There can be a lot of confusion when it comes to scaling a business versus growing one. In fact, most people think that scaling and growing are the same thing.
But the truth is that learning how to scale a business is a lot different than learning how to scale one.
Recently, on the Ignite Visibility podcast, I was joined by Casey Clark, CEO and Co-Founder of Cultivate Advisors. Casey knows a thing or two about how to scale a business. Keep reading to learn more about what we talked about and how you can apply it to your business.
Who is Casey Clark?
Before we jump into how to scale a business, I want to give you some background information on who Casey Clark is and why you should trust his judgment.
A serial entrepreneur, Casey Cark went from paper routes and lawn mowing to running franchises of over 600+ employees. Today, Casey is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cultivate Advisors, a business advising firm out of Illinois.
At Cultivate, Casey and his team have guided thousands of businesses from struggling to gain traction to grow beyond their wildest dreams. They work with solopreneurs and small businesses to teach them how to scale their businesses in successful ways.
In fact, they’ve helped so many businesses and have seen so much success themselves that Casey was recently awarded the 2023 Gold Stevie Award for Best Entrepreneur in the Business & Professional Services category by the American Business Awards.
So when I say that Casey knows how to scale a business, I mean it.
The Two Sides of Business
At the beginning of our conversation, Casey broke down how entrepreneurs and leaders should think of their business in two halves.
The first side of the business is the capacity side. This is where your leadership techniques and recruiting strategies live.
The second side of the business is the growth side, which contains all of your marketing and sales work.
One of the biggest challenges that Casey sees in his clients is that owners with brains wired for the capacity side have a hard time understanding what is needed on the growth side and vice versa. This creates a problem because, in order for a business to be successful, both sides need to be in line and running co-dependently.
Casey Clark: The #1 Mistake Entrepreneurs & Owners Make
In addition to not understanding the entirety of the business, Casey sees another really common mistake. The majority of owners he works with tend to get sucked back down into an operator or sales role. They start to think that no one can do these lower-level tasks as well as they can, so they don’t even attempt to delegate them.
The problem with that type of thinking, however, is that a business cannot grow or scale when the leadership is focused on anything other than leading a team. You can’t learn how to scale a business when you’re too busy in the weeds of daily operational tasks.
This somewhat works while businesses are still in the solopreneur stage because solopreneurs are focused on the wrong topics. They aren’t focused on the ROI of their time. There’s no structure to their business. They’re only focused on growth, not scale.
Once you move into the owner/operator scale, it’s more about learning how to give up control. You aren’t a solopreneur anymore, so you have to stop acting as though you are. No one person can do every task in a business.
In order to grow or scale, you have to trust that your team has the tools, experience, and knowledge to guide the operation. You also have to let them do it themselves without micromanaging their experiences. You have to name the goal and then trust that your team will dictate the path to get there.
Scaling vs. Growing: What’s the Difference?
One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs and small business owners face when learning how to scale a business is that they don’t actually understand what “scale” means.
Many people consider scale and growth to be synonymous with each other, but, as Casey and I discussed, they’re actually extremely different.
Casey broke it down like this. When you think about growth, think of it in terms of “I want more revenue. I want a KPI in my business to move.” Growth is something that you can track. It’s something that is very measurable.
On the other hand, scaling is more of a mindset. Think of it as more like “feeling that I’m running the business instead of the business running me.”
You don’t have to achieve growth to create scale. However, when you have fast growth paired with a good scale, it makes your enterprise value higher, which is the goal for most entrepreneurs who eventually want to develop an exit strategy and sell their business.
What a lot of entrepreneurs don’t realize is that growth is expensive. As you grow your business, you’re going to have to hire more talent, make more products, and run a larger operation. While your profit margin may be higher, your overhead expenses will be, too.
What is Casey Clark’s Propeller Methodology?
One of the most important things Casey discussed during his interview was the Propellor Method. This is the method he uses with his clients to break down how to scale a business with them.
He says to think of your business as a propeller. The engine in the middle is your financial stability and your cash on hand. Just like a propellor can’t operate without its engine, your business can’t operate without enough cash. If you don’t have the right margin structure, pricing units, or long-term budget, your business won’t go anywhere.
Connected to the engine are all of the blades of the propeller. In your business, some of these blades will come from the growth side of your business (think marketing and sales) and others will come from the capacity side (think leadership and talent recruitment.)
Protecting the engine and the blades is productivity. These are the guardrails, technologies, and systems that you have in place that keep the blades and engine running smoothly.
This exercise should give you a visual understanding of why each area of business is just as important as the other areas. You can’t run a sustainable and successful business without each blade contributing. Understanding this fact will help you understand how to scale a business.
How to Use the Propeller Methodology
To implement the propeller methodology in your business, you’re going to need to sit down and rank your business on a scale of 1-10 in all of the major areas of business – finances, sales, marketing, leadership, recruitment, and productivity.
Once you’ve done that, draw out your propeller and take a look at it. Are your blades even? Or is your sales category a 7 while your recruitment is a 3?
Would you get into a plane if the propeller looks like the one you just drew for your business, or are you afraid that it will crash and burn?
If you are afraid that your propeller will crash and burn, it’s time to do some reevaluation. It’s not necessarily about building all of your blades to a 10. It’s more about building all of your blades to an even level and then working on growth.
That’s what scaling is. It’s establishing systems and evening out all of your blades so that your business can run successfully. It’s not growing at such a rapid pace that makes your blades uneven and your propeller fail.
Learn More From Casey Clark
Scaling a business isn’t rocket science but as it turns out, there is a science behind it. If you’ve been struggling with how to take your business to the next level, listen to my interview with Casey Clark on the Ignite Visibility podcast.
In addition to all of the great tips and information about how to scale a business, we also discussed our feelings on how AI will affect businesses in the near future, how major layoffs in other industries mean our industries could pick up some incredible talent, and how important partnerships are when it comes to growing and scaling businesses.
Casey also gives his most popular tip for recruitment and hiring and his reasoning for why you shouldn’t get too wrapped up in the current noise of economic uncertainty.
Set aside 30 minutes today to listen to our podcast episode. You’ll be happy you did!
