So, the three levers you can leverage to scale a business are:

Skill
Support
Systems

Skill

Those who are naturally strong in the skill lever can get their businesses far on their own or with very little support.

They often end up being high-paid consultants or specialists. They have a reputation for being experts or providing the highest level of service in their industry.

If you're high in the skill lever, you'll probably be great at sales, great at high-level relationships, and a good 'key person of influence.'

Watch Outs

It's easy to fall into the trap of convincing yourself your business has to be dependent on you.

In the short term, you might not mind this, but as you get older or crave more freedom, you can end up resenting your business.

Also, be careful of your perfectionism and how that might be leading to you making your business harder than it needs to be, possibly undercharging and limiting your scale.

In essence, you can fall into the trap of making yourself a well-paid self-employed specialist instead of a business owner.

Tips

Get clear on what you want from your business long-term. Think about the 4 Fs of: Fulfilment, Fun, Freedom, and Finance [I wrote more about them here].

Spend some time getting clear on the top-level numbers you need to achieve for your business to give you the lifestyle you want.

Think about things like Average Client Value and how that ties into Yearly Revenue and Profit Targets. Thinking top-down from your numbers is useful to override your tendency to think bottom-up from delivery.

If you struggle to think about the business side of it, consider working with an external partner or hiring someone to help you focus on and build that side of things.

You don't even have to hire; you can use services like MiPa or The Fractional Integrators to get access to specialist support without the stress of hiring.

Support

Those who are naturally strong in the support lever get their businesses far by attracting help from others.

I have a good friend Dave who has built a fantastic charity from the ground up by being a ninja in attracting support.

Every time I speak to him, he's somehow managed to get about five new high-level experts on board with the charity and helping him.

Leveraging support provides endless scope for scale, so it's an incredible skill to have in business, but there are still watch outs.

Watch Outs

I've noticed from experience that those who are naturals at gathering support are often poor in systems and structure—my good friend won't mind me calling him out on that.

We see this in a lot of businesses. You've got the great owner who the team loves and would do anything for... but they can't do great work because the owner isn't giving them enough clarity or structure to work with.

The person who is great at leveraging support is also often terrible at holding people accountable.

Ultimately, your watch out is the tendency to think that the answer to all of your problems is just finding more people.

Tips

Instead of just thinking about getting more people, spend some time thinking about what problem you need to solve or what you need to achieve first.

It will help immensely for you to sit with someone else and go through this as it's probably not your strong point.

You might be tempted to just ask someone else to do this for you, but it won't work. What you want to achieve is in your head, so you've got to extract that information and translate it into things others can understand and act on.

Having a strong Head of Operations can be a game changer here, or, if you don't want to hire a full-time Head of Ops/COO, you can use a service like ours to get the same results at a fraction of the cost.

Systems

The natural systems thinker will often get a business far with things like software and outsourced or fractional services.

It might not come as a surprise to you that this is my leading lever. Systematisers are very good at seeing how things can be done for maximum efficiency.

Systemiser's are always finding ways to do things quicker and better and can therefore achieve decent business growth with little to no support.

Watch Outs

Be careful that you and your business aren't being held back by over-systemisation. Systemisation takes time, so you can end up spending a lot of time systemising things that haven't yet been validated to work and therefore wasting your time.

Another watch out is your tendency to avoid getting help through support.

Often, instead of finding the perfect solutions and building the perfect system, the best thing you can do for your business is find the person/people that already know the answer and/or have the skills you need.

Tips

Consider getting someone on your team who is strong in the support lever. You're most likely an introvert, and your tendency is to look to systems for all answers.

Although systems can get you far, virtually all businesses need good people to scale and sell.

If this feels like a big step, start working with someone who can teach you how to utilise people well, such as an outsourced executive PA service like our good friends provide over at MiPa.

If you're a small business owner and lacking in the systems lever, check out the video below and find out how to get your business ready for sale/scale with three simple systems.


Thanks for reading - Mike
The Fractional Integrators | Co-Founder



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