How to Scale Your Service-Based Business

Ever Googled “what does it mean to scale a service-based business?” and walked away more confused than before? Same. 😵‍💫

Today we break down what “scaling” actually means, why it felt impossible when I first started, and how we eventually grew a tiny, scrappy business into a program that serves thousands of clients across the world.

We’re covering:

• What “scaling your business” ACTUALLY means (and what Google totally failed to explain)
• Why service-based businesses always hit a ceiling
• 3 different ways to scale (and which ones I tried… and hated)
• What scaling means
• A simple mindset shift that helped me double (and then double again) the number of clients we serve
• Your challenge: How to start finding your next “scale up” solution today

If you’ve ever wondered:

• “How can I create an online business?”
• “How can I serve more people without burning out?”
• “What does scaling mean?”

This episode is for you. 

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

 Can somebody please go back and tell the 20 something year old me who didn't understand  what the words scale your business meant that we did in fact scale our business? We scaled beyond her wildest dreams, got thousands of clients all over the world, and now we're sitting here on a podcast teaching other people what it means to scale your business.





 . I distinctly remember. Being told I needed to scale my service-based business, and I had no idea what that word meant, and I pretended I did, and then I Googled it and I still didn't know what it meant because the Google search did not make any sense. Hopefully the next person to Google that will then find this podcast where I will explain to you, dear listener, how to scale your service-based business, whether that is a business that is currently just you alone at your kitchen table with your laptop.

Or maybe you rent office space and see clients one-on-one there. Maybe you are a therapist 

or a personal trainer or a tarot card reader. These are all. Service-based businesses and we all come up against the same specific challenges when trying to scale, which means grow your business in a way that is sustainable and doesn't rely on you trading your time for money.

For instance, eight years ago I was a social media manager. I had like many of us invented a job using a double hand me down laptop. It wasn't just hand me down once. It was hand me down, did twice.

I started doing the social media for some local businesses. I've told this story before, so I'll spare you the details, but suddenly I had this business and I'd be hard pressed to even call myself a business owner 'cause that's not what it felt like. Just like now, I don't really resonate with the term entrepreneur.

 I don't really call myself an entrepreneur, but Sure. I suppose that's what we are, right. Anyway.

 I ran these businesses, social media. I made their content, I wrote their captions. I helped them with,  the graphic design and the branding and all the things that go into social media. I was over-delivering like crazy and soon I ran out of time pretty quickly.

I ran out of time. I was working all the hours in a day. I wasn't spending time marketing myself, which is a big problem if you're spending. 90% of your time doing actual client work, then you're not,  working on your business, you're not growing your business. And then when a client leaves, you have no choice but to panic because you don't have somebody queued up to fill their spot.

 There was a lot of things that I was doing wrong, but I was making more money than I ever had before, and I was making reliable money for the first time in my life after being an actor and a bartender 

and that is awesome. And if that's where you're at, that's great. Like that is such a beautiful, fresh place to be when people just start giving you money to do a job that you maybe even enjoy. Dare I say? So that's a great place to be, but it got to the point where I wanted more and I wanted to grow this thing, and I wanted this thing to be a little bit more sustainable.

And maybe I could picture my life down the road a bit and I would still have this. Job or this business. Okay, so what needed to happen then? So I started getting into communities of business coaches and business coaching and started meeting other people that were freelancing and had jobs like this. And then that's where I heard the word scale, you need to scale.

Someone even said you need to scale by creating a program. And I was like, what? What does this mean?

And then I heard you need to stop trading your time for money. Like, okay, wait, like get out of the hourly pay mindset. Okay. Fascinating. What does it mean?

Scaling is about your delivery. It's about how you deliver your offer. All right,  whether your offer is dog walking or. Consultations or whatever the delivery needs to change because the delivery cannot demand, a hundred percent of you because you only have so many hours in a day.

 If you are booked to capacity and your business is not scalable and it requires a hundred percent of you, then you can raise your prices and that's the only way that you can make more money. We'll simplify, ? You can make more money by raising your prices, but you can't increase your client load once you hit capacity.

 From there, option B. You can hire someone inside your business, hire a junior expert, hire someone and teach them how to do what you do so you can double your client load or give them clients as well. You're gonna have expenses now. You're gonna be taking a cut, but you could grow that way. And there are a ton of books on how to do this.

I read a lot of them. I tried it for a couple of years. I didn't like it because one of the requirements of hiring more people in your business, and the business books will tell you this, is you need to be okay with those clients receiving an 80% as good a job as you could do, right? So if you are the most excellent at what you do.

The people that you hire are not gonna be as excellent as you. Otherwise, they would be out there  having expertise in their own businesses, yada, yada, yada. So theoretically, at least for some of the time, your clients are not gonna be receiving the amazingness. That is you. You're gonna have to settle, oh, I hate the word, but you're gonna have to settle for them receiving a subpar.

Product,

  I tried to hire so many people , to create social media content and to be writers for me. And so then we scaled up my agency by bringing on more writers and bringing on more people to make the content. And even though they were really, really good. I was also constantly getting better, right?

So we're bringing in someone who has some years of experience, but there's no way that they can catch up to me because I started five years before them, right? So even if I train and train and train and train, I'm gonna continue to grow and learn and get better. So. Because of that, because of that gap, even though you could be giving people, you could be giving your clients like a really good product with your junior experts, you are always gonna be better than those junior experts because you are the expert.

Expert. You see what I'm saying? So you can choose to go that route if that works for you. That's awesome. That's one way to scale.

Another way to scale is instead of serving people one-to-one, you serve one to many. . So instead of from 9:00 AM to 10, am you doing your one-on-one with your clients like you always have, you can do small groups, so it's one to three or a larger group, one to 10. Maybe you start hosting workshops so you can have a group of people in the room, or maybe you create an online program that people go through at their own pace, and you could infinitely scale.

All of these are delivery that don't require a hundred percent of your attention to every single client.

Now, if you have ideas, great, go act on those ideas. Reinvent the wheel, invent something new, try a bunch of stuff, ask people if they're interested in it. Go and act on it. And if you are sitting there thinking. None of these will work for me. Jenna, .  Before you give up on yourself or before you think, nah, this can't work for me, I want you to know that when I was a social media manager and I was just starting out, I thought I had to put FaceTime in with all of my clients.

I would drive across Toronto in rush hour traffic from the east end to Mississauga to meet with my clients and take pictures, sitting in traffic for hours and hours. I would, show up, put FaceTime in, bring my camera. Take the photos, stage their locations for photos for Instagram only meet with them in person.

Never zoom  I was doing so much in person work, which severely limited the number of clients I could have because meeting someone in person takes four hours. Meeting someone on Zoom takes 20 minutes, 

so you could meet a bazillion clients in that same time window. You see what I'm saying? And I was doing that for years. Not realizing there was an easier way, so I want to encourage you to look for your own blind spots. Is there an easier way that you're just not seeing right now? Because you're probably listening to me being like, obviously I wouldn't expect to see my social media manager in person.

I hired someone in. You know, God knows where. And I remember when I first got a call from an American client after only ever working with Toronto based clients. 'cause that's where I was at the time in Canada. And I got a call from an American and I was like, okay, well like I'm Canadian, like I can't come there.

And they're like, yeah. Obviously like they knew, like to them it was like, yeah, like of course you wouldn't come here. What are you talking about? And then I started getting calls from more Americans and no one even expected me at all to be there in person. They knew clearly that I was Canadian and they could see what I couldn't see, which is like this was a fully online business.

Because of that, I was able to take on more clients and increase my capacity that way.

Which is the road to scaling that biz.

We actually had another moment in recent history when we were able to scale my program.  I have a program Magic Marketing Machine, where I help service-based business owners to get more clients, fill your freaking books using Instagram, create content. Get all the likes, get all the comments, do it as quickly as possible.

Spend as little time on your phone as possible and get all the clients coming into your inbox. That's what my program does. And we had worked with hundreds of people, had hundreds of clients from all over the world come in there, old Jenna would be very proud of me. And then we got to the point where we were hitting our capacity again and we had to go, okay, how do we scale this further?

And another time, guys, I was up against a wall going, there's no way. There's no way I could scale this to bicker. I've already grown so big. How could I possibly scale this without hurting my clients, without spending less time with them? There's no way. Like I'm stretched too thin, you know? And I sat down with my husband on the couch and I said, okay, .

, we'd actually just had a launch where we had 60 or so new people come in in like a day and we're like, okay, what do we do here? Now we've had all this success. It's champagne problems,   we're up against the wire. How do we handle this? And he came up with an idea and I was just like, yeah, it's perfect.

And what I formally thought was unscalable, we changed the delivery. We were able to scale perfectly. We had never got a single complaint.

 I don't know if it's interesting to you at this point to hear the details, but, uh, basically  we added a weekly coaching call and then split the calls into groups

using breakout rooms, meaning we  doubled and then doubled again. Our capacity and our clients actually get more personal support from us now because of this. So it worked out really perfectly.



 Every week our clients are able to submit their messaging or worksheets or content that they wanna post, or content that they did post and get it reviewed with me and my other coach on live calls. And he's fantastic too. You know what? That's another thing. Nathaniel, who is another magic marketing machine coach, is wonderful, and I was so scared to bring on another coach.

Listen, you get a lot of me. In the program. There's a heck of a lot of me, and I know that anytime you add another coach in a program like this, people can get nervous because they're like, wait, Jenna, I came for you. And I was nervous about that happening. When I tell you I think Nathaniel some days is better than me, like he is so good.

People absolutely love him. They still get lots of me as well. I've never got a single complaint or a single that I know of request that was like, can I please have Jenna? Like they love him. He's perfect. So, um, that was another time that I was scared thinking that adding help would hurt the business and it served it tenfold

anyway. How are you gonna scale? ,   lay out your delivery right now. Grab a pen, write it down, lay out all of the elements of your delivery and ideas on how you could get double the amount of people into however you're delivering that.

There are loads of options. I've given you some here, but I mean, everyone's business is unique. The first step could be doubling or maybe just adding five more clients. Just challenge your brain to come up with solutions because I just, I can't express enough. There were moments where I thought that scaling would be impossible, and we always found a solution.

We always found a way to serve. Double the amount of people that we were currently serving. There was always a way, actually, I'll say one more thing. When I first launched Magic Marketing Machine,  my colleague Paige helped me launch it, and she's so lovely and she worked with me at the time, and then her business started absolutely thriving.

So she went away to focus on her business,  . She used to what we call Cheerlead, our weekly group coaching calls,  her job was to be in the chat, supporting people, reading out their questions, any sort of support, just to make sure there were more hands on deck for the class.

And when I first launched the program, there was between, you know, 12 to 25 people on a call. And that's, well that's still true because of all the ways that we've grown the program, but. At that time, I would say to Paige, after every call, how would we have handled this call if there was 45 people in this room?

And she would shudder and be like, oh, there's no way. How could we do it? I'm like, there. How could we do it? Let's think about it. It feels scary in this moment, which is the perfect moment to come up with some solutions. How? How would the call be different? What would need to change? What wouldn't work anymore?

What might be a possibility that we could experiment with and try?

 That's your assignment. That's your assignment right now in this moment. How could you add five people? How could you double your capacity? What wouldn't work anymore? What would need to change? What could change? What could you experiment with? All right.  .

Because you are here listening. In my world, there is a very big chance that you are. A giver, a helper, a healer, someone who has a service that improves other people's lives in some way. That is a huge part of my listener base, and we are living in a time right now where it is very important that you, a good person, makes money, money.

Coming into your business is power and is important that good people have power and money. So go out there and scale this baby. Okay? Scale this, grow this, let's change the world. I'll see you next week.