Hey, dear friends. I’m super excited to be diving in with you today and talk about misconceptions about what scaling your business really means. One thing that I’m noticing is the word “scaling” or “scaling your business” is being used all over the internet for all different reasons, and most of them have nothing to do with scaling a business. I’m here to set the record straight: let’s talk about what scaling your business really is, and what it’s not.

Scaling vs. Growing

The phrase “scaling your business” is misused all over the internet these days. For instance, one of the things you need to know is that you don’t start scaling your business from five figures or six figures. You grow it. I see this being used a lot on the internet by business coaches who are helping people get to five or six figures. They say that they’re going to help you with scaling your business there, but that’s not scaling your business. That’s just growing new business fast.

This is called rapid growth. And you can do rapid growth without doing any scaling, especially in the five and six-figure range. There’s usually no scaling required to get your business to a startup business level. (I consider businesses below the 250k mark to really still be in the startup stage.)

You’re just getting your business started. You’re getting the basics dialed in and establishing the business foundations such as your messaging, how to attract your ideal clients, your sales process, etcetera. These are just the basic fundamental pieces that you need to have in place to run a business.

That has nothing to do with scaling your business; it’s about marketing and messaging and maybe some strategic funnel-building, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Scaling vs. Automation

Automated funnels fueled by paid ads are not scaling your business. They’re automation. Simply taking something that you’ve been doing manually—such as social media marketing or mostly getting clients from referrals—and building out an automated funnel fueled with paid leads is not scaling your business. That is automation that you put in place in your business.

That automation does mean that you will hopefully have some rapid growth and free yourself up some; that’s smart, but it’s not scaling your business. It’s automation.

Scaling vs. Leveraging

Going from one-on one-coaching to developing a group coaching program is also not scaling. That is leveraging.

Leveraging means you’re leveraging your time in a smarter way. You’ve decided that seeing clients one-on-one, basically selling your time for money, is not going to get you to the financial goals that you have for your business. Instead, you develop a group program where you can serve more than one client at a time. This allows you to start leveraging your time in a more impactful way. Again, not scaling; leveraging.

Scaling vs. Marketing

Upping your marketing to rapidly grow your business is not scaling. I’ve seen people use the phrase “scaling marketing tactics,” but marketing tactics are not scaling. They’re just marketing. Increasing your marketing to get better results is not scaling.

So What Does Scaling Your Business Actually Look Like?

Scaling your business is really only relevant once the business has grown to the point that only slow, incremental growth is possible because the business model and the structure of the business are not able to support rapid growth.

Let me talk a little bit about that slow, incremental growth. It’s possible that slow growth is the only way that you can really grow your business. If you rapidly grow the business, things will start breaking.

What does that mean? Well, one question that I often recommend my clients ask themselves is, “What would break if your business grew ten times overnight?” That’s often a good indicator of what needs to happen in your business and where you need to focus your energy and time.

Scaling usually needs to happen when you, as the CEO, get to a point in your business where your business is now at capacity. Meaning,that if you do a marketing event, maybe a summit or a paid ad funnel, and nothing really happens—or you get some growth, but very slowly thereafter, your business plateaus back down to a certain level—that’s a telltale sign that your business is at capacity. The more you have to work on growing the business, the more likely it is that you are probably at capacity. Because when you are scaling your business the right way, growth happens. Growth becomes the natural flow state of your business.

What that means is that once you remove the capacity blocks in your business, rapid growth is not only possible but inevitable. It happens naturally because simply removing those capacity blocks will speed up growth. B

Why does this happen? Because by that time, when you are ready to really scale your business, you have gotten past the startup stage of business. You’ve figured out messaging. You’ve figured out how to get clients in the door. You have enough clients, you just can’t serve them as rapidly as they’ve shown up, or things start falling through the cracks. Plates get dropped on the back end, or maybe the delivery is not as good. Maybe quantity starts actually making the quality suffer. And when that starts happening, that’s usually when you start slowing down the growth, because you just can’t keep up. If you’ve reached that point, then it’s the perfect time to start thinking about scaling: when growth is no longer possible, because you don’t have the structure and the foundations in place to really support it.

Scaling is not business as usual. It is literally quantum-leaping into the next dimension of what’s possible. It’s a unique way of looking at your business and seeing what needs to be changed to shift things quickly and easily.

Let me make an analogy. I go to a lot of live music shows. I love live music, and when you go to a live music show, you see the sound guy, right? He’s standing in front of that soundboard, and sometimes that board has hundreds of knobs on it. Hundreds of pieces to keep track of. He’s slightly listening to the music and then slightly adjusting the knobs. It’s all precise, minute adjustments. And then with the sound check, there’s this back-and-forth with the musicians on stage, figuring out if the mics, the instruments, the balance, and everything else is right. They work together to figure out how to get the perfect sound, but the sound guy is really the one making the adjustments behind the scenes.

And then the musicians start playing, and they still need some adjustments and optimizations. But once that’s done, what does the sound guy do for most of the rest of the night? He sits there and listens to the show. He doesn’t really move the knobs. He doesn’t continually change things. He lets the show run once he’s found that perfect sound and scaling is very similar.

When you’re looking at your business in the beginning, you have to do a deep-dive assessment and look closely at what is working and what’s not working. You need to identify what needs to be amplified, tweaked, and optimized to get the best results.

As you start implementing these things, it takes a lot of massive action. Achieving just the right “hum” of the engine of your business, where it’s really humming and working on its own, takes a lot of work. I love hearing the “hum” of my business when I know that my team and the systems and everything are working in perfect harmony. And once you’ve achieved that perfect hum, that perfect sound, you stop touching the knobs. You get to sit back and enjoy the show.

That is one of the biggest gifts of scaling your business. It’s something you do once, and once you have it done, you can ride that wave for years. Even decades. You can sit back and enjoy the harmony of what you built.

 Scaling your business is not about hustling. It’s not about the grind. It’s not about pushing your way to a certain level of business. It’s not about any of that. It has a lot of ease and grace built into it. There’s a level of strategy and smarts that goes into it.

Are You Ready To Start Scaling Your Business?

There you have it! This is what scaling is all about. Do you feel like you’re ready to scale? Are you in a place where if you grew your business by ten times overnight, everything would crumble, but you really want to get to that next level of growth?

It’s not about getting to seven figures or eight figures or whatever it is. It’s not the number that matters, but rather the level of freedom that you get to receive on that other side.

Personally, we are on a path right now to scaling our business into eight figures. It’s really exciting. We’re having so much fun. We are doing some restructuring, and I’ll be sharing some about that here and there as we go. I’m really excited to start revealing some of the new things that are coming out of my team, but really, it’s all about saying hello to freedom. It’s really about stepping into a whole new level of power and influence in your world and really owning who you are in a bigger way.

What does that look like for you? Is that something that you truly want to step into? If so, you know where to find me. If you want to make sure you never miss an episode, come follow the 7 Figure Freedom Podcast on Spotify, subscribe on Google, or head over to Apple Podcasts. In the meantime, I’d love to connect with you over on Instagram or in the 7 Figure Freedom Club Facebook group so we can chat about what you got out of this episode!

Are you wondering if you’re ready to take the next step in your business? Curious about whether you’re a good fit for our services? Take the free business assessment quiz to find out! And if you want to learn more, you can visit my website or schedule a call with me today. I can’t wait to hear from you!