Harmony of Hustle
Jump into the World of Justin Shoemaker aka "The Waterboy" . From Business, to music, this is the inside look of the world of the hyper-driven and their Harmony of Hustle.
Harmony of Hustle
Episode #15 : Scale your company FAST!
Say goodbye to the myth that skyrocketing your business is a high-stakes gamble; it's time to embrace the thrill of rapid growth done right. Through the lens of my personal journey, I shatter the perception that crawling progress is a sign of prudence, revealing instead the perils of complacency that can spell the end for startups in cutthroat markets. We're peeling back the layers on why aggressive expansion isn't just an option but a necessity, and how assembling your dream team from the get-go, from ace plumbers in home service industries to top-tier sales and operations gurus, is the linchpin to scaling your ambitions to towering heights.
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What's going on. Everybody Excuse the audio. Today it's been pretty busy and I had to get off early to crush it today Busy, busy end of the month. So I want to talk about something that's been really on the top of my mind and I think it's a thought that is hurting a lot of entrepreneurs and I truly believe this because I've done this twice now with scaling companies.
Speaker 1:There's this belief in business that growing quickly is dangerous or hey, don't scale too fast because it's risky, and that's just not true. It's only risky if you can't execute on fulfillment, which means you just don't have the people to do the installations, which really is not an issue of you being able to scale. It's an issue of you being able to hire, and that's what I think is so interesting is, you can scale so freaking fast if you just do the work. A lot of people use the better to grow slow mentality because they're fucking lazy. They just use that as a barrier or an excuse of why they're not where they think they should be, and when they see people blow past them, they think, oh, this person's going to fail because he's going too fast. Speed is not your enemy. Executing and not being able to execute correctly is your enemy. Being lazy is your enemy. In fact, the truth of the matter is, for most startup companies, you need to do 50 times the amount of inputs just to get to a point where your company is safe. When you start a business, the clock starts. You're burning cash day one. If you don't go fast, you're going to run out of money and you're going to go broke. So you need to do the things that are going to make you successful and make you money quickly, not slowly. And if you think about it, if you're just starting a business, you're entering into a domain where you have competition who's probably been in business for three, four, five, six years already, who already have some sort of the TAM secured. So how do you expect to capture that market if you want to go slow? It doesn't make any sense. And, in fact, if anyone says that they're probably not a very good entrepreneur, in my opinion, or they're an installed business or they didn't grow the correct way. Because, yes, you can hurt yourself by growing too fast, but that's just because you didn't have the foresight to hire people to fulfill your needs when you go into the different markets. So, for those of you who are trying to grow quickly. I'm going to give you the cheat codes right now, because it's not that difficult.
Speaker 1:If you're in a home service company, the first thing you need to figure out is who do you need to fulfill your system? So, for me, I need plumbers. So how many plumbers do I need to service an area? Well, it's going to depend on the plumber you hire, but in general, my one plumber can handle the entire state and I pay him very well to do so. And here's the thing, guys if you're a new startup and you don't have a ton of volume, you need to pay your installers more than you normally would to service a bigger area, and they will do it all the time. Okay, now, as you scale, you get more volume, you'll start paying less, but to start out, pay them a premium to keep them on board and to have them address your entire market area. Okay, as you get more volume, then guess what you need again Another plumber or another installer. The nice thing is, once you have one good one, you can have him, train him, shadow him, and then you keep that ball rolling and all you have to do is just maintain the standard and you're fine.
Speaker 1:The second thing you need is people. Okay, so that's the second place. You should be putting your money to either a recruiter or a zip recruiter, or indeed, and bringing people into your organization. Now here's the thing if you start a company and you don't know how to train salespeople or you aren't a good salesperson, you are fucked. Okay, the only other way to do that is to bring on a partner who can do it. So you need to be honest with yourself and say, hey, if I'm an operations guy which I'm not but if you're an operations guy and that is your lane, then you need to own that and you need to bring on a partner that is a killer frontline salesperson that can lead and inspire a team, because if you don't have that, you're not going to grow and you're dead in the water and you're probably not to offer them either a very, very nice equity share or you're going to need to offer them some sort of profit sharing or incredibly high payback period, because obviously, starting out, you're not going to be able to afford them for the salaries they're going to be worth or for the commission they'll be worth.
Speaker 1:To be honest with you, and on the flip side, if you're a frontline salesperson, like I am. If you're a guy that can lead a team and you've done it before and that's like your niche and that's what you love to do, well then guess what you need to do? Just the opposite you need to bring on a top notch operations guy. Because if you're just selling, selling, selling, and there's no automations, there's no CRM, there's no process attract clients, there's no Customer care, there's none of that back-end Stuff happening, well then you're also fucked.
Speaker 1:Okay, you guys have to have all those pieces in place and you want to get all of that in place, ideally before you start the business. Okay, too many people Start the business without having all the foundational pieces in line. Okay, so before even start the business, you want to make sure you have your operations guy locked in. You want to have your frontline sales guy locked in. If you're the operations guy, you want to have who you're gonna hire on as an installer locked in. You want to have the market locked in and you want to start bringing on some sales people.
Speaker 1:Okay, now you might be thinking well, that's really hard to do. Well, it's really hard to do if you're starting from scratch. So here's my advice to you and this is how I did it and it saved me a ton of headaches. If you want to start business in an industry, go work in that industry for two to three years and be a top producer in that industry. You will rise up the ranks and you'll get to learn how that business really operates, some of the pitfalls that you can find, but you'll also build relationships with people high up in that industry. So eventually, when you decide to go do your own thing, you can use them as a resource to assist you. Okay, you can also probably bring some of the salespeople along with you if you were leading from the team and you inspired them. So there you go. You have your installers ready to rock, or your salespeople ready to rock and roll.
Speaker 1:Excuse me, most people jump in too quickly. If you can be patient and Dedicate a few years to learning the craft inside and out before you jump in, then scaling isn't a problem. In fact, that's. All you should be focused on is scale, because the faster you scale, the more money you make. The reason why most small businesses fail in the first year is they run out of money and they run out of money. They don't scale fast enough. They stay in the same location with the same spot, with the same team. All right, you don't need a massive team to get to a point where you're making money. Okay, you can get the 50 installs 60 installs a month with a team of five guys, so just let that sink in, okay.
Speaker 1:The the ability to scale is the ability to make money. So if you think that scaling quickly is a bad thing to do, Well then I'm sorry. Your business isn't gonna grow and people like me and businesses like mine are going to crush you every single time, and the companies that are already around Are also going to crush you every single time. So the moment that business starts, you need to be focused on putting 1000% extra effort in that you even think you need to put in just so you can catch up to the people you're competing against.
Speaker 1:I hope that helps guys a little spirit to this morning. I just I saw a lot of, a lot of people with these small businesses Complaining about or trying to tell me how scale is dangerous. Yet I was able to scale a store company from 625 million in 11 months and this company that I started on my own Swarov treatment company. We were able to scale from zero To about 90 K in 11 months. Well, 90 K a month on our 11th month. So Scale is not a problem. How you execute and the work you put in, that's what's holding you back.