Introduction
Oh, what if I fall?
Oh but my darling, what if you fly?
—Erin Hanson, young poet
Scaling a business has many similarities to swinging on the flying trapeze. I should know – as an adult, I have learned to do both.
On the trapeze, you must climb a 35-foot ladder to reach the top. Yes, it can be terrifying – but, just like growing your business, you must be willing to take many fearful risks in order to achieve your goals.
Once you make it up the ladder, you are standing on a platform that’s only a few feet wide. It is nerve wracking and, to some people, paralyzing. People often allow their fear or lack of direction to hold them back, and they are not willing to take the leap.
It is exactly the same in business when you are poised to expand and scale.
You have two choices at this point. One: You can gather your courage and break through to where all the riches are waiting – this experience is exhilarating, enriching, and tremendously rewarding. Or two: You can get stuck on the platform and tell yourself every reason why scaling is not a good idea. In this scenario, you go nowhere.
What will you choose to do?
I chose the first option, though it took some time to get there. I started my first business in college and, by the age of 25, I was already running my own national advertising and public relations firm. My clients included Fortune 100 companies such as Supercuts, Ben & Jerry’s, and Charlotte Russe. I was making great money, but I was working night and day. I should have been on top of the world, but I had no life of my own and, honestly, I felt miserable.
I recognized that my business needed a new model to continue its growth beyond my own individual efforts, but I didn’t know how. Years later, after a powerful wake-up call resulting from a near-fatal car accident and a failing marriage, I made a life-changing decision to walk away from the lucrative agency that was starving my soul and figure out how to get there – whatever that ultimately was going to mean.
The result was that I developed an innovative method of scaling that led to a much more impactful and meaningful business path, both personally and monetarily. I took a risk and have never looked back. Instead, I’ve moved forward to achieve even greater success through building and scaling nine additional businesses, generating millions of dollars. It is of even greater personal importance to me that along the way I’ve developed a business mentoring company that has helped thousands of other business owners around the world realize their full potential.
As many of us know and have already experienced, dreams can easily get shattered. (If you are among the few who haven’t yet, trust me when I say that you will. As you’ll discover in this book, setbacks and failure are not a bad thing.) Expectations sometimes need flexibility, a willingness to look at a challenge from a new set of eyes. Starting out with an innovative idea, seed money, hard work, hope, and confidence-building pep talks are all great assets – but they are certainly not guarantees for success. There are a great many variables affecting whether you and your business reach their full potential.
Growing your business is an even more daunting endeavor. You’ve made it through the early stages, you’ve built a client base, you’ve established some product recognition, you’ve seen some decent results, and maybe you’ve even managed to keep your cash flow somewhat consistent. But soon you find that the business is leveling off. Costs are rising. In order to achieve your long-term financial goals, you know you need to expand existing revenue streams or create new ones, or your company will stagnate and then sink. On the other hand, such expansion involves risk. As a rabbi once said to me, when I was discussing the pains of my marriage at that time, “Nothing worth having is ever easy.”
However, there are ways that you can stack the odds heavily in your favor. The scaling model described in this book – which has guided the success of many of my clients – is a practical, proactive approach that can also help you to shift your risk–reward equation. You have nothing to lose except a few hours invested in reading this book and applying its methodology.
What Is Scaling, Exactly?
When founders reach a certain point at which they feel as if they are chasing their tails and putting out fires, have unending To Do lists, and never have any free time, it becomes impossible for them to focus on the things that can actually grow their businesses. They’ve had success with their companies and with building revenue, but they just can’t seem to make the jump to the next level or even to hire the right people. It drives them nuts, taking all the wind out of their sales (pun intended!) and the fun out of their lives.
So, what does the word scaling mean for those founders – perhaps this group includes you – who can’t seem to get to that elusive next level? I like to think of this in terms of being able to grow your business while at the same time managing the expanding workload without sacrificing your level of performance, efficiency, and employee safety. In fact, if you are scaling properly, you are creating processes and workflows that improve all areas of your operation and save you a lot of time, money, and headaches. By adopting a scalable business model, you can generate huge profits without all the budgetary strains that overburden traditional growth models.
The goal of scaling is to build a replicable system for delivering products and services that allow businesses to increase their customer base without having to increase their overhead at the same pace. The traditional growth model has fostered a vicious cycle of inefficiency, causing companies to hit a wall that they cannot break through. For instance, a company gains a few new clients, so they hire more people to service those clients, adding costs at nearly the same rate that they’re adding revenue. The method in this book will show you how to grow, replicate, and expand while at the same time building a self-managed company that you can step away from for periods of time as it continues to soar. Most Fortune 500 companies are structured in a way that allows the CEOs to come and go without impacting the company’s success. This is a mere dream for most business owners, but in this book I am going to show you exactly how it can become your reality.
To me, successful scaling means that you get to a point in your business where you are flying higher with less effort and resistance – like a professional trapeze artist who creates more height, power, and momentum when he allows the physics of his leap, swing, and team to carry him to new heights. Let me explain how this concept works.
Scaling Away with the Greatest of Ease
Let’s start with a story, to illustrate my philosophy of scaling and how I find a great metaphor in the exhilarating world of trapeze artistry.
Years ago, when I was at a crossroads in my life, I happened upon the Flying Gaonas – a fifth-generation family of trapeze artists who performed with circuses such as the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus and the Big Apple Circus. Richie Gaona, a legendary trapeze artist himself, operates a training facility called Gaona’s Trapeze Workshop, where people from all over the globe are trained to “fly.”
Now, having been a gymnast back in high school, I became exhilarated at the prospect of trying out this physical – and seemingly dangerous – art form. I simply had to try this out for myself and take the leap, as it were. From that very first leap, I was hooked.
More than 18 years later and still going strong, I continue to climb up that 35-foot ladder to a narrow pedestal and stretch out into the air. In my mind I visualize the routine ahead of me as well as my safe landing, sometimes reciting to myself the lyrics from the song “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” – probably the most famous circus song ever, and written as a tribute to real-life nineteenth-century French trapeze artist Jules Léotard.
Below, a team of flyers and spectators watch with anticipation as I inch my toes to the edge of the platform. I draw in and release a deep breath and, an instant later, jump into midair. I somersault once … then twice (that is the plan) and, with the goal of just the right timing and finesse, clasp my arms gracefully with those of another trapeze artist, who is appropriately known as the catcher. And, because a trapeze artist should always seek to take her aerial feats to the next level, I repeat all of this motion again – only this time with a jump that is higher up, a swing with more drive, or an additional twist to push myself beyond what I thought I was capable of achieving. The goal in business and trapeze arts is to surpass what your mind wants you to believe you can accomplish while assembling the systems, processes, and team behind you so that you can soar. Like any team sport, it is the union of the individual’s determination, persistence, and finesse, intertwined with the right strategies and team to propel from.
Okay, my feet are now firmly back on earth. You are no doubt still wondering: What does all of this have to do with scaling? As it turns out, scaling a business shares a similar process to swinging on a trapeze – although of course it’s all planted on the ground.
Playing It Safe Isn’t a Business Strategy
As a businessperson, you must develop a clear vision, stretch yourself into unchartered territories, and sync gracefully with the right team. In both instances, tremendous amounts of fear are typically involved.
Because the scaling process and fear of the unknown and/or failure are so daunting and scary, business owners are often unwilling to take the leaps necessary to take their businesses to the next level and grow. And yet, calculated risk-taking is an essential part of success, which means that avoiding the scaling process due to fear of failure will completely paralyze and stagnate your business. This book is less about the prudence of weighing risk and reward – which, to be sure, is just plain smart to do – and more about failure caused by surrendering to the irrational fears, disorganized thought processes, and blindness to life-changing opportunities in favor of the status quo.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
—Helen Keller, author, activist, and lecturer
Consider the statistics. The “play it safe” mindset leads 34 million American business owners to avoid risk entirely and suffer from smallness. But what these business owners don’t realize is that playing it safe leads to unsafe results – missed opportunities, inability to meet demand, lost market-share, flat-to-declining performance, employee unrest and turnover – or, a business that could have been and would have been, yet never made the full commitment to fly, so to speak.
Even if such extreme outcomes don’t occur, the worst feeling for any entrepreneur is to settle on a shrinking vision – whether you are a fledgling or have been chipping away at it for many years. Chances are you came to this book because you began with big dreams and you continue to hold on tight to them. You want to stretch yourself, grow, and soar through the air like a trapeze artist.
I relate to all of this because I used to be one of the many entrepreneurs – perhaps like you at this moment – who was frustrated because I was stuck in overwhelmed mode. Things changed only when l began to stretch myself beyond what I had thought were my limitations. Channeling the same self-assurance I had when I leapt off the platform to catch the trapeze bar with my hands, I catapulted from being a small-time entrepreneur to the leader of a thriving enterprise.
Okay, I’ve Launched My Business – Now What?
When I was a struggling single mom, I had to get honest real fast about my illusions that I had a business safety net. Instead, I embraced the idea of transforming from an underdog small business owner to a powerhouse CEO. I was not savvy by any means in those early days, but I was smart enough to know what I did not know. I realized that, if I was going to fly into the unknown, I needed to surround myself with experts who had walked the walk before me. Just as I had found a top trapeze coach to help instruct and guide me to successfully fulfill that passion, I recognized I needed to do the same for my business. Looking back, finding the right advisors who “had been there, done that” and could give it to me straight was the best strategic move I ever made toward finding long-term success.
It’s possible you’ve heard this advice before in some form or another. In fact, you can find a lot of excellent advice if you are in start-up mode or are in the early stages of owning a business. But there isn’t as much help available once your business is off the ground. You may even feel like a forgotten entrepreneur trying to figure it all out on your own and ask yourself: “I made it here, but how the heck do I get there?”
What I have found from my own personal experience in building 10 successful companies over three decades – each one started from scratch and scaled up – and from sharing my process with thousands of business owners, is that there exists a certain place no one tells you about as you are growing your company. In fact, you may not even recognize you are there until you have been stuck for some time.
Entering Another Dimension
This vast nowhere land resides somewhere in the void between entrepreneur and enterprise. I liken it to The Twilight Zone TV show, except in this case it’s where so many small business owners inexplicably get lost and stagnant. To quote a line from the opening monologue of the classic TV series: “It lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”
There was nothing in the dark that wasn’t there when the lights were on.
—Rod Serling, screenwriter, playwright, and narrator of The Twilight Zone
Once you’ve crossed into the entrepreneurial Twilight Zone, you struggle to find your way out and think you are trapped there forever while fumbling through trying to build an enterprise. After many failed attempts landing you right back where you started, you start to feel like “the little engine that could” from the children’s book. When you ride on flat and steady land, you are cruising along. But when you hit the steep hills, you find you need a lot more horsepower, direction, and support in order to reach the top. You have shifted into playing a much bigger game with more pressure and greater responsibility, and it takes so much more resilience and fortitude to obtain a win. As in the Little Engine story, you hear your inner voice chant: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can …”
“Wait a minute,” the voice says to you. “I don’t think I can. I need larger wheels, a stronger engine, and more oomph to keep up with those bigger trains and make it through the entire journey.”
You really want to get up that hill – that is, grow your business – but nothing that you did starting out as an early entrepreneur seems to be working anymore – even when you pressed yourself harder. In all likelihood, you have your hands in every part of the business, wearing way too many hats in an effort to maintain control. Meanwhile, you are continuing to implement the same old strategies, management practices, and mindset that you used in the early days – which will not work as you get further along on your climb.
I’ll use another classic children’s story to illustrate my point. Do you remember in Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland when Alice blew up like a giant in the White Rabbit’s tiny house, with her arms and legs flailing through the doors and windows? When she was smaller, she fit just fine in the little house. Now that she has grown, she is busting out at the seams.
Apply that image to your business situation and you can see why things that used to work before have all of a sudden stopped functioning as expected. Products or services that used to sell are no longer selling. Systems that used to keep you in check are breaking down. Important tasks are slipping through the cracks and you are running around like a crazy person trying to hold it all together. And you are realizing that some of the employees who helped you so much in the beginning don’t have the skills or fortitude to take you to the next level.
Here’s the thing. You can’t build a bigger house upon the same foundation and beams as those of your smaller house. Similarly, you can’t double or triple your company’s revenue with the same bandwidth, thought processes, tools, and materials you used when you started. Amazon.com, Apple, Google, and even Disney all originated in garages years ago and have long since outgrown them. Imagine if they’d never left their garages – what do you think would have happened? Sticking to old habits is a recipe to fail, not scale, and they are no way to live your life, much less run a company.
That said, it is understandable why so many business owners keep banging their heads against a wall to figure out how to get to the next level while refusing to try anything new or different. We take action based on what we know and what we have done before, as if the past can predict the future. Certainly, there is a lot to be learned from prior experience. However, as is the case when it comes to most habits, it is often not about having learned with an eye toward enrichment, but rather, from unconscious programming that is far removed from any informed decision-making. Obvious examples of this occur all the time in everyday life and you don’t even realize it. How many times have you not consumed enough water during exercise and then felt dehydrated? Or how many times have you stayed up late to get work done and then were ragged and red-eyed for an important meeting the next day?
Letting Go of What You Know
In order to recondition your mind with new choices for expansion while you are in the Twilight Zone, chugging up the hill, and shedding your old business model, you must be willing to get out of your comfort zone and let go of everything you’ve been doing. Just as a trapeze artist must step off the platform and venture into the unknown with a completely different mindset than the one she had while her feet were on the ground, you must also clear your mind before stepping into uncharted territory.
Yes, of course, you should value your life experience and be proud of your acquired wisdom. At the same time, however, you need to be honest with yourself and realize that some of those things might also be holding you back from spring boarding to reach your fullest potential.
To begin, ask yourself these important questions:
- Am I playing big enough?
- Do I look at my business as a way to change the world?
- How big of an impact do I want to make?
Maybe you’ve heard or read about businesses that skyrocket from $500,000 to $100 million in what seems like record speed. The truth is, in most cases these companies underwent years of strategic planning and blood, sweat, and tears prior to experiencing this astronomical growth. You didn’t hear about their grass roots rev-up before their scale-up. No doubt you were also unaware there were also common philosophies, practices, and systems in play among these success stories that helped them overcome their fears, break free from their stagnant thinking, change their limiting habits, and navigate other bumps in the road while they scaled.
So, how do these great success stories fit into your vision of where your business is headed? Whether you are going from a local shop to a regional chain or from a national brand to an international household name, the answer will always be the same. In order to take the leap from entrepreneur to enterprise, you must be willing to tear the pieces of your business apart and reconstruct them at a higher level that drives your growth. It doesn’t matter whether you are in the six figures and scaling to seven, or seven figures and scaling to eight or even nine, you must be willing to get out of your comfort zone and jump while at each level.
The good news is that there is always a safety net on the trapeze. And, when it comes to scaling, this book will serve as part of your safety net to ensure you manage falls and setbacks, receive all the support you need, and get right back on the trapeze.
Sure, it is scary. But the strategies I provide in this book will help you separate real fears from imagined ones, assess them carefully, and ultimately choose growth over staying still.
Time to Fly!
My intent with Scale or Fail is to help business owners and entrepreneurs like you get past the mental and strategic pitfalls that cause revenue bottlenecks and expansion headaches, stunting financial and personal growth. Applying my formula with diligence has led to breakthroughs every day for so many of my clients – from neighborhood sole proprietors to CEOs of nationally known brand-name corporations.
In the chapters that follow, I will share with you my “Signature Roadmap of Scaling” called the SCALEit Method®, through which I outline how you can multiply your growth across a variety of assets, including: retaining and recruiting the best talent; creating a collaborative, efficient, and satisfying workplace environment; developing new products and services and/or building your core customer base; and producing an ever-flowing stream of cash flow with consistent profits. In addition, I show how you can build a business that has deeper meaning for you – and one that can impact the world in a positive way.
Let me emphasize one crucial point: Doubling your business does not mean working doubly hard with your sweat equity. Instead, it is about leveraging your team’s talents and your own intellectual and leadership capital to successfully apply one or more of the sixteen scalable strategies presented. Visual tools, checklists, and spreadsheets illustrate these discussions and, as a bonus, you will find them continually updated on the following website: www.ScaleorFail.com/bonus.
The Five Components of SCALE
There are five components that are central in scaling your company. Each of these five levels of the SCALEit Method are described with exact steps to follow and are highlighted with powerful stories of the amazing clients I have had the honor to know and work with over the years.
- S: Strategic Vision: Knowing where you are headed is crucial in order to figure out how to get there. Yet most business owners don’t have a clear destination in mind and, as you might imagine, this is a big reason why they flail about instead of remaining steadily on course. Your Strategic Vision – or “Big Picture Vision,” as I call it – is your personal Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City. It is the inspiration that keeps you determined and moving forward, regardless of the obligatory rejections and brick walls you will face. Creating the right Big Picture Vision is the key to being able to successfully scale your business.
- C: Cash Flow: Think of cash flow as the life force of your company. It ensures you are breathing and pumping blood to the core systems of your business so they will thrive and grow. You must build a revenue-driven business that creates cash for your business on a daily basis. Applying the cash flow practices discussed in the book will give you the vitals you need to invest in your Big Picture Vision.
- A: Alliance of the Team: You, as the leader, are the Visionary. It is up to you to attract and surround yourself with creative talent and how-to experts who can transform your vision into reality. That includes your taking the lead to build a culture that aligns your team with your Big Picture Vision and feeds off your passion and energy.
- L: Leadership: Guiding your team on your Big Picture Vision journey means you must become the best possible version of yourself. If you want to expand your business by 50%, then you must grow personally by at least 60% to be able to attain that station, carry the weight, and then have the emotional, physical, and intellectual reserves to lead it. Your own personal growth fuels the courage necessary to lead this mission.
- E: Execution: Action is where all of your magic comes to life. Action is where you apply and perfect your Big Picture Vision so you can leap higher and higher in both profits and impact. Action, not perfection, is the true measure of how well you executed your best-laid plans. Contrary to what most entrepreneurs believe, miscalculations, mistakes, and course corrections are among the best assets in your business. Failures are never really failures; they are doorways into much better things, if you react properly to them.
In building 10 companies – 4 of which I sold – I know the high-highs and the low-lows oh so well. I have weathered many breakdowns and dead-ends on my way to the breakthroughs and the big wins. I would not trade one moment of those experiences – even the painful ones – because so many of my smartest pivots came from my darkest times.
Here’s the deal. To get out of nowhere land, you must upsize your strategic practices, implement new marketing strategies, find new ways to build your team, and expand your mindset to break through whatever is keeping you stuck at the same level. You must believe in the deepest part of your being that you can build your enterprise, regardless of whether or not you know exactly how to get there at this moment. Then you must be willing to take the leap into the giant unknown – to make your impossible possible.
Yes, it is a risk. But isn’t anything you truly want worth such a risk? If your answer is no – if you are too afraid, too shy, or too this or too that – the alternative is that the dream you carry in your head will never become realized. To me, that is the saddest story of all.
So ask yourself: Which is really the greater risk – going for it or living with the regret of not having gone for it for the rest of your life?
Besides, there is no guarantee the status quo will remain the status quo. Things change. Markets change. You change. If you think sitting tight will “keep you safe,” I suggest you spend some time thinking that through. If you don’t make the commitment to build a new structure for your company, one of three things will most likely happen:
- You will squander opportunities to leap from entrepreneur to enterprise.
- You will be a sinkhole in your own growth and maybe even get swallowed by it.
- You will find your company disrupted by the latest innovation that you didn’t see coming.
I don’t want to see any of this happen to you – and it does not need to. All can’ts must be tossed out the window. You can achieve your dreams – and you will.
Who I Am – And Why I Believe I Can Help You
I am so grateful that I found my calling early on as a business owner at age 19. Now, in what seems like a lifetime later, I have the opportunity to help business owners like you turn your small business ventures into enterprises. I am rewarded when I see entrepreneurs bestow their greatest works upon the world.
For over a dozen years, as the CEO of Allison Maslan International, I have been blessed to coach thousands of business owners from their infancy to achieving revenue streams of eight and nine figures. In 2010, I founded Pinnacle Global Network, Business Mentoring and Mastermind, which is a world leader in business advising and mentoring. We guide established business owners to grow and scale solid companies – many of whom ultimately double and triple their revenue in less than one year.
The Power Is Right at Your Fingertips
Scaling a business, like performing on a trapeze, requires a balance of will and skill. You become an expert at learning the right steps, tools, and principles – the central principal being that it all starts with you as the business owner, founder, and CEO. Everything starts with your decisions and actions. I commend you for all of the accomplishments that have led you to this place.
Business is definitely not for the faint of heart. Many give up before they even reach this point. I’m sure you’ve had many moments of doubt – we all have! But your tenacity and spirit have gotten you here. Now, it’s time for you to develop the structure, systems, roadmap, and mindset you need to get there.
Whether your ultimate desire is to sell your company for a three- to five-time evaluation, run it for the next several years for continued cash flow and personal fulfillment, or pass it down to your family and to future generations, Scale or Fail offers you an ideal roadmap to success. You and your executive team may refer to it time and again as a company bible of sorts every time you need a refresher course on what to do when the business flattens out.
I encourage you to approach Scale or Fail from a new perspective – with fresh eyes and a new vision of what can be. Once you let go of what is no longer working and holding your organization back, you will be able to enter into a whole new world of remarkable opportunities.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to support you on your next big journey. Let the adventure begin!