Do THIS if You Want to Scale Your Business
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 27th, 2023
Had a thought-provoking chat with a budding entrepreneur the other day that I just had to share.
We tackled the age-old question: “What if my business idea doesn’t scale?”
Here’s the deal: fretting over scalability from the get-go is like putting the cart before the horse.
Instead, focus on honing your skills and building a solid foundation. Scaling comes later.
Obsessing over scaling can be a trap and I share about this more in this episode with some real-life examples from my own journey.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Do things that don’t scale, and that leads to scale.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
I was talking to a kid the other day on a strategy call. I like to take one or two strategy calls every month with people who are building businesses and, you know, starting off on their entrepreneurial path. So just kind of get a perspective of like, what are people thinking and doing out there? And I was having this conversation with him and he said something which I’ve heard so many times before, but for whatever reason, this time, like, it just like set me off and I wanted to do an episode on it and just talk with you about this real quick. He was really concerned about what path he was going to pursue, which business idea, which market he was going to step into. And he was asking interesting questions, but he was getting hung up on the stupidest question of all, which is, it’s not even really a question. But the fear that he had was like, what if I pick something that doesn’t scale? And the truth is, that’s the worst question to ask at this point in your journey when you’re brand new is like, don’t pick the opportunity that scales. First of all, if you’re a brand new entrepreneur, you’ve never built a business. It doesn’t matter if it can scale or not.
You don’t have any of the skills that are going to allow you to scale it. And so your first business, your first two, three, four businesses are kind of, I look at them almost as like, practice businesses, growaway businesses, where it’s like, don’t go for the billion dollar idea. Go for the one that you can turn into a six figure opportunity or into a seven figure opportunity so you can learn how to build a seven figure company, because you can’t be concerned about building the nine or ten figure business until you know how to build a seven and an eight. Maybe you’re in the tech startup world, and in that case, you need to go for the unicorn opportunities. But for the vast majority of people, I don’t recommend that path because there’s a more surefire way to generate a great return on your time and your energy, make good money and have a good lifestyle. And that’s by building sexy businesses that you’re not worried about scaling to the moon and being like the next 10 billion decacorn. Right? So instead of that question, instead of focusing on can the scale, the real question is, do you have the skills that can scale the business and so go work on those first, rather than worrying about whether or not you have the right idea. And to that end, I believe that you can scale any business opportunity like there are 100 million dollar roofing companies.
There are 100 million dollar landscaping businesses. There are 100 million dollar dentist office. Right? Like, any business can be scaled to $100 million. But the secret to scaling in the beginning and to this gentleman’s question about which opportunity, I’m like, pick one. And then you need to go in there and not worry about scaling, because the things that will enable you to scale are the things that fundamentally do not scale. So what I mean about that is do things that don’t scale, and that leads to scale. So here’s an example. When we were building escape climbing and we were in the middle of operation Cannonball, this is an idea where, in nautical times, if you were on a boat and you saw a boat coming at you, they might be pirates, you might want to fight them, and you would be a fool to start firing your cannonballs at them, right? Because the reason is you haven’t triangulated the angle of attack yet.
And so a lot of your cannonballs, they’re going to miss by the time you finally zero in on your target, because you don’t have an unlimited supply of cannonballs, you might run out. And so the better path, because you can carry more bullets on your boat, is to fire bullets and use those to triangulate the angle of attack and then fire your cannonballs. Okay, so this is proving, first that there’s a company or business parlance that there is product market fit. Prove that you have some kind of product market fit and then worry about scaling. Okay? So at escape climbing, we spent a number of years proving that we had product market fit. And then in 2017, we decided to launch operation Cannonball. This was okay. We have hit the targets in these three domains, which was plastic climbing holes, wood training implements, and climbing hardware.
We knew we had product market fit in those three areas. Now it was a matter of scaling and getting to a large enough size that we could take a meaningful part of slice of the market share. Right now, to scale those three things, we had to do a lot of things that didn’t scale. In particular, one of the things on the marketing side that we did to go from doing $300,000 a year to doing $3 million a year, and this was just like, in the span of a year or two, the thing that I did was we went every single day to social media, in particular Instagram, because that is where a lot of our target audience lives. And we engaged on hundreds and hundreds of pieces of content that our avatars were putting out there. They were climbing, and they were sharing their climbing videos. And we’d go in there. It’s like, that’s an awesome video.
Hey, have you done this climb there? Have you gone to this restaurant? Have you checked out this hostel? We would go in there and we would add value and we would do that through the company’s brand escape climbing. And so hundreds of times, every single day, we would be leaving these comments. And this is effectively going one to one to one to one to our customers, our ideal customers. And we weren’t selling them, we weren’t pitching them our products. We were just adding value in being present. And then the result of that is they would get curious and they’d click and then they’d look at our Instagram and they go, oh, you guys are doing this stuff. Let me go look to the website. And then that would lead to sales.
Remarkable. And if nothing else, it would lead to goodwill, because now we’re engaging with them, part of the community, and they see us as part of their network. Right? This is how we scaled our marketing engine to the point where we actually had to stop our marketing engine because we couldn’t keep up with the demand on the manufacturing and operations side. Good problem to have. But we got to that place by doing things that fundamentally did not scale. Okay. And I hope that example really drives home the importance of, like, if you want to go to the moon on your business, you’re going to have to do things that don’t scale until you get to the point where the scaling comes in your ability to hire and train people to backfill for you. I only have so many hours in a day, I can go and leave comments on Instagram, right? But I can hire a guy to do that.
I can hire two guys to do that. And that is where the scale comes. So hopefully this helps reframe a little bit of maybe what your expectations are for how to scale a business. Because in the beginning, until you get to honestly, this still works. As we are on the cusp of a nine figure real estate private equity firm. This type of one to one action, it’s invaluable. I don’t know how to put it any other way, guys. So stop worrying about so much, about the exponential growth and the things that will take you to the moon.
Focus on get your boots in the dirt, go fight hand to hand. That is the way to grow your business. That’s what I found, at least. So hopefully this brings you some value. Guys, I appreciate you as always, for being here. Come back tomorrow. We’ll see you then.
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