Caitlin Bacher:
Episode 83: Popular “Scaling” Advice That Is Killing Your Business
Have you ever wondered how an online course business can scale from $30,000 to $650,000 in less than a year?
Or what about scaling from $70,000 to $500,000 in a year, or $200,000 to $1,000,000 in a year?
Those are just a few real life results that our clients have experienced.
And while I could sit here and tell you exactly how they did it, I won’t because my free masterclass already does that and you can sign up to watch it right now.
Instead, I want to spend today telling you what they didn’t do.
You see, there’s so much advice out there floating around the internet about how to properly scale a business, and I have to say that most of it is pure garbage.
Today I’m sharing three pieces of popular scaling advice to never follow and what I advise my clients to do instead.
So let’s get started.
My name is Caitlin Bacher, founder and CEO of Scale With Success®, and I’m on a mission to help course creators all over the world grow their business in a way that is profitable and scalable. We are sharing revealing conversations about what it really takes to scale an online course business to millions of dollars per year. Join us here to discover the tough decisions we’ve had to make, the biggest failures we’ve had to bounce back from and the learnings that emerged every step of the way. We are so grateful that we have the chance to share it all with you right here on Scale With Success®, The Podcast Built for Course Creators™. Let’s get started.
Today I’m revealing three pieces of popular scaling advice that will ruin your business, and I’ll share exactly what I advise my clients to do instead.
These are the same clients that have gone from $30,000 to $650,000 in eight months, from $70,000 to $500,000 in less than a year and $200,000 to $1 million in a year.
Now if you want to see more results just like these, make sure to take a peek at my results highlights on Instagram.
Before we dig into scaling, I want to talk about what the word actually means because it does get thrown around a lot.
So when most people think about scaling a business, they think about increasing their revenue, and that does happen, but what it really means is increasing revenue at a rate that is outpacing the rate at which your expenses increase.
I mean, let’s face it, if you are increasing your revenue and serving more customers, you’re going to need to increase your monthly expenses to do that.
However, scaling means that even though your costs are increasing, your revenue is increasing even more.
For example, let’s say you 10x your revenue in a year. Well, if you were scaling, that means that maybe your cost would increase, but not at the same 10x rate.
This ensures your business is profitable and gives you the opportunity to reinvest a portion of your profits back into the business so you can continue to grow at a rate faster than your expenses.
Now, I see a lot of course creators experience initial success, retire their husbands, buy a new car and buy a bunch of stuff they probably don’t need because when you’re first starting out, your expenses are very low.
So an influx of cash means you have a very high profit, but what they don’t realize is that you have to increase your business expenses in order to support and sustain that level of growth.
Then these same course creators find themselves in a place where they’re suddenly struggling because their business is cash poor.
You’ve got to send your partner back to work, you’re burned out because you haven’t begun hiring a proper team to help you, and everything just feels like overwhelming chaos.
I don’t want that to happen to you, and if it is happening to you and you want my help to turn things around as I’ve helped so many people do, then please send me a DM on Instagram with the word “mentorship”.
- My longer term packages are booked out for the year, but if you tell me what’s going on and I think I’m in a position to help, there might be a way we can work together in a shorter time frame.
Okay, so let’s get right to it.
Three pieces of scaling advice to stop following immediately.
Number 1: “you need a big team”.
I’ll never forget the look on my client’s face when I told her that her team was twice the size of mine, but my annual revenue was 4 times the size of hers.
She couldn’t wrap her head around how I was able to run a business that at that time was generating $2 million a year with a lean team that was half the size of hers.
So how does that happen?
Well, most of the time I see this happen because the CEO is failing to prune.
Now when your business is growing, you can’t just keep hiring more people and build upon your existing team without stopping to assess if those roles are actually even needed anymore.
Figuring out what roles are needed to sustain continued growth requires strategic thinking.
And that can be difficult sometimes if you’ve built a team that feels like family, and sometimes it is family, but the needs of the company have outgrown their skills or capabilities.
Sometimes you may have 3 contractors or part-timers that can be replaced by just one full-time person who is highly qualified and they can get the same thing done in about half the time.
So hiring that full-time person actually ends up not just saving you money, but depending on the role, they could actually be generating money.
Now when people hire me to help them build their team, sometimes the CEO determines that they actually don’t need to hire anyone new, but they do need to reorganize and even let go of a few contractors or part-timers.
Now these decisions are hard and require a lot of strategy and support from someone who’s already done the thing that you are trying to do.
The goal is to have a lean profitable team that is high-performing and makes decisions that are aligned with your company’s core values.
Typically, bloated teams happen when the CEO is afraid to make hard decisions and continues to put off what needs to be done by hiring even more contractors and temporary consultants to put out fires, which ends up costing them even more money.
So I always advise my clients to get creative when it comes to creating an organizational chart.
What roles do you actually need to run the business, not based on what you’ve been doing in the past, but based on what is happening now and what you want to happen in the future?
Number 2: “you need a complex funnel”.
Now this is just wrong, just like you need to consistently look at what roles and people you need to keep on your team, you also need to be doing that with your sales and marketing funnel.
The reason why our clients see such incredible results with us is because we are obsessed with keeping things simple.
When you’re scaling to your first million, it is all about simplicity.
I’ve seen so many course creators stay stuck at $250,000 a year or even $500,000 a year, and sometimes it’s because they’ve really over complicated things.
When course creators come to us looking to reach their first 6 or even 7 figures in annual revenue, the first thing they do is build a Profitable Sales Engine™.
That’s because we want them to build a steady stream of consistent revenue from their online course that can scale up over time.
Now what can happen is that sometimes our newer clients get distracted by other strategies they see me or others experimenting with, which is why we provide live coaching calls twice per week with our Head Coach and one live coaching call a month with me.
Now I always tell them, start with simple and get fancy later. The clients who get the best results inside our programs are those who keep things simple.
Now once things really start taking off and your monthly revenue begins to rapidly increase, then we can talk about new things to add or subtract to sustain that level of growth.
That’s one of my favorite things about the Profitable Sales Engine™, it’s so flexible.
I’ve personally helped some of my high-level clients tweak and build upon their Profitable Sales Engine™ with some pretty cool bells and whistles.
But the only reason they were able to become my high level clients who were doing multiple 6, 7 and multiple 7 figures is because they started with simple and got fancy later.
Let’s talk about the 3rd piece of advice that you should absolutely ignore when it comes to scaling your business.
Number 3: “you need everything to feel easy”.
I’ll never forget the time a client told me that she was frustrated with herself because she knew things were supposed to feel easy, but things felt hard and she couldn’t figure out why.
I looked her right in the face and said, “Who said this was supposed to feel easy?”
At first, she couldn’t remember, and then she said maybe she heard someone say that on a podcast or Instagram, but she couldn’t remember exactly who or exactly where.
Friends, scaling a business doesn’t always feel easy.
Sure, there are moments where I really feel in flow, but there are other moments where I feel very challenged as I find myself facing new problems that I’ve never experienced before.
But who says that a challenge can’t be fun?
Who says doing something hard can’t be rewarding?
Scaling a business requires discomfort, not occasionally, frequently.
And if you want to be in this for the long haul, you need to start reframing your relationship with discomfort.
Discomfort doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.
It means you’re growing and the only way to avoid discomfort is to quite literally stay in your comfort zone.
And there’s nothing wrong with staying in your comfort zone, but doing so will not lead to doubling, tripling, or even 10xing your revenue.
Scaling is not a wild mythical beast.
It’s simply increasing revenue faster than your expenses, which is something every course creator can learn to do.
Will the path be easy? No, but it will be meaningful, rewarding, and one of the biggest adventures you’ll ever embark upon.
To recap, here are three popular scaling pieces of advice to avoid and what to do instead.
Number 1: You don’t need a big team, you need a lean profitable team.
Number 2: You don’t need a complex funnel, you need an effective, Profitable Sales Engine™.
Number 3: You don’t need things to feel easy, you need to reframe your relationship with discomfort and recognize it for what it is, growth.
I appreciate you being here today and tune in next week for another episode of Scale With Success®, The Podcast.
Are you sick and tired of launching and looking for a proven method to generate consistent revenue from your online course on auto-pilot?
Sign up for my free masterclass, “How To Generate Launch-Sized Revenue Without Launching” and I’ll show you how our clients are making MORE money in LESS time than they ever did while launching.
If making sales everyday in a way that is completely automated and doesn’t require paid advertising sounds good to you, then click the link around this episode and sign up for my free masterclass today.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Scale With Success® Accelerator — an online course designed to help you generate launch-sized revenue without lanching. If you want to learn MORE about our proven method for success, click here to watch my free masterclass. See you in there!