Business Growth Get's Easier After You Implement This One Simple Trick...
Building a business is merely about repeating successful actions.
The single most difficult part about building a multi-million dollar business is simply getting all the right systems in place.
Hey, I said it was a simple trick, not necessarily an easy one.
When I decided to "go solo" and leave the tax firm that I had helped build into a $3.2 million per year business, there was no question about how I was going to get started with my own firm. Sure, I'd fix some of the issues that prompted me to leave that firm in the first place, but the core systems and tactical methodologies would be retained. From my decision to start taking IRS representation clients to the $35,000 MRR mark took less than 10 months, starting from absolutely zero prospects or clients.
How?!?! Simply by implementing the systems that I already knew worked.
The rapid growth of my boutique tax firm was proof positive that the systems worked. The checklists that I had developed at my old firm could be applied anywhere, pretty much at will. Want to know the even more miraculous part of this? During the majority of the time that this new tax firm was being birthed, I wasn't even in the United States, and clients and prospects had no idea.
Here’s another example from my own entrepreneurial career: When my two co-founders and I started our B2B SaaS tech startup, we did so by following a well-worn path. There was an existing process, an existing set of systems, that had been tried and tested by thousands of other SaaS tech startups over the preceding years. Systems that were perfected as the result of lessons learned from many successful companies, and even harder lessons learned from numerous business failures.
The systems existed. We simply had to follow the proven plan, adapting as necessary to solve our own business challenges. While that tech startup will never become a billion-dollar unicorn, it’s a solid, successful business with dominant market share in it’s tiny vertical.
If you’re a professional service provider in private practice, or own a small service or retail business, systems provide another amazing benefit. Once you have systems in place, you can turn your business on or off at will. You can take a break if you want (like I'm doing now), and come back later and fire things back up with very little lead time. Systems also let you continue to grow to the limit of your own time and staff resources, and to whatever size you want to grow to after that.
Once you have your business running smoothly with automation and checklists, new customers come in nearly on auto-pilot. Stuff gets done in a methodical, pre-planned manner. Can you even imagine running your business with absolutely zero fires to put out? When systemized, there simply are no "emergencies" to deal with.
So where do you start to make this all happen? First, you need to make a conscious decision regarding what you want your business to look like. You need to decide things such as:
How many hours per week do you want to work?
How much interaction do you want with customers?
How many employees, if any, do you want?
How big of a physical office do you want to have?
Do you want a physical office at all?
How much take home income do you want?
What is your long-term exit strategy?
If you’re leading a venture-scale tech startup, you have a different point of view on questions like this than a solo attorney in private practice, so you’ll make different choices.
Many people scoff at the idea of making any of these items into conscious decisions. But that is precisely what they are, and determining how you want to live your life is priority one. Remember, make your business work for you, don't work for the sake of your business.
Even if you have a mortgage and a family to support, there is no reason for you to work 40 hours per week if you don't really want to. You can can still take home a decent six figure income with zero employees, working from home, and working far less than "full time" — if you have the right business model and the right systems in place. Millions of us do it already, and there is nothing "secret" or special about making it happen. But it starts with making the decision.
Only after you know how you want your life to look, and how you want your business structured, does it become time to look at the "how to" of making it happen.
Fortunately, that's the easy part, because other people have already done it. You just need to seek out the successful systems and apply them to your own business.
Action Items
Answer for yourself, in writing, the bulleted questions above.
Seek out benchmarking reports for your industry and familiarize yourself with the key metrics, challenges, and solutions. You can obtain benchmarks from industry trade associations, publishing companies such as ibisWorld, and studies published by large consulting firms like Bain, McKinsey, Boston, PwC, KPMG, etc.
Research best practices, checklists, and systems for your industry. These may be found from similar sources as the benchmarks above, as well as from subject matter experts, thought leaders, leading firms, etc. in the form of books, reports, and courses. Startups, look at accelerators like Y Combinator, Techstars, and 500 Startups — they publish their best practices for all to see. Look for substance, not fluff. The best systems models look very similar to franchise handbooks.