Scale vs Size
It's pretty easy to think that scale and size might be interchangeable, but they’re not.
Scale is a thing in business. While you can use the word in a bunch of fancy or subtle ways, it ultimately means how you grow the size of your bottom line profit.
Obvs, if you want to increase profit, something else has to increase. Like making more stuff, or making it faster, or selling it for more (preferably while making it for less).
But here’s the thing. The size of a thing is just that - its size. Scale is a relationship. It’s the size of this thing IN RELATION to that thing. Scale is always personal, because WE are the ones evaluating our relationship to the thing(s).
And personal means it will likely hit you in the feels.
Ignore your feels at your own peril.
Scaling a Biz
In entrepreneur-land, scale is the size of your biz in relationship to you.
So let’s talk about scaling your biz. Sure, everyone wants to increase profits (and if you don’t, that’s a different convo for a different day)
But to do that means a lot of things need to shift, and every one of these scaling maneuvers is going to affect YOU, because you are always part of the relationship. Remember: scale is personal.
Pretty much every decision to grow involves increasing the amount of time you will spend on both the growth, and the newly grown, larger operation you will now be managing.
In broad terms, growth will demand more space, more software, more people, more robust systems, more skills, more relationships, more marketing, more money (to buy all of the above, before the profits roll in) and, heaven help us all, more meetings.
Scaling Time
In essence, the price of growth is TIME, the one resource that is nigh on impossible to hack, absent a time-turner or Tardis.
And you, as the boss of all this, are the person who stands to give up the most time for the growth initially, if not permanently, until you can hire the right people and tighten the right processes to lighten your load.
If your biz is built on the creative output of your brain, that output will get flattened in periods of growth. You’ll become the Chief Everything Officer, pining for an afternoon free of commitments, hoping you can fire up your art brain on demand before dinner, and come up with a decent idea before bed.
And none of this is to say growth is bad. It’s not. But in order for it not to be bad for YOU, it needs to be really strategic.
Creative Time
You need to pay attention to what your non-CEO creative soul needs, and make sure that’s protected like the Crown Jewels before you layer on the growth. And it’s not just protecting a block of creative time, it’s protecting everything that makes a block of creative time fertile.
Most creatives I know need expanses of “sit and think” time to get the ideas flowing. Growth hustle is enemy of such time. You might get the hours, but your exhausted head won’t put down the Should Be Doing List long enough for a muse to pop by.
Success isn’t just in the bottom $$ line. It’s about loving and LIVING the life you’ve made, making enough money to live that life, and opting out of the conventional idea that more is always better in terms of the size of the biz you run. The best size for your biz is “big enough to manage,” not “the sky’s the limit.”
You got into being an entrepreneur to have more flexibility in your life. Make sure you flex for YOUR best life.