Scale versus Growing the Business

It’s an interesting shift in perspective when we begin to look at scaling business. Growing a business has a great deal of focus of creating a commercial profitable enterprise which will function without the business owner. Essentially the business owner has a blueprint for their business. In terms of scaling they can then look at where and how to scale it. Let’s take Ray Kroc and McDonalds, essentially having focused on the functionality and replication of the business. McDonalds today has over 37 thousand restaurants throughout 100 different countries and is reputed to feed 1% of the global population daily.

‘speedee service system’

The point here is the scalability of that first outlet in where the ‘speedee service system’ was introduced. Essentially Kroc applied the 4 key ingredients; leverage, scalability, opportunity and marketability to take McDonalds to the goliath it is today. When you take a look at these areas in direct relation to your business you’ll identify just what will be required to create scalability or indeed scale your business now.

Leverage is all about dividing to multiply. Doing the work once and getting paid forever is key here. How leveraged is your business right now? Is there a heavy reliance on you within the business? If there is you need to identify where and what needs leverage. Then look at the scalability in the context of the next sale costing less and was easier to make. This will in turn accelerate the direct growth and by virtue the business’s scalability.

The tough question here is when we look at the size of the opportunity. When you take into account the ease of making the sale, does that fit in your business? Or is your business the next greatest idea that, as yet, no one has heard of. Take a look at Zappos who built a massive business selling shoes. Finally how marketable is your product or service? Does it sell itself? It is about limiting the reliance on marketing and having a greater focus on the route to market. A focus here is achieving market share and becoming a brand name, which surprisingly isn’t quite as big a challenge as you may think.

Food for thought as we enter into 2019. Just how scalable is your business? There is a reason why so few businesses truly scale up, and is often a lack of belief in what can be achieved in one lifetime. So when you ask yourself what your business looks like when it’s finished just what could that be? If you’d like to join the conversation I’m going to be sharing my thoughts with a number of articles on LinkedIn this month.