Scaling with Purpose: The Masterclass in Growing Your Business with Vision and Culture

In this episode, Brian Montes discusses the best practices for scaling a business. He emphasizes the importance of having a solid foundation and consistent revenues before scaling. The first chapter focuses on getting the leadership team on board and constantly reinforcing the vision. The second chapter highlights the significance of keeping a pulse on company culture. The third chapter advises against assuming that what has always worked will continue to work. The fourth chapter emphasizes striking a balance between uniformity and variation. The fifth chapter discusses the need to be mindful of internal competition. Overall, these practices are essential for successfully scaling a business.

Takeaways

• Before scaling, ensure you have a solid foundation and consistent revenues.
• Get your leadership team on board and constantly reinforce the vision.
• Keep a pulse on company culture to maintain a healthy foundation.
• Don't assume that what has always worked will continue to work.
• Strike a balance between uniformity and variation.
• Be mindful of internal competition as the company grows.

Want to connect - email me at brianm@scaleocityworks.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Employer Podcast. I am your host, brian Montez, founder of Scalosity Works and the Entrepreneur to Employer Coaching and Membership Community. So congratulations is in order. If you've built a successful freelance business that has grown to the point where you need to hire, you have achieved a huge milestone. If you're already past the point of making your first hire and your team is now growing well, congratulations is in order to you as well. So, regardless of where you are with scaling your team and your business, whether you're at employee number one or employee number 100, this podcast focuses on everything related to people operations. We'll cover best practices, strategies and solutions to help you build a sustainable and scalable business that is fueled by great people and a great culture. So if you're enjoying listening to this Entrepreneur to Employer Podcast, please subscribe, give us a like and give us a review. Your feedback will help us grow this podcast and we'll be able to positively impact more employers to help them build better work environments. Welcome back to another episode of the Entrepreneur to Employer Podcast. I am your host, brian Montez, founder of Scalosity Works.

Speaker 1: 1:16

So if you're an entrepreneur, chances are you've considered scaling your business for various reasons. It might be for the continued growth of your company. It might be for your brand. It might just be part of your exit strategy that you want to build your business, get it to a certain level profitable, of course and then sell it. So it could be a variety of reasons why you aren't thinking about scaling your business. Whatever that reason is, scaling your business will take you to new heights, but to get those benefits, you got to execute well, and you know it's very popular for business owners to say, well, I'm ready to scale. But before you can start scaling your business, there's two things you have to have. You have to have a solid foundation in your business with SOPs, procedures. You've got to have all of that built out, or most of it built out, and you got to have consistent revenues. Those are the two foundational pieces before you can really say I want to start scaling my business. So today we're going to talk about the best practices for scaling your business and we're going to get into the different things you need to do to be able to start to really grow that business. And so, by time you're done with this podcast episode, you will have a list of the things you need to execute well on in order to scale your business.

Speaker 1: 2:24

All right, let's get into it. So, number one, you're going to need to get your leadership team on board Before you can scale your business. You need clarity on your vision and you need to be sharing it over and over and over again. Sharing your vision just one time is not going to cut it. People are not going to remember it, they're not going to embody it, it's not going to come in grain. That vision needs to be something that is constantly reviewed, constantly in front. It needs to be in front of everybody constantly so that they remember what is the vision.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Where are we headed? Why are we doing this? So it's vital for everyone to understand the why behind why you want to scale and what's behind it. And again, when you craft this message the message of why you want to scale and where the business headed can't be because I want to build this business and I want to sell it in five or 10 years, because then your employees and your leadership team are going to take a step back and go. What's in it for me? If he's just going to exit and sell this thing, why should we help him or her grow it? So you have to make sure that, when you discuss your motivation for scaling, that you are putting yourself in your leadership team's shoes and your employee's shoes and giving them a reason of what's in it for them reason as well. And once you've done this, the answer to that question of why are we scaling is going to help you navigate other key questions, such as how you want to scale and what value you want to add by scaling. And once you cast this vision and get your team on board with the why, the how and the what, that is what will start to drive it. Once they understand the why, the how and the what, and once they understand what's in it for them, now you have that vision cast and you can move forward. It's been said that you know when you get tired of repeating your vision. The team is now just starting to hear it, or maybe just starting to take it to heart. Right, they've got to become fans of the expansion. They have to be behind the scaling process and the reason why, and they have to have clarity on direction so everyone can move forward together. Community among your leadership team is critical to successfully scaling.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Okay, the second thing that you need to execute well on is going to be keeping a pulse on your company's culture. Okay, culture, in my opinion, is everybody's responsibility, but it starts from the top. It absolutely starts from the owner. The founder, the CEO, whoever is at the top of the food chain has to keep a pulse on company culture. And culture, good or bad, stops, you know, stops with you, right, you can set that culture in motion to be good or you can set that culture in motion to be bad. Culture is paramount in companies and a healthy culture is the foundation that will help you successfully scale.

Speaker 1: 5:02

If your original, if your culture has, is built on negativity and you're trying to expand, that culture will seep into the new employees, new locations, right, whatever that framework of expansion looks like, that negative culture is going to flow in there and, surprisingly enough, a healthy culture isn't necessarily transferable from one location to another. So if you are a brick-and-mortar type business or you're a multiple location manufacturing company, you could have subcultures. You could have a situation where the culture is not the same throughout, right, look at how hard Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out have worked to keep their cultures consistent, and I'm sure there's, you know there are one-off situations and there's there's, you know, store locations that are having problems because nothing is perfect. But look at how hard that organization has worked to keep the culture consistent throughout every location. Right? If you want a Chick-fil-A, what's the standard response? My pleasure. I mean 99.9% of the time that is the response we get when we go into a Chick-fil-A and we ask for something and we say thank you, it's a my pleasure. They're very consistent in the culture that they've built.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Now, just like repeating the vision to your team is vital. Keeping a pulse on the status of your culture is of equal importance. A unified team will hold the same values, thus embracing the importance of a healthy culture. However, through the process of scaling, a variety of emotions can derail your team before your very eyes. New responsibilities exist among your direct reports that will breed anxiety as things start to get more. As things start to get busier and a scaling process happens, anxiety will start to creep in, right, they'll have increased stress, a lot of frustrations, right, and that can all impact culture if you're not dealing with it regularly. So I cannot stress how important it is to consistently evaluate the morale of your team as you go through this growth process.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Remember you can't successfully scale your company alone. You need a team in which to do it. You need your team to be operating at their highest capacity, with a very healthy approach. Your leaders and other team members need to have good communication with each other. There needs to be transparency and accountability in the communication and the work itself. Team members should be building each other up, not tearing each other down, and if you notice any issue with your company's culture, address it and correct it before the real scaling starts, because all you're going to do is create a negative culture if you don't do this and remember toxicity kills growth. I'm going to say that again Toxicity kills growth. You've got to get rid of any toxicity within your organization. If you have toxic employees, they cannot be part of this journey. They need to move on. You need to make them move on. You need to make the decision. As a business owner, as a CEO, as a leader, I'm not going to allow toxicity in my organization and if this person is going to be toxic, they are no longer going to work with us.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Alright, number three Don't assume what has always worked will always work. Okay, the reality is that your original business plan has a unique blend of factors, such as team members, customer base and location. Chances are the processes, the systems you put in place worked well because of certain factors in the beginning, but as you grow and as you expand, you may need to take a step back and realize that what got you to a certain level let's just say what got you to one million may not be what gets you to five million. Okay. So you have to be willing to take a look at any dependencies or roadblocks that could impact that growth and that what used to work to get your sales, or used to work to build your culture, or what used to work to keep client satisfaction, may not continue working. So you're gonna have to pinpoint pain points, limitations in your current systems and you're going to have to highlight those and start to develop new processes or enhanced processes or continuous improvements so that you can continue moving forward.

Speaker 1: 9:01

Number four strike a balance between uniformity and variation. As you discover which systems and processes are and are not working, you will likely make some changes, but you don't have to apply every change to every location as you scale. You should strike a balance between uniformity and variation and again, obviously I'm saying this if you have a brick and mortar location, you can also be scaling a business that doesn't have brick and mortar locations, but you have employees all throughout the country or even throughout the world. So, regardless of whether it's physical locations or locations of employees, you have to be aware that you have to strike a balance between uniformity and variation because, let's face it, how some people process and work things in Georgia maybe different than California versus the Philippines versus Sri Lanka. So you have to be aware of that and develop compromises to make sure that you strike a balance between uniformity and the variations that are going to naturally occur due to either geographic locations or physical location differences. So when we balance uniformity and variation, we are ensuring that the workplace, even though it's growing, is not a free for all and there's consistencies between groups, between departments, between locations, and by having that we can still make sure, as we move forward, we're not micromanaging things.

Speaker 1: 10:26

The next thing you need to be aware of and conscious of as you scale your business is be mindful of internal competition. When business leaders think of competition, they might be more likely to consider external competition, right Competing companies, indirect competition outside. When you scale your business, you will start to have internal competition that will develop your new locations or your expansion into different parts of the country, your hiring of team members might start competing with your original ones, and you will see that start to happen. A great example of this is I had a meeting this past week with one of the largest food distributors in the US, and they are six billion in annual revenues, and one of the comments that the executive team made is that they sell against each other. Right, so they have a division that sells proteins, meat, beef, things like that that they are procuring from farmers and from ranches, but they also acquired a meat division, a meat processing company that they've acquired, and due to the fact that this meat processing company tends to raise higher level, higher, more gourmet stakes if you will right, they're raising a higher end cattle they have kept that division as a standalone division. So now you have sales reps that are selling more middle of the market type stakes and meat, and then you have the other division within the same company selling higher end, and so sometimes they're calling on the same customers and they're competing against each other. So that's a great example of internal competition starting to happen. They're selling against each other, so they're not selling. You know, they're selling against Cisco and they're selling against US Foods and all the others, but they're also selling against themselves, and so the sales team has to be aware of that. So make sure you understand and you're paying attention to internal competition that can start to develop as you grow your business.

Speaker 1: 12:34

All right, so those are the things that you have to be thinking about when you decide to start scaling your business. So let's just recap those to make sure that your list is complete. So, first, you've got to make sure you have your leadership team on board, and you have to make sure that your vision is crystal clear and that you reinforce that vision and, most importantly, make sure that vision includes in it what's in it for them, because all you're doing is telling them you want a scale so that you can exit as a you know multi-millionaire in 10 years. It's going to be hard to get your team on board with that if there's not something in it for them. Number two, make sure you keep a pulse on your company's culture, because company culture can get very squirrely, especially as you expand. Number three don't assume what has always worked is going to continue working. What got you to one million may not get you to five million, so make sure you are aware of that and you are constantly driving continuous improvement. And number four make sure you strike a balance between uniformity and variation, because as the team expands, more variables will come in and you've got to have a framework to keep things consistent. And number five make sure you are mindful of internal competition that will develop as the company grows. You have external competition and you will have internal competition, and that is a normal occurrence when you start just to grow a business.

Speaker 1: 13:50

So I hope you've enjoyed today's episode of the Entry to Employer podcast. If you have, would love to leave. You love if you would leave a review. Give me a five star review, four star review, and leave a comment. I do take all the comments very seriously and utilize them to improve the podcast. And if you believe somebody would benefit from listening to this episode, grab a link to the show, text it over to them and say hey, I just listened to this episode on what we need to be thinking about if we're going to start scaling our business. I think you'd benefit from it and send that link to them. This will. The more you share this podcast, the more business owners we can help impact to help them scale and grow their business. That's it for this week's podcast. I hope you've enjoyed it and we will see you next week on the Entry to Employer podcast.