When what got you here won’t get you there - the discontinuity point before scale
You might be thinking about some initial plans for growth, like how to keep growing your business, how to make your current revenue level more sustainable and profitable, or how to even transition or sunset lines of business.
And in many cases, to achieve your intentions you need just to keep doing what you’re doing, benefitting from the effects of time and compounding awareness of your business. Sometimes it’s small tweaks to what you’re doing, strengthening a process or adding something new in.
But for some of you, you’re facing a crossroads in your growth plans, where what got you here won’t get you there.
You’re at a threshold in your business where what you were doing in your business currently will need to markedly shift in order to keep growing or scaling.
This is what we call a discontinuity point - a step change where the foundations of your business like your strategy, your systems, the questions you ask, and places you focus as the owner all change significantly.
And I don’t think there’s a clear awareness of when those shifts happen - and what you need to navigate through that transition.
The first key discontinuity? When you start adding leverage to your business model.
If you’re a delivery-based business, you are probably operating as a soloist likely up until the $125K-$250K revenue mark in your business, depending on your line of business, positioning, and revenue structure.
By this time, you may have brought on a team for administrative support, for accounting and tax, potentially for a specific portion of your marketing. But, you’re probably still offering 1:1 services as the primary face to your client, often in one location.
What changes at this point? You start adding leverage to your business model, where you start decoupling your revenue from your own time. Your business model shifts.
Adding client-facing resources or second practitioners: You add account or project managers if you’re an agency, additional paralegal support or a second practitioner, or associate coaches/consultants if you’re providing a 1:1 service.
Expanding locations or service lines: You expand to a second location, leveraging the infrastructure, the systems, and the brand you’ve built. Or maybe you add a service line and bring in an expert to run that line of business.
Changing business models to a leveraged or scaled delivery model: At this point, you might switch to group delivery, courses, or a membership model to create leverage for your time.
And what shifts at this point?
Adding this leverage, particularly in the form of other people working with you in your business, adds complexity to all of your systems. These aren’t the tech systems, necessarily. These are the big-S Systems that span our businesses.
Financial Systems: When you’re a soloist, you get to make financial and pricing decisions based on your own take home needs and base hourly rates. But the questions shift when you have a team member delivering services. You’ll ask questions like, “What should I be pricing now? How can I know what I should be paying them, while also still paying me? What’s my plan to keep them paid if business slows down? How can I proactively manage my cash - not just looking at my bank account?”
Prioritization and Planning Systems: When it’s just you in your business, you can keep your projects and tasks in whatever format you want, and you can change priorities when you need to. But when you’ve got a team member delivering services or managing course delivery, you shift from doing the work to setting clear expectations about priorities, deadlines, and capacity in concert with one or more humans. The complexity increases exponentially with each person. And this shifts where you, the owner, spend YOUR time.
Delivery Systems: You know the quality you provide to your clients with your service and delivery. But now, you’re focused on the ways to ensure that same level of quality when delivered by a partner, a team, or a second location. We get into the land of process, templates, tools, and automation. You’ll be setting communication standards, templates, feedback loops, and brand voice guides, oh my!
People Systems: There’s such a freedom in being a soloist - you just have to manage you! But as you bring on core team members, it’s time to think about how you manage team members not just as contractors but as people. What’s their onboarding plan, their development plans, your thoughts around leave and time off? How do you want to communicate with your team for both their work but business updates? How are you discussing performance and having those important feedback conversations?
Sales and Marketing Systems: When it’s just you, you handle all the sales and marketing. But as you bring on team members, do you have repeatable processes to handle sales at all stages of the client lifecycle, including renewals and expansions, and make sure you as the leader have the time - and know your targets - for your pipeline?
And across all of this, you’ll be implementing actual technology and tools for your team to stay aligned.
If I put you to sleep in the last section… sorry not sorry?
I spend a lot of time in online business land. SO MUCH focus goes in to the sexy growth marketing and sales strategies. Because, if you don’t have sales you don’t have a business, and so deservedly that's the focus of a lot of support and online education.
And honestly? Systems and operations isn’t sexy. You can’t manifest your way to strong infrastructure, and this behind-the-scenes work isn’t immediately apparent in your social media follower count or newsletter subscribers. Some of this work really can’t be taught at scale because what you need to implement depends on your business structure, so it gets neglected by gurus who want to teach “one growth formula” to hundreds of students at scale.
But if you see yourself nodding along to these upcoming shifts in your business… make sure your plan incorporates these three ways to bridge the discontinuity point.
Strategy: Where are you going?
When you’re at a discontinuity point, you need to truly decide what comes next. What role do you want to play in your business, what is your ultimate vision, and what are the assets you have - and the bottlenecks based on your business - that need to be accounted for?
Take some time (by yourself or with a guide) to create your forward-looking sales, revenue, and cost plan for the year, factoring in the time it takes to ramp up revenue at this step. And define the key markers you need to hit along the way, like knowing you can hire/expand when you have $X amount of cash in the bank and Y number of clients or people on the wait list.
Identify your bottlenecks, the systems from above that will need to be strengthened or restructured based on the decision you make for growth.
Skills: What do you need to learn?
As someone who went to a top-tier business school, let me say it louder for people in the back: NO ONE TEACHES THIS STUFF, EVEN IN BUSINESS SCHOOL. So unless you spent time in an organization that had strong modeling about how to think about these systems, you probably never learned these skills.
I encourage you to stop saying, “I should know how to do this already” - because again, no one is taught any of this stuff - and ask, “what skills do I need to learn now?”. Look at the list above with curiosity and prioritize your learning path. You’re excellent at your craft, because otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten this far. This is the stage to skill up in business.
Support: What is the right support structure for you?
The one common problem that everyone at this level faces: time. You’re too busy to do anything that isn’t immediately applicable to your business, because you had to carve out precious time to do the work, to show up live, and so you need the interactions to be valuable.
So get curious - what level and structure of support do you need as you go through this?
Do you need the mastermind with live group coaching, do you need “on call” 1:1 sessions with a trusted guide, do you need skill-based trainings to make you do the uncomfortable systems work above, or do you need a community that shares tools and techniques that can be done asynchronously?
Everyone has different skills they bring to the table. At this stage, support is often not one size fits all (if it ever is?), and knowing what you specifically need to make the transition is the best way to maximize your investment of time, money, and attention.
If you’re at this point in your business… consider whether custom Deeper Business support is right for you.