When you start a business there are a lot of things you need to do or at least you think you need to do.
But once you’re established there’s even more things on your plate that you need to solve if you want to exceed your own growth.
It’s not uncommon for most entrepreneurs to believe they need to scale instead of mastering their start up phase, even after generating a significant amount of money.
So here’s the difference between the both along with one commonality that would actually benefit most entrepreneurs, but is most often missed:
When You’re Starting Up
It’s not rare when you’re starting a new business for people to be excited for you.
You tell them your idea and they say, “That’s a great idea, I love it! You should totally do that!”
Then you launch the business so you go back to them and say, “It’s ready! You can buy it now!”
And then… Crickets.
They start stumbling over their words trying to tell you why they “can’t” buy from you right now.
It’s frustrating, to say the least, so here’s a quick solution.
Sell these people your thing right then and there when they say they love it and give them a discount for buying on the spot.
Get their credit card number and write the info on a napkin if you have to.
If they really love it, they will give you the payment.
This advice came from my good friend Raff Pendery at one of our workshops, but it also leads me to my main point.
When you’re starting up, you are doing anything you can to make sales, whether it’s going door to door, asking friends and family or posting on your personal social media.
Many business owners automatically assume they need to work on their marketing, but in reality they need to work on their sales.
Selling to everyone you know to get feedback and some working capital.
Whether you’re selling a service or product you need to go through the first baby steps, and nobody thinks about this part as much as the constant generating of sales part.
My own father in 2001 would bring people into a workshop, deliver his knowledge and introduce his product before he was even close to making millions of dollars.
So the starting up phase is the scrappy get out of your comfort zone part, that actually makes you a better entrepreneur!
But most business owners don’t fully commit to it and it can hurt them in the scaling up phase…
When You’re Scaling Up
When a business is attempting to scale up the biggest problem they face are bottlenecks inside of the business.
What does that mean? It means they’ve reached a limit to certain things like sales, website traffic, leads, employees hired, etc., or so they think…
Most times when business owners believe they’ve reached a limit, that’s when the scrappy entrepreneur needs to come out, but this time with more resources at their disposal.
The scrappy entrepreneur starts getting creative on how to break bottlenecks, and eliminate thresholds.
Whether they have to get creative with reducing costs, reach out to celebrities, create a fundraiser to start networking or manage their time more efficiently, they do everything they can to handle the things holding them back from scaling.
Most times it’s not sales that stop a business from scaling, that’s just a symptom of something else like a system not in place or an asset not performing at its best.
Sales become very easy when you’re scaling, all you do is spend more to make more!
But if you don’t strategically reduce costs or make sure there’s something in place to systematize your revenue coming in, that’s what needs help, not the sales.
So when you’re starting up sales are necessary, but when you’re scaling up the main focus is making sure your holes in your boat are plugged so you’re ready to sail off into the sunset.
