Hey there, visionaries! Today, I want to talk to you about how to recognize when it’s time to start preparations for scaling your business. I’m going to go over the telltale signs that will tell you when it’s time to invest your resources, your time, and your income into scaling your business up to the next level.

Oftentimes I find that many visionary CEOs totally miss the signs that it’s time to scale, and that can really backfire on you. It not only can sabotage the growth of your business, but it can also sabotage your reputation and send you on a terrible downward spiral. So much can fall apart if you’re not paying attention to when you need to start investing your efforts into scaling your business.

There are three red flags to watch out for when thinking about scaling: reaching the top limit of your ability to deliver, the deterioration of your day-to-day operations, and the deterioration of your team.

Delivery Deterioration

The first sign that you need to start thinking about scaling your business is when your programs reach capacity and you can no longer take on any more clients. Most visionary CEOs think that this could never happen to them; they think that if you have a group coaching program, whether you have 30 clients or 100 clients, the delivery really doesn’t change that much.

That is a far cry from the truth.

The reality is that having 30 people in your group coaching program and having 100 people in your group coaching program are significantly different situations. And what it takes to deliver the same level of value changes significantly, as well.

It’s very possible that you are able to take on more clients in the program itself, but you don’t have enough support staff or team members that can take care of those clients quite as well as you are taking care of them right now.

This a really common pitfall, to the point where I’ve seen many visionary CEOs lose their mastermind groups entirely. Clients end up so upset that they’re not receiving the value they paid for that they just up and leave. I’ve seen whole communities turning on the leader of the group when the capacity blocks of the program are not addressed; I’ve even seen one visionary CEO walk away from a 700k+ business after her whole community turned on her because as she started scaling her business, nobody taught her how to actually address the delivery components and ensure she had enough support on the delivery end to keep that group program sustainable for the company.

So as you’re beginning to think about scaling your business, ask yourself these questions: Can you take on more clients? What does that process look like? How do you do it efficiently?

Day-to-Day Deterioration

The second red flag that signals it’s time to start scaling your business is a deterioration in your day-to-day operations. This is what happens when your workflows and systems and daily operations are built for where you are right now, not for where you want to go in the future.

With this, as you start growing and adding on more clients and maybe adding in a few more team members, things begin to fall through the cracks. Mistakes happen more frequently. For example, maybe an email goes out; in hindsight, you realize it wasn’t on brand. Clients are complaining. And even though you might have even reviewed that email before it went out, because you didn’t have the bandwidth to slow down enough to be present through that review process and actually read that email in detail, you approved it despite its issues.

You’ll know when this starts to happen because things will start speeding up, and no matter how much time you put in, there will still be way more stuff that needs to get done. You’ll start feeling like you just keep falling further and further behind, even though you are putting lots of time into your business.

So what happens next if you don’t stay on top of scaling your business? You begin to cut corners. And believe me, that comes back to bite you in the ass big time later on.

Team Deterioration

The third red flag is one of the biggest issues that shows up, and also one of the last. When this starts happening, you really know that now’s the time to start scaling your business. If you wait any longer, you can seriously sabotage your business. The last sign is when the team starts falling apart.

At this point, you’ll notice that turnover has started getting high, and you have to start plugging holes. Or, when growth begins to happen and you need more team members, you’ll find that you don’t have a clear hiring or onboarding process. You don’t have a clear process for training or evaluating new hires, so sometimes you hold on to new team members for way too long before you realize they’re not going to work out.

When this happens, you end up with high turnover. People leave because they’re placed in really high-pressure situations and feel wrongly judged for not delivering on something they weren’t properly trained to do.

Because you’re scrambling to plug the holes in your business so that you can keep up with demand, you are not being very thoughtful with how you bring in new team members. And oftentimes, you may end up hiring people and agencies and vendors and just hoping that they’re going to be able to figure it out.

Here’s what happens next: your team members end up trying to do what they can to pick up the slack, but they’re not properly trained on a task that they’ve taken on, so they’re going to make mistakes. Some of those mistakes are going to be very costly. And even if they seem to be doing well for a short while, their lack of training and know-how will show up as big blaring holes on the back end, often seemingly “out of nowhere.”

This happens because you’re too busy and distracted to realize that they don’t know what they don’t know when they’re first asked to take on the task. You don’t realize how deep and detailed you need to be during the handoff for them to be able to do a really good job at what you’re trying to give to them, and you actually end up setting them up for failure.

So not only are these mistakes being made, but because you don’t have enough checks and balances in place to make sure mistakes don’t happen in the first place, you catch them on the back end when the impact has already been felt by your clients and your audience. At that point, the cost is much, much, much steeper.

Don’t Wait To Start Scaling Your Business

You shouldn’t wait until your team or your day-to-day operations are already falling apart to start thinking about scaling your business. Just knowing that you have the ability to take on double the number of clients and seeing that momentum start to build should be enough; that’s when you want to start investing in scaling your business so that you can maintain the level of growth that you worked so hard to create. All of that effort can get completely lost unless you start planning ahead of time and start investing in scaling your business before things start falling apart.

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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!