know, your first step is figuring out where you are, drawing that line in the sand, creating that baseline.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like you said, it starts with a goal, right? So, you know, if you have your 5 clients a day and you want to get to 10, that's where you have to start, right? Is like, okay, so I want to have 10 clients, and then work backward from there. You know, at the very start, how are you going to make the changes to be able to have those 10 clients? Where are you spending the most time? Where are you spending— when are you wasting the most time? You know, what tasks are you doing? What things are mind-numbingly, you know, everyday tasks that could be automated. And, you know, are you generating the revenue that you can to invest in systems like Keep that, that can automate that for you and, you know, generate a huge return on your investment in terms of time? And then, you know, in turn, for time, you have the opportunity to take on more clients, to generate more leads.

Absolutely, and one of the things that we've invested in most recently is a social scheduling tool that's not only making your life more effective in scheduling content for clients, but the reason we, or one of the reasons that we chose it was that our clients can actually utilize the software themselves. So you don't actually have to have us, you know, on a retainer to do social scheduling. You can actually buy the software from us, and it's proprietary to agencies like ours to be able to offer it. So, you know, if you're a small business, you can't just go buy this software. But there are some efficiency tools in there, you know, like auto-scheduling where you can just drop content in and it's set up on a schedule and it will start to post out automatically based on the days that you want it to come out, which is a great way to start scaling, you know, your time away from your social media and focus on those revenue-generating tasks for existing clients.

Exactly, and I mean, the thing that, attracted us to this new tool was the fact that it simplified things. And I think that's the very basis of scaling your business is learn how to simplify things because that's going to save you time, that's going to make it easier to take on new clients, it's going to make it easier to, you know, provide that value and be consistent, most importantly, with every client that you have. You know, Shaun and I were on the meeting with this, the person who, the ambassador, I guess, for the new software, and we're, you know, sitting there texting each other like, So excited about all of the options that it had. You know, it connects automatically to Google Drive, which that right there can save, you know, an unimaginable amount of time in terms of uploading and, you know, downloading content. So it really did simplify things. And, you know, the amount of time that we'll save is, you know, very valuable to us now.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that we're looking to scale is obviously servicing new Keep clients. That are coming on board and keeps that CRM marketing automation tool. So when clients come on board, we want to get content in front of them to help them get up started, you know, more effectively and fast. And prior to that, I would have recorded videos, downloaded them, uploaded them to Vimeo or YouTube, built a page on our website, and then use those to send out the clients. So there's a lot of steps that were involved. You know, about a month and a half ago, we switched from from Loom for screen recording to HippoVideo, which comes with landing pages. So you can actually record videos, fully hosted landing pages. So it took all those steps out of the, out of the process. And now we know that we can create videos and have the link for a fully hosted landing page the way we want it branded with options for people to book, you know, in our calendar for them to do video replies, stuff that we would never have that easily been able to create. So the time saving was huge, and now it's going to allow us to scale more effectively and faster.

Absolutely. And I think a big part of, you know, the whole process is, you know, determining when is the right time to scale. So, so what for you, Shaun, are those key indicators that a business or, you know, even in your experience that your business is ready to scale?

Yeah, and I think, you know, and every business is different. But I think usually it comes up when, you know, somebody is at the point as a business owner where you're just, you know, you've kind of felt that intuition. And I know it's like, you know, the hokey pokey, like you got that feeling, but it's like, you know, you'll know when you're ready to take it to the next level. And I'm going to use that word next level very effectively because it's like, don't look for that. We want to get to like a million in 5 years, right? That's too far away. It's where are we at now? What do we want to go to next? So if it's like, you know, $5,000 a month in revenue, we'll use that, and you want to get to like $10,000, right? That's the first step. And let's try to get to that. What can we do to get that? Those little steps are going to be, you know, a lot easier to obtain that way. You know, if you track stuff like, you know, the amount of time spent on free consults, like how much time is your team spending on that? Can we reduce that down? You know, it's those little things, you know, cutting efficiencies and making them, you know, more effective for your team and yourself is going to help you kind of scale all different elements of it. Um, you know, another thing is if you're following your financials, which you should, it's like, you know, is your, is your profit margin starting to kind of come down because you're spending too— your expenses are getting too high? Right? You're spending too much time doing stuff that's not revenue generating. So can we reverse scale? Can we scale back the expenses? Right? Which in turn is going to up your, your profit margin. I mean, this pandemic that we had was a huge thing for us in our business because we weren't spending as much anymore. We weren't doing, you know, excessive traveling for, you know, meetings, we weren't doing, you know, video shoots as much. We were able to do more online, which brought our expenses down, which brought the profits up, right? So we scaled without actually trying to scale. Yeah, right. So, so you can scale back in a positive way.

Yeah, yeah. And I, I think there's this idea that business owners, um, or small businesses are always going to be stressed and overwhelmed, but And to a certain degree, that's certainly true. But I think the thing that people miss is that when you're feeling that overwhelmed stress, a lot of times you can find weight. That's a big sign that you can scale because there's so much on your plate or you're not being efficient. But like you said, scaling back with going through and planning and simplifying things and making them run efficiently. You know, that's a big sign that you're, you're ready to invest in technology or you're in desperate need of automation or any tool that you have to, or any tool that you can get to, to really make your business more efficient and take away that stress and that overwhelmed feeling.

Absolutely. Now, the other side too is looking at, you know, Scheduling your week, right? So, you know, we're talking about being more efficient in things. You know, if, if you offer a free consultation, which we do for anyone— if you want one, go to our website and you can get one— but if you opened up your calendar for the entire week and said, okay, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, you know, they can book any time in there, your team has to kind of get in a different mind shift every time that they go into a free consult versus working on a client project. And one of the exercises I did a couple of years ago when it was just me was let's look at maybe booking Mondays or Fridays as free consults and leaving that middle chunk for client-based work. And that was huge because I knew from Tuesday to Thursday when I came in to work, I was focused on revenue-generating projects. It was all client work. There was not free consults that are in there. And if you've done free consults before, you're hit or miss. Some people show up, some people don't. They're, they're not the right fit. You don't know you're qualifying them. And if you have to jump from strategic client work to just conversation sales mind back to strategic, there's a cost to transition that happens, right? And in last, yeah, last episode, episode 39, we talked about difficult clients and how they, they're sending you just stuff sporadically. And if you got to get into the mindset, go ahead and make that little update and then stop, and then go in the next day and do it, right? You're not as effective and you're burning time, right? So your ability to scale is just not there.

Yeah, exactly. You know, time is of the essence, as with pretty much everything. And I mean, another big thing too that we reiterate time and time again in our blog posts and on our social channels and, you know, um, throughout podcast is data and the metrics side of things, right? If you don't have something that's tracking your business growth, you know, no matter what area or industry or whatever your business is, if you don't have that data and that metrics, it's gonna be 10 times harder to scale and 10 times harder to know, you know, all the deciding factors and, you know, if the efforts that you are taking to scale and grow your business, whether or not they're working, you know, you won't have that concrete information that is gonna really help you to make, decisions in a less stressful and, you know, taking away the guessing game.

Yeah, absolutely. So, do you have anything else to add about scaling?

I don't think so, Shaun. The one question I did have for you though was when did you realize you wanted to scale? Because I know recently, you know, taking me on, that obviously is scaling, and I'm just wondering what factors were running through your head and what did you notice about your business that that you made that final decision?

Um, for me, I mean, I always had a vision that I wanted to grow the business, and it was never like I wanted to have a team of 50 people and making like $10 million in sales because I knew to get to that point, I would be pulled out of the business. I would be in that CEO level where you're just having— making high-level business decisions, right? And you didn't actually get to be working with the clients, which I absolutely love to do. But there was a point where I was like, okay, I'm maxed out. My time is maxed out. You know, by the end of the day, you know, there was still more that I could be doing, right? And what came down to me was the industry and the, the client demand for social media services was still there, and I was always being asked, and I was turning it away. I was not turning it away because I didn't want to do it. I was turning it away because I just didn't have the time to do it. Right, right. So that was like, it is time to scale, right? The demand was there, um, and you know, you came into the picture and now we're like, okay, now how do we take this and effectively scale that portion of it, right? And for us, you know, my specialty and my experience has been 10 years with, with previously Infusionsoft, now switched to Keap, same software, just different brand. Um, and it's like, okay, that's a very specialized offering. But those clients also need social media, and the people who need social media services can utilize what we can bring with Keep. So it's like, here's a perfect combination where we have a duo team now that has their area of specialty but understands both parts, right? So, um, that was the, the natural part of it. And then also, if you're looking to scale a team, look for programs in your area, you know, that offer incentives or benefits on wage. I mean, we got a government program that subsidizes some of your wage because you came right out of school. Those programs exist. Whether it's new hires out of school or maybe it's people who are unemployed, there's programs to get those people back into the workforce. If your issue is with wondering can you afford that, look for that help. Realizing it is an investment first. So, you know, it's going to take several months to start to, to, to take that scaling and generate that revenue. It's not the moment you decide, okay, tomorrow we're going to start scaling and suddenly your revenue spikes. It doesn't happen. So you got to be aware to start to, to invest that. And for me, it was because of this pandemic and I was able to cut the cost, there was some money in the bank that I knew we could go a couple months as a kind of an investment expense there to get things up and running. Right. Prior to that, it was always like you get things into the positive and then you got to pay your taxes and you go back to your line of credit and you go, right. And you're very familiar with that. If you've run a small business, you live and die off that line of credit and you just play it back and forth and back and forth. Yeah. So that's it.

That's it.

That's it. Enough said. So thanks for listening to this episode number 40. If you haven't subscribed, please do so. Go to our website, bluecowmarketing.ca, and you can book a consult with us there. We've got information about the services, the social media services, the software that we talked about in our packages. And obviously you can find us anywhere on social media, just search Blue Cow Marketing and we are there.