Speaker 1: I often get asked the question, Patrick, what can I do to scale my business? And normally the first thing I'll ask them is, what does scalability even mean to you? Meaning, what does it mean to scale your business? Well, I think scalability is for my business to grow faster. Or for my business to do this. And I tell them, to me, scalability is for your business to have a life of its own where it grows with or without you exponentially. To me, exponentially is doubles. Minimum is a double. So if you go from $100,000 a year income to $120,000 to $140,000 to $180,000 to $260,000, that's not exponentially. Exponentially is $100,000, $240,000, $700,000, $1.8 million, $4.2 million. That's scalability. And there's a formula for it that you've got to keep asking yourself what you can do to scale your business. And we're going to talk about that today. So first things first. There is a predictable side of the business that's very important to be working on that gives you the opportunity to scale. A lot of times, entrepreneurs will say, well, I want to start scaling my business right off the bat. And they put so much time and emphasis on scalability, business goes out. It goes out of business because they run out of funds, they don't have money anymore, and they don't even have the opportunity to scale the business. Before scalability comes, you may put five to ten percent of your mind thinking about how to scale, but you've got to put 90% of your effort in producing a predictable stream of income, even if it's $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 that's bringing in for you to survive and not have to worry about expenses, to ask yourself, how can I scale? So you're working in the business, making sales, growing it, making money, having some support, having some help in the business, scaling the business is what you're thinking about. So how do we do that? Let's talk about that. People will often tell me and say, Pat, listen, the reason why our business is going to explode is because we have the most incredible product in the world. We have the most incredible product in the world. Our product is going to blow up. Look, rule number one of products, the best products don't always win. There's a lot of books I read, and some books I read and I'll say, this was an incredible book, but it did terrible, because it wasn't a good, scalable marketing plan in place. And there's some books I will, I just read a book, a new book that just came out, and it's one of the books, Inc. Magazine recommends it as the best book. I read it and I said, I didn't learn anything from this book. It's something that's been refurbished from 20 blogs that he put it into one book, but because he has a platform, it made the book do very well. So his product looks better than somebody else who may have had a great product, but terrible scalability. So product doesn't necessarily take you to the next level. The second thing is personality. There's a lot of people that's based on their personality and their business is based on their personality. Just think about it this way. Very simple. If you die, or if you don't exist, what happens to your business? If you die, the business dies. If a business is 100% predicated on your personality, that is not a scalable business. And two, if it is, you're not going to have a life. The more the business grows, the more it's going to suck you in because it's 100% predicated on your personality. What allows you to scale is if a business is built on a system. The foundation has got to be a system. A system that produces results with the product that you have, not based on your personality. This needs to be number three. If this is number one, this is number two, this is number three. A great system, a great system you put in place with a good product and a decent personality will do ten times better than a great product, a good personality, a decent system. It's not going to scale. You can still make good money with a great product, but if you don't have a system, you're not going to scale it. You've got to make sure your system is driving your business. So systems could be a step one, two, three. Somebody comes in, first they see this, then it goes to this, then it goes to this, and they buy. And if they buy, then they have the option to upgrade, they have the option to upsell, they have the option to do this. But this is a streamlined system that takes your business to the next level. Now what you need with a great system, here's what you do need with a great system. Popovich has a system, but Popovich drives the system. So you'll see some people that have the same system as somebody else in another business, and they don't scale the business, because they're not a driver. They're thinking the system's going to scale their business on its own. It's not going to happen. There always needs to be a driver. The triangle offense that Phil Jackson ran with the Lakers and the Bulls, only worked because he drove it. Popovich works because he drives it. The New England Patriots keep winning because he has a system that works, but he is the driver. He doesn't have a personality. Belichick is not a personality guy. His product is football. His product is athletes. He knows how to pick good products, but he doesn't necessarily have the best talent all the time, but he knows how to drive it. He knows how to drive it on what he does. So you've got to keep in mind, your system, ask yourself, how well is your system? How much of your business is based on a system and how well do you drive it? You'll normally see one of these two has a flaw, or you're relying way too much on becoming an expert in products and way too much on how great of a personality you have. These two have a short lifespan. This is the only thing that can have a life of its own, if there's a driver. And by the way, the driver, you don't have to have the most flamboyant personality to be a great driver. You actually don't. Popovich is not the most flamboyant personality. Phil Jackson is not the most flamboyant personality. But Belichick is not the most flamboyant personality. There's a lot more coaches with flamboyant personalities, but they're not as good of drivers. Drivers do things that you and I never see. Drivers do things that happens right here behind a desk, right there at a conference table. Right here where a meeting happens, that they know how to drive a vendor, they know how to drive a partner, an employee, an executive, a team member, a client. They know how to drive that behind closers that nobody sees, that the average person cannot do because they're just happy with the system they have in place. Now, there's still one more message here on how to scale your business. There's five more steps on scaling your business, and I'm going to leave the last one, because I'll tell you the last one, what it is, but I want to make sure you get it at the end. Five steps to scaling. One, thinking big. It's very simple, but very few people do it. It doesn't take much, believe it or not, to fill somebody's appetite. It really doesn't. Very few people think big continuously. Now think about it. Somebody may say, well, I'm a bigger thinker than my friends. I get it. But being a bigger thinker than your friends doesn't mean you're a big thinker. You're a small thinker amongst great thinkers, right? So if you always compare yourself to your friend, I'm a bigger thinker than my sister, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my niece, you're probably going to be a cool big thinker amongst your friends because you make $2.80 a year or whatever your business is doing. All respect to you, whatever level you're at with your business. If you're happy with it, that's fine. But to have it scale and have a life of its own, you're not watching this video to find out how to get your business from $2.40 to $2.80. That's not the purpose of this video. There's plenty of videos on YouTube to show you how to do that. There's plenty of articles to read. This is about scaling your business. And if you're not refusing to think big, don't count on it being scaled. It's not going to happen. Right? There needs to be a big thinker behind it. Apple happened because there was a product expert called Wozniak that I had a chance of interviewing, but behind it there was a driver called Jobs who drove it because he was a big thinker. Amazon has a big thinker. Anything you think about that scales, there's typically a big thinker there too. Don't celebrate. The celebration life span sometimes is too long. You know, people get one victory, one vendor, oh my God, we got this big client that's going to give us $600,000 of business per year. This is so exciting. Let's go to a bar today. Hey, a game is on me. Let's go to the Lakers game. Let's go to the next game. It's on me. Let's go to watch the Warriors play. Let's go. Hey, beer tonight. Drinks. Way, way too much celebration. A big thinker doesn't necessarily celebrate a big vendor coming on board because they're expecting that to happen because they're thinking big. A small thinker's life span of celebration is way, way too long. That's why they rarely scale because the moment they make $50,000 a month, and in their mind they're getting paid way more than what they're worth because their entire goal is tied to a money, because they get to that point, they don't experience what it is to explode and scale. They stay there too long. Three is in, on. You've got to spend time working on your business but knowing when. There's a certain timing here. If this is a pendulum, this is in, this is on, you spend the majority of your time working in your business and then gradually within six, 12, 24, 18, whatever months, then you're spending more time on and then eventually you're working more on your business than you are in your business. But you've got to time this well. Sometimes people go on too early and sometimes people never leave in because they're controlled and they want to micromanage everything and they never experience scalability. So this is a timing factor that you have to deal with. And then it's the highest return. You've got to, you know, a lot of times as a CEO I run a firm and I'll run a financial firm, a PHP agency, and I'm running the firm and we'll have a problem that will come up. We have a challenge that we have with anything. It could be many different platforms that we have a challenge. And we'll have a meeting and I'll say, okay, how can we solve this problem? And we'll make a list. We'll process this together. We'll make a list and we'll say, if we do this, we can do this. If we do this, we can do this. Perfect. That solves the problem, right? Yes. But it's not the optimal solution. It's a solution. It's not the optimal solution. I'm looking for the optimal solution. The optimal solution is what is going to be able to put us in a position to not have to face this issue again six months from now, or are we simply putting a Band-Aid on this problem that we have to face seven months later? And why are we doing that? A lot of times when you're a leader of a business, the entrepreneur, you'll face an issue. I see too often trying to build a business with Band-Aids than actually sitting down and saying, what can I do for this pain to go away? That's what I'm looking for. Because I don't want to have more issues coming up later on that we're looking at having to overcome six, seven, eight months later. No. Optimal solution. So if I can invest money back into my business, and I sit there and we're having a meeting, we have $300,000 to put back into the business. I think we should do it here. We should do it here. We should do it here. It's great. Let's hire three new people. That's what we need to be doing. Excellent. Let's do that. Awesome. Great job, guys. No. What can we do to get the highest possible return that's the optimal solution to scale the business to the next level and not just throw money away at something that will give us a 6% return? Why don't we spend another hour in the meeting and try to find out what's going to give us a 13% return and let's sleep on it and find out tomorrow what we can do to get a 19% return and maybe we find out we can do a 29% return if we do this. Optimal solution. Scalability. And the last one I left blank because the last one is an art. The last one is an art. The last one is an art that takes a while to learn and you're continuously going to learn this and if the last one is something that you don't touch, if the last one is something that you don't embrace, you're lowering the chances of you being able to scale. It can still scale. But the last one is going to give you the highest level of scalability. And that is leverage. Leverage. So how do you leverage? Look, knowing you don't have all the answers and you bring somebody in who's the opposing strength of you. If you're a pure profit, visionary type of a CEO and you're terrible with operations, don't try to be operations. You've got to leverage somebody with operations to help you with the systems to increase the speed. If you're an operations type of person and you're not a great driver, you're just purely operations and your driving skills are not good, you need to bring a driver to be able to drive the company. Don't try to be a CEO known behind closed doors. You are an operation guy. You keep only thinking about that and no wonder there's not somebody driving a business. Maybe you're a good CFO and you need help with an operations or CEO person and all you care about is money, money, money. You're always worried about, we can't spend money on that, we can't spend money on that. And because of how cheap you are, you don't know how to leverage somebody else to tell you, we need to invest into this. We need to buy this software. We need to go and do it. We need to invest into marketing. You're not going to scale. What leverage is, partnerships. Right vendors. A partner that's going to come that you may have to give something in return to be able to scale the business with. That's all leverage. So what can you do to leverage time? What can you do to leverage your business? What can you do to leverage your vendors? What can you do to leverage your partners? What can you do to leverage the executive team around you? What can you do to leverage your team, consultants? What can you do to leverage someone that's going to help you scale the business? Not somebody you just throw money away either. You don't hire aggressively all the time. You're hiring very slow. You're firing very fast. But all you're thinking about is, what position can I put myself into to help me leverage the business, to scale it to a whole different level that I possibly couldn't do by myself? And if you do those things, it's not just a one area. You've got to go back and watch this video one more time and ask yourself, am I spending more time on the predictable side or the scalable side? Am I a more product person? Am I more personality? Do I drive my business based on system? You know, what am I most of the time working on? And then ask yourself these five areas, how well you are. And then slowly but surely, ask yourself what phase of this business you are in on. Start asking yourself, I want to scale. How do I scale? How do I do this? How do I do that? And slowly but surely, you'll get better at that. And then all of a sudden, you have a double, double. It's got to be a minimum of a double. That's scaling your business when you start having some doubles in measurable numbers that you're looking at that is doubling. That's scalability. That's my message to you about scaling. If you've got any questions about it, comment on the bottom. And if you haven't subscribed to this channel, please do so as well. Thanks for watching.