Think you need a big team to build a 7-figure business?
In this episode, Samantha and Leon break down how to scale smarter with fewer people, fewer headaches, and a lot more freedom.
They dive into how you can build a highly profitable business without managing a bloated team that takes up all your time. If you’ve been thinking you need to scale up your headcount to scale up your revenue, think again.
They also discuss what scaling actually means and how to protect your founder energy. You’ll walk away with a smarter way to scale, one that doesn’t involve sacrificing your goals or your weekends.
Whether you’re about to hire your first VA or rethinking the way your team runs, this episode will show you how to scale lean, lead smarter, and build a business that works for you.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Why flashy branding without substance breaks trust (03:26)
- The real difference between authentic branding and performative marketing (04:14)
- How great brands like Nike, Apple, Patagonia, and Lego build movements (06:57)
- The role of lived experience vs. theory in your message and content (24:13)
- Why your words carry energy and how AI can dilute your real voice (13:55)
- How to run a quick authenticity audit on your brand (31:11)
WANT TO EXPLORE WHAT’S POSSIBLE FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
If you would like to brainstorm a plan to explore what’s possible for you, I invite you to book in for a Scale Session.
In this quick 15-minute call we’ll dive into…
• Reviewing your niche, offer, and pricing to map out your immediate growth potential…
• Evaluating your marketing, sales, and delivery systems to pinpoint what’s working and what’s not…
• Identifying the primary bottleneck that’s holding you back from growing and scaling…
• Build a 3-step growth and scale plan rooted in positioning, profit, and simplicity
Click Here to book your no-charge Scale Session
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
Instagram @thesamriley
CONNECT WITH LEON FLITTON
Instagram @leonflitton
SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW BUSINESS GROWTH LAB
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Business Growth Lab. If you enjoyed this episode, please head over to your preferred podcast app, follow the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver valuable content but will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you!
TRANSCRIPTION
00:00
Get it off your plate. You’re the founder. That’s not the best use of your time, anything that’s repetitive, that needs to be put onto someone else’s plate. Are you having time for yourself to be the CEO, to be the founder, do the founder things.
00:15
I’m Samantha Riley, and welcome to the business growth lab, where visionary entrepreneurs come to experiment, evolve and expand what’s possible.
00:26
Welcome to today’s episode of the business growth Lab. Today, I’m your co host, Samantha Riley, alongside my partner in business and life, Leon flyton, Leon, it was great episode on Tuesday. I was joined by David Anderson, and we talked about building a team to support your business. I thought it was an excellent episode. I’d love you to start off by, I guess you sharing, what are some of your key takeaways from that episode?
01:00
Yeah, I thought it was a really good episode as well. And I think one of the things that I really liked was when he was speaking about accountability. Doesn’t equal micro management
01:09
that just kills your creativity, you know, like and creates teams that autonomous, that kind of thing. So that was one thing I thought was really cool. And the other thing was, scaling doesn’t mean doing more. And I know we’ll come back to this a bit later. Bit later in the episode. I suppose it probably means, like, doing less of the wrong things. And it probably more of a as you guys discussed, you know more about, like, a mindset shift as well. So that was two things that I took out of it totally. And I know that you were in a position at the end of your corporate career, where you were being micromanaged, and it was a very high up position where you were accountable for a lot of business, for a huge team. How did being micromanaged relate specifically to that role? Can you just take us through that? Yeah, so I think it really relates as well, because you know when you say something firsthand and you understand what it means, but I think the biggest thing was stopping it from being autonomous. And what I saw was people that when this one particular leader that was an issue, and this particular leader, he actually made everyone feel anxious, and everyone turned into a CYA, you know, cover your ass all the time. So they stopped worrying about what would keep growing the business, and started worrying about, how do I not get in trouble? Because also this particular person who was micromanaging was also not able to deliver feedback very well. So it was like a double whammy, but you could see how the autonomy was just killed. Just killed it, you know, and that was across the entire team, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was a huge team. So I mean, that person had seven direct reports, and I was one of those. And out of that, we had 30 plus direct reports, which is crazy, like world’s best practice is seven. We had 30. But you can see how that then trickled down to the teams, you know, because that actually that anxiety that came through from being micromanaged and killing autonomy. And you could just see the business going backwards, but it actually filtered through the rest of the team as well. So micromanagement and particular level it wasn’t necessary, you know, but you can see how it just killed the autonomy across the whole team. You know, I think it was like somewhere between five or 600 team members that kind of really filter through to big issues.
03:36
Yeah, and it’s definitely something that I talked about with David, about how to grow that team so that they do work well together and autonomous. I had a couple of different takeaways. Number one for me was the amount of grit that it takes to build business, and what I’ve seen over the last few years is too many coaches out there gaslighting people with the idea that business is easy because it’s not. It’s not easy. There are certain things that we can do to simplify business. There are definitely things that happen that are good. We have amazing days. We sign clients, we have a great session that we deliver. There’s lots of good things that happen, but there’s also lots of bad things that happen, and you need a lot of grit to be able to go on that roller coaster. It’s actually quite funny. I talk about this being a roller coaster all the time, because you have these, you know, massive highs and massive lows. I personally hate roller coasters. I’m one of those people that grips dear life. I do. I hate roller coasters. I hate being out of control. But, you know, I am on the entrepreneurial roller coaster every day. Maybe that’s all that my nervous system can handle.
04:52
That was my first takeaway. And my second takeaway is that the biggest problem that founders have when or that they.
05:00
Make when they’re growing their team is not holding the team members accountable. Now you were just talking then about not micromanaging your team, but you need that balance where they also are accountable for the work, and that as you’re growing a team, if they’re not accountable, it actually creates so much more work to look after a team. They’re almost then, if you didn’t have them at all, you know, as founders, we really need to understand the systems behind having and holding our team members accountable for the work that they’re doing. Yeah, they need to have the like, the right systems as well. So the right systems, that’s like a very broad thing, I’ll say thing again as well. It’s a broad thing, but what I would say is that what I did notice in my previous career was that sometimes some of these companies in trying to actually have team members take accountability, they add things in, and they make stuff over complicated, and it just makes it more difficult it needs to be. So I think there’s kind of a right way of doing it, and then there’s a over complicated way of doing it, not wrong, but it’s over complicated anyway, so you’re just wasting energy. So that’s something I think of as well. Yeah, so today we’re talking about how to scale with a small, a very small and lean team. But I think before we talk about this, can we talk about the definition of growth and scale Leon, because I think this can be confusing. And I realized how confused some people are when I had a conversation a couple of years ago. It was someone I’d met out at dinner. It was, it was like, not a networking group, but it was a group of entrepreneurs, and we were meeting each other. And, you know, I was asking this person about a business, and blah, blah, blah. And I said, you know, what are you working on? She said, I’m working on scaling my business. And we are cool. What is your business? She said, Oh, no, I haven’t started yet.
07:01
You’ve got to nail it before you scale it. Okay, so if you don’t have a business, or you’re in the startup phase. That is a growth phase. You’re in a growth phase if you’re increasing revenue, if you’re increasing customers, if you’re increasing output by adding more resources. So think more clients equals more work, equals more team, equals more cost, right? So an example of this is if you sign 10 new clients and you hire two new team members, your revenue grows, but so do your expenses, your workload and your complexity. That’s growth. It requires a proportional increase in input to get a bigger output. So that’s the growth phase where scaling means increasing revenue, increasing impact or reach without a proportional increase in resources. It’s about leveraging what you already have, for example, systems, team, IP, and using that to achieve more with less. So an example of scale would be you create an online group, program that 100 people can join, but you don’t need 100 more hours a week to deliver it. Your delivery time may stay the same, but your income scales. So scaling is smarter growth. It’s more profit, it’s more reach, it’s more freedom without hustle or head count. So essentially, the growth mindset is, or the growth is, I need to do more to make more, and the scale mindset is, I need to do better to make more. However, like I said at the beginning, you need to grow before you scale. So you can’t scale something and make something better when there’s nothing there to scale. Anything you want to add there? Leon, well, I was going to say sometimes the growth thing is almost like a bit of investment, because sometimes to not do it like you might need to invest in some team to get the growth. But when you think of a business as getting bigger, there’s something we call economies of scale. In regards to scaling. If you add another 100 grand a week to a business and your wage percentage was, you know, 10% for example, you want to add 5% of wages, not 10% so you’re adding like 100 grand and like half the wages increase that you would normally have. So that’s your economy of scale. So your output is costing you less by unit, so to speak. So that’s something we always look at. So now that’s what’s really I think scaling is where you can add sales and add a marginally less amount of cost to it.
09:33
So what we’re talking about today is scaling lean, and when we talk about scale, or when people talk about scale, many people think about the like the old school model of building a business machine that has layers of staff. You know, you’ve got the team leaders and the department managers, and you’ve got all of these staff. And this is.
10:00
What we did talk about with David in Tuesday’s episode. But for many entrepreneurs, and especially in professional services, if you value lifestyle and freedom, scaling really does need to look different, and it can look different, and it really if you look at the outcomes of what it means as well. Like I think that was important what you said there, Sam, like, the outcomes of what you actually want to get out of having your business as well. Is it time? Is it freedom? What exactly is it? And I, I like to call it lean and mean, but I’m sure that’s probably more technical version of that somewhere. Yeah, yeah. And I also wonder this, Sam, I mean, do you think people want to have, like, massive teams to look after as well, so because that might not also bring freedom in. So yeah, complexities, totally. If your end goal is to have a business where you’re delivering coaching or services only 10 or 20 hours a week, and then you want to be done for the week, then having a team of 50 is probably not the way you want to go, because even if you can manage to work yourself out of the business, which I’ve done with a team of 35 it still takes a lot of work to get there, because you know, you’re adding 35 real people with real problems, with real baggage, with real issues that need to be dealt with, with real families behind the scenes, with children that get sick, and all of the things right. It takes a long time to get there. And if I think back to us, Leon in 2020, our sort of goal at that time was to build our business with one team member. And we had, we just lost a team member at the end of 2019 we’d actually taken some time over sort of January, yeah, January of 2020 before we knew the world was about to go crazy and decided that in February of 2020 we were going to hire one team member to be our personal assistant, to look after our calendar, to help a little bit with our deliverables. And other than that, we were going to rely on freelancers for for different things that needed to be done in our business. So essentially, we were going to run with one team member, which we did for a few months before our business model changed, and that was our choice, and we now have a much bigger team, but I guess why I’m telling this story is we could easily still be running our coaching business right now with only one team member, when you get the right person, and we’re going to talk about that more in a little while, aren’t we? Yeah, and I think that’s a really important thing to note, and the whole getting the right team member and the hiring process and all those things that we we need to have a bit more chat around that, because that was a really crucial thing that happened with this one team member as well, and how it went about that totally so essentially, we had to focus on what needed to be done and not who it could be. Because I think one of the biggest traps that we can all fall into is we automatically and unconsciously gravitate towards someone that’s similar to who we are. And as business owners, and especially those in coaching and consulting, in speaking, in any business where you are the brand that is your zone of genius. You’re the extrovert, even if you are the introvert, your brand is around you, showing up, being on stage. That generally means that you’re someone that doesn’t like the details, looking after your calendar, creating systems and processes and filling in spreadsheets so when you know what needs to be done and not who can do it, then you can find someone that fits that role, and you can find someone usually that is good at systems and is good at supporting you as the founder, but also in implementing and using the systems I was going to say as well at this point in time. So even from when we hired that first team member back in 2020, to now, and if you look at what AI has done and how systems can be a lot like more leaner and less, I suppose human heavy, I suppose you could call it, you know, you might need to consider like, even if I think about what we hire who, if we’d done the same thing and hide again, and mind you, when knowing here it is, we’d be fine with it. But want to consider it is someone that can implement AI, like, it’s a more of a hybrid ai plus systems Plus a va, so to speak,
14:36
you know, and how that looks as well. And I suppose when you’re hiring is the person that can think a bit more autonomously, maybe what you might need in that instance. But you know where technology has moved from to now, the lean and main thing could really be even, even better than it was. You know, like five years ago. You just mentioned that was our first VA. It actually wasn’t remember we had one in 20, 1820,
15:00
19, and he was great, but that was a mistake that I made, that I hired someone that was very much like me. Could you remember he would sit on the Zoom and have a chat for hours, just like I would like, dude, like, can you just go and get the work done? He really, he was a high i in this profile, not so good at the systems, great at talking, but his role was systems. His role was implementing. And that didn’t end well, because there was a whole heap of things getting missed. So that was definitely something that we leaned into when we hired in 2020. It must be a C type personality. It needs to be someone that has got a skill set where I don’t, and I think that we made the classic or I made that classic mistake, and it’s something that I learned from there, and I don’t believe I’ve made it again. No, no. I was just gonna say, like, how many, like, people out there, you know, might be a business owner or an entrepreneur. But the other thing was, when you’re hiring people, like, if you’ve not been in that position before, you can make some pretty classic mistakes with if you haven’t hired someone for a while, things like that, like looking at who they are. Because when I say things like, you know, hire for character and train for skills you’re like, if you’re not, if you’re not the C type personality that you need. You probably don’t want to try that. So it’s not really good saying that our entire team is not C type personalities. It certainly is C and S type personalities heavier, but we’ve definitely still got, I can think straight away. We’ve got two very high I type personalities, but they’re in the roles that are perfect for that personality. So we are really, really clear on the seat that we need filled, and then we hire the right person for that seat. And we also make sure that even if they’re the right fit, will they fit into the team, because we’ve got such an amazing culture with our team that we can’t afford to have the bad apple come in, because I’ve had that before in one of my previous businesses, and it takes years to clear, like, just years and years. And I know that that’s happened with you, too. Yeah, toxicity. So you know, one bad apple, one toxic team member, can go through your whole staff, even if we’re talking like lean and mean running kind of teams. If you’ve got like four team members and you’re doing a million bucks a year, or something like that, or even less,
17:36
yeah, one team member can wreck everything on you, and it’s hard to get rid of, too, because it’s like a disease. Once it gets in there, it’s real hard to get out. Yeah, you could easily run a million dollars even with one team member at or two, because you can still lean on freelancers to do specific tasks or small projects. But that still needs to fit in the culture, even if it’s if it’s just you, they still need to be able to balance you out and make sure that you’re supporting each other and running autonomously and being able to work together like it needs to be a balance. Yeah, yeah. I think we’ve come across that with contractors as well. It makes it difficult to get the task done you need. And that’s a good point as well, because while you might have one team member to top up where you need to with a contractor here and there to get the job done, but if they’re not a great fit, they can also cause problems as well.
18:38
Totally. So we’ve just discussed that we can build a seven figure business with one or two team members. Let’s talk about some practical tips to scale with a small team, because you don’t need a massive team, but you do need the right team members. You do need the right systems, and you do need them to be able to work together. So we have three steps to work through this. Leon, do you want to take us away with the very first step? Yeah, so what we do know is that you need to be auditing your time. So this is where you need to consider what’s draining you really what’s taking up all your energy. You know the things that you do every week on repeat that you really don’t need to be doing, and that’s probably going to be where you can see your next hire coming from. So anything you can, you know, work out what’s draining, you look at what you’re repeating every week, and then see how you can use that task, or, I should say, that outcome not a task, and that’s probably going to be next hire. Yeah, absolutely. I just want to say quickly, when we talk about what drains you, I think most people think about it as, oh, there’s this task. For me, it’s doing the best. I hate doing tax, and that drains my energy when I’m doing it. But here’s the other thing, it drains me for a week before how?
20:00
End as I overthink how to get out of it. It drains me for the week after it drains me during the week. So what you’ll find is the tasks that drain you don’t just drain you while you’re actually doing them. They will take up so much space in your head, rent free for so much more time. So it’s really important to understand what drains you so that you can get it off your plate, because you have to protect your energy. As the founder, you’re the big vision person, and generally, the business revolves around your brand and around what you’re delivering. So that’s really, really important. Do you think it’s also, you know something where you can like systemize it to make it faster, or you can hand it off to someone else. So that might be tasks before you get hiring someone as well, that you might just want to see if you can actually systemize it, make it quicker as well, make it easy. Well, that’s number two. You’ve jumped in right before me. You’ve got to automate the obvious. So it really is about getting really clear. What’s your onboarding emails? Have you got payment links for all of your programs? What’s your onboarding process for new clients coming on? What’s your workflows in anything that you do throughout the week with your client delivery, with your admin and
21:21
item one is auditing your time, and you’re writing everything out, you can start to see All right, well, I need to onboard a new client. How do I automate that? What do I need to do? What does that automation look like? What are the steps? What’s the process? How much of it is done by like a machine automation? How much of it is automated by going to a team member, because just because you’re automating it or creating a process doesn’t mean that the whole lot happens without people contact. For example, you might have an automation set up when a new client is tagged in your CRM and that gets automated and uses Zapier to go into your project management system. There also might be an automation to tag your team member, to create a gift to send to that person. It’s still an automation, but it’s not all being done by, let’s call it machine. There could be still a person coming into that but it’s like, what can be automated, so that you don’t need to think about it, so the process is repeatable, and so that you also have a certain level of deliverability. I think that the processes help with that.
22:37
Yeah, you know, you’ve got SOPs as well. And then you’ve got the automations and all those pieces that go together. And if you couple that with, like, you know, a good employee, it’s almost like you have a bionic employee, you know, like they’re, they’ve got,
22:52
they’re, like, power assisted. So it just makes everything way more efficient. And also because, like, most SOPs, have checklists in them as well, things don’t get missed, because no one wants to have, like, a half assed delivery system either. So we want a robust, solid delivery system. So I think that’s yeah, where a bionic employee will come in handy.
23:13
I mean that in the future is AI agents, right? That’s going to be our Exactly, yeah, that’s exactly what’s coming AI agents, or when I say coming, they’re kind of here. Yeah, they’re not kind of here. They are here. So but, and we’ll be seeing more and more and more of that really quickly. So we’ve got auditing your time, automating the obvious, and then number three is around delegating the repetitive. And this is around the tasks like social media, repurposing. It could be customer support, or it could be scheduling people or scheduling meetings, scheduling people, scheduling meetings.
23:59
I use the same thing, scheduling meeting and scheduling people? Yeah, I guess it sounded a bit weird,
24:07
but yeah, it’s about delegating that get it off your plate. You’re the founder. That’s not the best use of your time, anything that’s repetitive, that needs to be put onto someone else’s plate. I think you need to check back in with some of these things as well, and go, am I protecting the founder’s energy? Well, your energy, yeah, because you’re the one that’s, well, you’re driving it, you’re driving the business, and you’re the one that needs to have the energy to be creative and things like that, you know. Yeah, so, and maybe, maybe the delegation and the automating, all those bits and pieces come together and auditing your time, because, you know, are you having time for yourself to be the CEO,
24:45
to be the founder, do the founder things? Yeah, well, CEO time should be protected at all costs. You know, taking time out to go put your feet on the grass, taking time out to go and read or to study, to work on the business.
25:00
Us to unpack, your IP, to go and dream, our creativity happens at times where we’re not forcing it. We’re not inside at a desk, where, generally, or for me, it’s when I’m in the shower, it’s when I’m driving, it’s when I’m out for a walk. It’s the time where, like, you’re just letting everything go. And it gives this it allows the space for those things to drop in. So CEO time is so, so important.
25:29
Now, I know we talked about with audit your time. We talked about, you know, who your next hire is going to
25:33
be, but what are the some of the things that we’ve come across, you know, that we’ve experienced while hiring teams that you think might be good things to note.
25:43
Oh, the two that come to mind. And we changed this quite early in the piece. And this was game changers for us. Is Number one, when we
25:53
advertise for the role. We used to advertise, this is the role. This is what you will do. And now we actually have flipped it. Now we actually say, this is our company. This is what we believe. And if you believe this too, then you might be a fit to work with us. If that’s a fit, these are some of the things that will be happening in your role, and that’s made a huge difference to our culture by bringing in the right people and not attracting people that don’t want to be part of a team, because our team’s really important. They need to be able to work really closely because of the business model that we have. So that was one of the big changes that we made. And when I think about the second big change is how we went through the hiring process. So originally, we used to say, okay, you’ve been shortlisted. Let’s jump on a zoom, which, when we thought about it, we’re like, hang on a minute. The way that we actually chat with our team is on Slack. So why don’t we interview them on Slack? Because that’s actually the way that we talk with them, and now that’s what we do when we shortlist them and we give them an interview over slack. We say, hey, Meet us on slack at this time, and we just ask some questions, and they just type their questions back, and then once we shortlist from there, then we take them to a zoom call and meet them. And that’s been a huge game changer. Yeah, it has. And I just want to go back to something, and I’m pretty good at asking questions in an interview, you know, hiring staff and coming up with, you know, some quirky questions, just to see what they think like. But something that you did, Sam, which I think is really cool, and I’ve always been really impressed with, is the chocolate comment, almost a koala. I don’t remember which
27:38
one it was. Oh, when you first said, I was like, huh, the chocolate comment, now I know what you’re talking about. Yes, I think it’s
27:49
okay. I know what you’re referring to. So when we put our job description up, not very many people read to the bottom. So the very last thing at the bottom of all of my job posts is we’re after someone that’s really detail oriented. So if you’ve read to the bottom, please put koala in the subject line, or please put, and it’s some random word penguin in the subject line. And it’s so easy to shortlist, because straight away, 50% of the people that usually start off with, hi hiring manager, haven’t even used your name. Hi hiring manager, I am very details oriented, and you just go delete
28:31
because you know that they’re not details oriented. So think about what’s really important to you, and what can you do to be able to get what you need at a glance, and that, that’s a really good one. Yeah, I love that one. One of the things that happened I noticed over my like career and corporate and whatever else, is that what looks good on paper for a resume and what people will say, and you know, even you interview them, might be great on paper, but not in real life, and until you try someone out, sometimes you don’t know. And yeah, to the point where, if you try someone out, you think they sound great at just what we needed to fit this role. And then they’re with you for a few weeks, and you go, you know what? What they said wasn’t actually what’s really been done or they’re capable of. And you might need to, like, cut it there, and then go, sorry, thanks for your time. It’s not working out, and be okay with that, that some just don’t work out, and don’t, you can’t get upset about it. Oh, I think I know what you’re saying. You can’t get upset about it, but we’ve had to let staff go. And I always get upset about it, always because you’re dealing with people, and it feels yuck. But at the same time, we’re running a business, and it has to run well. But I want to talk about like, the positive side of that what looks good on paper might not be great in real life. Sometimes what looks good on paper but doesn’t look like it’s a fit, sometimes it’s actually worth a.
30:00
A bit of a gamble, and I want to talk about one of our team members that’s been with us for five years now, and she originally applied for a completely different role. We hired her. We said she was not a fit for that role. We didn’t hire her for that role, but I could tell by the way she was answering questions, that she was going to be really a great fit for our culture, and it had nothing to do with her tasks and what she delivered, and everything to do with her mindset, around team, around vision. I could just tell that that she would be a real asset to a company. So I don’t know if you remember, we actually created a role for her, which I think at the beginning, because we had to create a role, and because it was quite early in the piece, and we weren’t very like money was was very, very tight, because we were growing. And we took her on and just said, Hey, look, we don’t have a position for you, but we’d love to have you join us for 10 hours a week, and we can offer you this work, which is not what you applied for, but would you be interested? And she took her and now she’s with us full time. Has been with us full time for a few years, is in a completely different role, because we could see where her skill set lay as she was working with us. And now she’s, you know, she’s rocking her role, and we love having her part of our team. Yeah, yeah. And that was a good, a good risk to take. I really was. It was, it was a little bit scary at the time, because I’ve never done that before. I’d never looked at someone who went, there’s something here, and I can’t put my finger on what it is, but let’s take a gamble, and I’m super glad that we did. And it taught us a lot, and it taught us that gambles are okay when you go with your gut and when you go with your intuition. The other thing was, at that stage as well, I don’t think we had quite decided on exactly the full structure setup of of the team in that case, we were, you
32:04
know, when they say, oh, you know, as an entrepreneur, we jump off the cliff and build the plane on the way down. I reckon we stick around and we’re bloody pulling that plate together.
32:14
It’s like bouncing off the rocks on the way down kind of thing.
32:20
Oh, man. Like, don’t just some behind the scenes stories. You just like, Oh, wow. One day that book will come out and people will be just like you did. What
32:32
exactly?
32:35
Oh, man. Have we got some stories? Yeah.
32:43
So I think that what’s really important as takeaways here, or to take away from this episode, is that your first hires should buy back your time and not add pressure, because at a time when you’re growing, adding pressure is you could almost turn it into that pressure cooker effect where the lid just flies off. So you’ve got to be really, really clear. Do that audit get really clear on what it is that needs to happen to grow your business, not just things that are fun to do, but that are going to move the needle and then fill those seats to buy back your time. Next takeaway is that, what’s the reason you’re actually wanting to scale for. So what’s the intention that you have? Is it building an empire? Do you just want, you know, a really good life, business balance or synergy, even, you know, like, Do you want more freedom? What is it? What is you want to you know, we’re doing it for and, and I think this is a, this is a point that some people miss, and think that if you’ve got a million dollar business, and like I was corrected before Ron and Riley, so is that you should be able to scale to a million dollars with the right business and even one team member, absolutely, if that’s what you want to have, you know, and think about the freedom that, because I know it’s like when you’ve got like, 30 direct reports And, well, there’s not much freedom. There is zero freedom there. And I think I want to add here, like, are you scaling fulfilled freedom? Is building an empire, or are you actually feeding your ego? Like, are you trying to build a business because it looks good? And I don’t mean this in a rude way, I just mean it’s use as a checkpoint to check in. Am I doing this for the right reasons, because it’s very easy to get off, you know, one degree, and a year later, you can be like, way off course, and get to the point where you’re like, oh my goodness, I just want to burn everything down. And I’ve seen it time and time again and, like, just, just don’t go, don’t go there.
34:40
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the third thing is to focus on systems and processes. Think about your onboarding, your lead generation, your follow up, your content creation, and create repeatable processes that work without you because your founder’s energy or your CEO time.
35:00
Time is really, really important, because it’s your vision that grows the business, not your virtual assistant, not your ops manager, it’s your vision that’s going to take it to the next level. And I think it’s good to point out now that if you’re actually hiring Well, it’s going to be easier for you to
35:20
let go of some of those tasks and let someone else do them for you as well, which is crucial for scaling totally. And if you’ve been putting off scaling because it feels like an absolute monster that you don’t want to feed, like, if you can feel yourself holding back from taking your business to the next level. Like, here’s your permission slip to scale your way. Like, Get really clear, start small, stay profitable, and build that business that gives you more of what you actually want. And if that’s freedom, then build it out that way. Any final thoughts that you want to add here? Leon, yeah, and I got a story. I’ll be quick. Oh, we like stories. Oh, come on.
36:05
What I want to say was, and Sam, you’ve told me this story about your dance shops, and when you I think it was, I’m not sure what year it was, but it was one of the recessions that we that we had. You ran quite lean and mean with the shops and the business. And interestingly, what happened was, when, you know the economy got better on the outside of it, and your business grew, your profit margin massively increased because it got massively Yeah, yeah. So it was, instead of like, if you’re if you’re making x amount of profit, it kind of multiply that profit like, so proper multiplier. It was be as you as you grew, rather than just growing, it actually scaled. So that was something that helped you to scale better. So, and I think that’s something that you really should think about, yes, yeah, get really clear on on scaling lean. And when the good times come around, it makes it so much easier and your business will actually explode. Totally good point. Le, tonhanks for sharing that. So if this episode’s hit home for you and you are thinking, You know what, I do. Want to start scaling. I want to scale smart. I want to scale without losing freedom, then we’ve created a free resource to help you to hire a high performer for your team. So if you’re ready to grow your coaching business, maybe to high six figures, maybe take it to seven figures, you won’t actually be able to do it on your own. I’ve always said if you can climb a mountain on your own, it’s not a very big mountain. So if you want to learn more about or know more about who to hire next, so you can implement what we’ve been talking about today, we also talk about the biggest mistakes that most coaches make in the onboarding process. If you want to understand the role that you need to undertake in your business and how it needs to change when you hire then we’ve created this resource for you. You can head to Sam at the Riley dot global forward slash team, and of course, that link is below wherever you’re watching or listening, but definitely download that and start to get clear on how to find someone to help you grow, and it doesn’t need to be someone full time. It doesn’t need to be someone that’s going to cost you hundreds of 1000s of dollars, but it’s just somewhere to start so that you can start buying back your time. Leon, thanks again for joining me. Another great episode. Thanks for having me back in the lab. It’s been great,
38:46
and thank you for listening. We look forward to seeing you next Tuesday for another episode of business.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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