193: Growth vs Scale: 8 Essential Steps to Build the Foundation for Sustainable Business Success

Welcome to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. Get ready to level up your thinking and expand your horizons. I’m your host, Andrea Liebross, your guide on this journey of big ideas and bold moves. I am the best-selling author of She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary.

I support women like you with the insights and mindset you need to think bigger and the strategies and systems you need to turn that thinking into action and make it all a reality. Are you ready to stop thinking small and start thinking big? Let’s dive in.

Hello, my friends and welcome back to She Thinks Big! Podcast. Today's topic is truly something that big thinkers deal with or contemplate often. Big thinker entrepreneurs. Big thinker female entrepreneurs who are in the messy middle. They are constantly thinking about growing or scaling.

I want to talk to you about the difference between the two, and how you might “do it”. I want to talk a little bit more though today about what are the steps that you need to take in order to lay the groundwork for scaling.

I think sometimes people think they're in the scale mode, but they're not yet quite there. They need to lay some groundwork. This is almost a little bit more of a case study of me. Go back to the episode that was released in July around the podcast rebrand, where I talked about big thinking and what that looked like for me.

Well, this is part of it. That's why I kind of want to dig a little deeper into this. We are tackling this topic again, which lots of female entrepreneurs face. Also, sometimes they use these terms interchangeably, but there is a difference between growth and scaling.

Understanding this difference can really be the key to sustainable business success. I think I figured this out—maybe the hard way or I don't know what the way it was—but I figured it out and I know I want to help you unpack it.

Growth is something that pretty much everybody's familiar with. It's about increasing your numbers, more sales, more customers, more revenue. It feels great to grow. You're selling more, you're expanding your reach, you're seeing the bottom line change, but here's the catch, the growth isn't always sustainable if it's not handled correctly, which brings us to scaling.

Scaling is really about capacity and capability. It means setting your business up to handle growth sustainably. It's not just about growing, it's about growing smarter. You scale a business by building the infrastructure and the systems that you need to support growth without a significant increase in costs.

Listen to the sentence. You scale a business by building the infrastructure, the systems, and the foundations needed to support the growth without a significant increase in costs.

Think of it like this. If you grow without scaling, you might be just adding more work, more complexity, and more overhead. But when you scale, you increase efficiency, streamline operations, and maintain or even increase your profit margins, even as you grow.

I want to go into when your business is ready to move from growth to scaling. There are several crucial first steps it needs to take to ensure that that transition is successful.

Again, there are so many clients who have been like, “I'm ready to scale,” or, “I want to grow more,” but you're not ready for that scale. They haven't laid the groundwork. Here are eight things that you need to do before you really get into heavy scaling.

Our number one, you have to assess and you have to plan. You've gotta audit your current operations. I have just gone through this. I hired someone to help me do this. You have to conduct a thorough review of your existing business processes, resources, and systems.

You've got to identify bottlenecks. I identified a whole bunch of bottlenecks—I identified a whole bunch of bottlenecks—inefficiencies, there were a bunch, or things that need to be improved.

I have been spending really all of Q2 doing this, auditing my current operations. Then I had to just define really what were the scaling objectives. What does scaling mean to me?

I am about to roll out in the fall—I have not revealed it yet—a coaching program that's going to help me reach more people. It's going to increase my customer base, my client base. It's going to increase my geographic reach. I am setting goals that align with those scaling objectives.

You've got to assess and plan, that's number one. Number two, you've got to strengthen the things you're already good at, your core operations. You have to optimize processes. You've got to streamline things to eliminate any inefficiencies, automating repetitive tasks, improving workflow design, adopting new technologies.

You've gotta probably build a better infrastructure. For me, this meant switching some software. It might mean for you upgrading your IT or changing your CRM or how your workflow, your client onboarding and off-boarding process is, and things like that.

For me, it meant changing my workflow management system where all the members of my team communicate. That's how I have been strengthening my core operations. The third thing is financing. If you're lucky enough to be in a business where you might secure financing, great. But do you need to go get a loan? That might be another thing.

Or, have you had enough of a handle on your cash flow to know what you are spending as you create this groundwork, this foundation, and you recognize that this is a good use of your money, this is a good use of your time because you are going to reap the financial benefits of it?

The financing, you've got to get a handle on finances in general. That's the third thing. Fourth, people. This is funny because actually, remembers your most valuable resources are money, time, and people.

People you might have to hire. You might have to hire experts now. You might have to hire the experts in key roles that are critical if you're going to scale. You might have to create better training for your employees or onboarding processes.

You've got to give them more responsibilities potentially. They might need to know more about your business and where you're going with it. That's important, developing your human resources.

Number five. All of your systems have to be integrated. There's no more duct-taping things together. I call this system integration. You've got to have all the pieces of your puzzle communicating seamlessly. That is vital to maintain your operational base.

Number six, part of that might be enhancing your customer management. Do you have someone who is dedicated only to client services that are increasing customer support?

They can handle increased inquiries. They can handle increased support issues. Do you need a different CRM? Are you managing all your leads? Your client interactions. Enhanced customer management with maybe improved customer support, client relations, and CRM systems.

Number seven, you've got to establish a strong company culture. This is something that I'm working on presently. What is my company culture? What do I value? How do I want to be communicated with? How do we want to communicate in general? How much transparency do we need? We have to keep all the team members aligned with our objectives.

Then number eight, you do have to have a risk management plan. What are the potential risks? Because there are new risks that are associated with scaling. There might be compliance issues. You keep people's secure data. I don't know anyone's credit card number, that's one of my things.

If you're someone who has a product that's distributed, could there be anything in the supply chain, you might have issues? You've got to have a risk management plan and some strategies to deal with this.

Let's review. Number one, assess and plan. Audit your current operations and define your scaling objectives. Number two, strengthen your core operations, optimize processes, and build some infrastructure.

Number three, secure financing, understand your finances and explore what options you have for funding. Four, develop your human resources. These are the people hiring the right people, having better training and development for them.

Number five, implementing scalable systems and having systems that integrate. Six, customer management, client services, client relations, and your CRM. Number seven, establishing a strong company culture. Does everybody know what the culture is of the company, and what the values are of the company? Number eight, creating a risk management plan.

Do you have those things? Scaling is kind of an art, my friends. It is part art, part science, and you have to get the right tools and the right team in place to do it. This is a lot of what we work on in Runway to Freedom.

Have you considered joining us in the Runway to Freedom Mastermind? If you're someone who's thinking about scaling, this is the kind of work we're doing. This Mastermind might be perfect for you.

Okay, let's have a conversation about it. You can always go ahead to my website, go to the coaching tab, click on Runway to Freedom, and book a call. Let's talk about it. As we wrap up, I want you to remember that growing gets you more, but scaling makes you more without costing you more in the long run.

It's about efficiency and making sure that your business is built on a foundation strong enough to support not just more, but much more. Okay, my friends, thank you for tuning in to She Thinks Big!

If you enjoy what we talk about here, if you enjoyed our deep dive into growing and scaling, I want you to make sure that A, you're subscribed to the podcast, B, you've gotten yourself a copy of She Thinks Big, the book, and even the workbook, C, you've gone to the website, you've taken the business freedom quiz, and you've dove into some of the resources that are really just free right on the website.

But best of all, go to that website and schedule a call, let's chat. Hey, you can pick my brain for 30 minutes, why not? All right, until next time, keep building, keep building your foundation, keep scaling smartly, and keep thinking big. See you next week.

Thanks for tuning into the She Thinks Big! Podcast. If you're ready to learn the secret to unleashing your full potential, don't forget to grab a copy of my book, She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary. It's available on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore.

And while you're there, grab a copy for a friend. Inside, you'll both find actionable strategies and empowering insights to help you navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship and life, and step confidently into your extraordinary future.

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