How quickly can I scale my business?
When I work with entrepreneurs, especially ones wanting to leave their jobs, the most common question I hear is, “How quickly can I build sustainable revenue if I work with you?”
And I usually answer like this:
“Depending on your capacity and available time to work on your business, I can tell you with some certainty how long it will take you to build the bones, the infrastructure of your business to get you started / to move to the next step / etc.
That’s in (y)our control.
What neither you or I can control? How quickly that infrastructure will build into sustainable revenue.”
Why do I say that?
Because getting to sustainable revenue is just as much about luck (especially in the early days) as well as skill.
Here, I'm inspired by Morgan Housel's book The Psychology of Money, and his talk about luck and skill.
Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take. - Morgan Housel, “The Psychology of Money”
In Housel’s book, he tells the story of Bill Gates. Bill Gates was clearly a genius with Microsoft. But Gates happened to go to high school at Lakeside School in Seattle, in 1968, where Lakeside had a computer terminal that most university graduate programs didn’t have, and he quickly became a computing expert.
Housel writes, “One in a million high-school age students attended the high school that had the combination of cash and foresight to buy a computer. Gates is staggeringly smart, even more hard-working, and as a teenager had a vision for computers that even most seasoned computer executives couldn’t grasp. He also had a one in a million head start by going to school in Lakeside.”
Where could luck play a role?
When we look at entrepreneurs that seemed to just “make it work” early on in their journey, what could be at play?
They found an early client from their pre-existing personal network that brought them into a lucrative or multi-year contract.
They worked with a client that turned out to be a super connector or incredible referral source. For example, you are an accountant or operations manager and bring on a business coach as a client who runs a growing program. You’ll end up being the “go to” for many of that business coach’s clients, without having to rely as much on your own organic marketing.
You are taken under the wing or signal-boosted by someone with a much larger audience that catapults you into a larger spotlight.
You get lucky on timing. You were early to the TikTok party, started making threads on Twitter or carousels on LinkedIn before the masses. Or tapped in to a social movement that’s not predictably replicable.
Yes, timing and network building is a real skill, especially when looking to the future about what moves you want to make and how you intentionally make connections and grow your network.
But if you weren’t in business in 2015, you can’t go back in time to when IG was quickly growing and FB Ads were cheap. And you can’t go back in time and make an pre-existing personal relationship to a client that happens to be be a steady pipeline of referrals.
But where does skill come into play?
But let’s say you don’t have that pre-existing network, or immediately tap into a referral stream early on.
This is when we lean into skill, and unfortunately, time.
You keep building your systems around marketing such as consistently meeting new people (like at my monthly dialogues!), intentionally expanding your network, and building relationships.
We dive into our creative practice, aerating our ideas by shipping longer-form writing/audio/video content regularly. As my mentor Jay says, “it’s like Mean Girls rules. But instead of ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink’, it’s ‘On Fridays, we ship.’”
You build your skill of sales, including increased confidence in pricing, writing proposals, writing copy, and improving how you navigate the sales process.
You deliver quality work that goes up in price with increased efficiency as your skills in your craft go up over time.
You refine your messaging and positioning as you work with more clients and see more patterns.
We play the long game with our financial runway, even taking up part-time work as we build our business. Full disclosure - I did this for the first two years, taking on sub-contract consulting roles from my prior network.
Over time, our effort begins to compound.
Maybe the first client doesn’t become an immediate referral partner. Or your first conference talk doesn’t go viral.
But the seventh client does.
Or the tenth talk or twentieth podcast guest spot hits.
Or you are referred to a community that opens up doors as as you grow.
That client you had a sales call with two years ago comes back to work with you.
We increase our odds for luck when we increase our chances for luck by staying in the arena, showing up consistently (whatever that means for you and your capacity), addressing the gaps in our processes, improving our craft, and doing the foundations repeatedly over time.
And that is the definition of skill.