How to Scale Without Burning Out or Losing Control

Scaling your business shouldn’t feel like you’re barely hanging on. In this video, Steve shares three essential strategies to help you grow without burning out or losing control.

You’ll learn how to systematize operations, build a strong leadership team, and implement a proven execution framework that brings order to growth. If you're ready to scale with clarity, confidence, and less chaos, this is the roadmap you’ve been looking for.

TRANSCRIPT:

Scaling a business sounds really exciting until it feels like everything is spinning out of control and you're the only one holding everything together. More revenue, more stress, more problems. What's the old song with Biggie Smalls? Mo' Money, Mo' Problems? ♪ Mo' Money ♪ Yeah, that's how you may feel and you may be wondering, is this even worth it?

So in this video, I'm gonna leave you with three things you can do in your business to make it more scalable so you don't have so much stress, so you don't end up in the ER, and so you can build a business that actually lasts.

So let's go ahead and jump in. Do you ever feel like I'm doing everything myself and everything depends on me? So that's very common in business, which leads me into the first tip, which is systematize before you scale.

Here's the problem. Every business has a constraint. It just depends on where you're at and it depends on what that constraint is. But if you don't solve that constraint, you're gonna keep bumping up next to it.

So here's the constraint. This is where you are right here, right? And you're gonna only grow to this constraint and then you're gonna stop. You're gonna keep bumping up next to it.

Now, if you continue to scale, all you're gonna do is you're just gonna scale your problem. So you don't wanna do that. So in order to systematize your business, you need to create SOPs, standard operating procedures, which may include checklist.

You can also do videos. Like if you use Loom, I like Vidyard, it doesn't matter, same thing. But Loom, I heard you can record videos and then through AI, it will transcribe those videos and make these videos into checklist and standard operating procedures. So you may wanna check that out on your own.

But essentially, you want to document your processes. And when you have these standard operating procedures, it's then important to take them and then demonstrate the SOP to somebody else and then have them duplicate them.

So in other words, if you sit down with an employee and you say, all right, here's the SOP. I want to show you how it's done. The SOP requires us to do A, B, C, D. And then you say, okay, now you try.

So they read the SOP, they read the checklist, they follow along, you don't say anything. And then they do A, D, C. You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not A, D, C. You do A, B, C, D. And they're like, okay, let me try again.

So they try again and it's like A, B, C, D. And you're like, great, okay, you got it. Check, do it again. And they do it again, A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D. And when you have this in place and you follow the system, then it's gonna be scalable.

What some companies do is they have a team of employees or one employee in the back office. They're creating these SOPs. They're just typing up instructions, work instructions, whatever. And then they don't demonstrate them to employees. They just file them away and therefore they can't duplicate work. That's key.

Now, when I was CFO of one company, we spent, I kid you not, a million dollars creating this SOP book. It was this massive book, but guess what? We never used it. It just fell by the wayside.

Now contrast that with another company who had solid SOPs and everything was documented. I mean, they had SOPs and it's like, okay, this is 1.1056. And they also had a document, which is 1.1060, et cetera. They had this organized table of contents.

And if an employee came to somebody and said, hey, can you remind me again, how do we pour concrete? They'd say, oh, check out 1.1056. Have you done that yet? And they're like, no, no, no, I haven't done that. It's like, go check that out first, read it. And then if you have any questions, come see me.

If you circumvent these SOPs, in other words, somebody comes to you and they say, will you tell me again, how do we pour concrete? And you're like, okay, let me just sit down with you. Let's schedule a one-on-one. Then your SOP book is not gonna be effective, right?

So you have to be able to follow in this process. And I was with a client once, and they're talking about these instructions, right? These SOPs. And on site, I said, okay, go back and grab your SOP for this one process. And they went and got it. And then I read through it and I was like, yes, I can do this. I can repeat this. And I was like, okay, good job, check.

But that's the key. You have to be able to create these SOPs, document the stuff, demonstrate it to somebody else, and then be able to duplicate it. So this is the first thing that you need to do, because if you don't do this, you're gonna have key man risk in your business.

Everybody's gonna be coming to you, and it's gonna be exhausting. And guess what? You're gonna keep feeling like the more you grow, the more chaotic it is, because you don't have a system in place. And I'll show you how to create a strategy system, which is gonna be really critical. And that's gonna be step number three.

But before we get into that, which is really fun, let's talk about number two, which is building a leadership bench. This is your bench strength. And I think this goes back to the analogy of like, if you think about basketball, here's a little basketball hoop, right? And you have a team playing right here, and this first string gets tired, and you have people sitting on the bench.

You wanna make sure that this backup team, this second string, is gonna be really good, and they're gonna be able to pick up the game. They're not gonna lose a ton of points to the opponent, while the first string is resting and recovering, right?

So the same thing is true in your business. And oftentimes, I see companies, and they have really strong leaders, right? So at the top, they have a strong leadership team, but then down below them, right here, there is nobody who could really step up and fill these roles. And that is a big problem.

In fact, I was just working with a company the other week. I was talking to the CEO, and she was really concerned because they lost two of their key people at the top, all right? And I asked them, okay, underneath these two people, who do you have?

And in fact, they had one person who could step up, and then sadly, just recently, this person gave them notice that they're moving. And therefore, they don't have anybody to fill these positions, and they have to go hire from the outside, which is okay, but it could be disruptive to the business.

So how do you build this leadership bench?

Number one, you need to invest in their education. It's all about skills. I think a big problem in business today is not accountability, all right? It's not like business owners, business leaders lack accountability. It's their team, they lack the skills and the capabilities to actually do the work, right? To actually implement the strategies. That's what it comes down to. So building better skills.

The other thing I’d say is when you’re delegating, make sure you delegate outcomes, all right? Not actions. Now, actions are good to delegate, don’t get me wrong, but when you’re communicating, you wanna delegate these outcomes, which we call key results, which I’m gonna show you here in this next part.

But when you go to somebody and you say, hey, look, I need you to send a bunch of emails, and you can be more specific and say, I need you to send 1,000 emails, and this is a true story here. If you don't tell them what the outcome is, they will literally just send out 1,000 emails.

Most people are like this. And I was working with this guy, and I told him that, I was like, okay, we need to go get more leads. We need to go do more outbound. Here's what I would do to reach out to people. Here's a script, give them everything. And then literally he would just go out there and send emails.

And he's like, yep, I sent the 1,000 emails you asked for. And I was like, you're sending it to HR directors. Why are you sending it to HR directors? Like, they're not even our ideal customer. He's like, you said, like, send out emails.

So some people will literally, like if you tell them, okay, meet me at the beach. You're just gonna drive down this street, and then it's gonna be on the left. They're gonna drive the car, and there's gonna be a curve in the road, and they're gonna just drive that car right off the cliff. And then they're gonna come back and say, what the heck? Why didn't you tell me to turn right?

I kid you not, right? I mean, you may feel this in your business. I'm not saying people are dumb and they're not capable. It's just when you don't communicate the outcomes, it can be problematic.

So instead of saying, hey, I need you to send 1,000 emails, I would say, hey, I need to generate five new leads by the end of the week. And therefore, I need you to do that through sending emails. Now, if you send 1,000, or whether you send 100, it matters less, I care more about the outcome, okay? Because otherwise, they're just gonna do a bunch of tasks, and when it requires them to pivot because something's not working or make adjustments, they're not gonna necessarily do that because they're not gonna understand the outcome.

But as leaders, oftentimes we lack specificity. I know as a CFO, I lack specificity and has a major problem until I got really clear with my team. I said, this is what success looks like, these are the outcomes I'm looking for, and that made all the difference.

All right, the other thing is, when it comes to leadership bench, you have to spend the time to build people up, right? You can't have all these barriers and silos that you put employees in. You have to train them up and not be threatened. A lot of these leaders up here, they feel threatened for their jobs, and therefore, they don't train other people how to do their jobs, and they don't document these processes, and therefore, when people leave, it's a major disruption to the business.

All right, let's get into number three, which is install, or instill, whatever, a strategy execution system. System is the key word. Strategy is not this one-time event.

So many companies are like, yeah, it's time to do some strategy, so they do an offsite, they bring everybody together, they just come up with a laundry list of things they're gonna do, that's not strategy, but then they treat it as this one-time event, and then the year goes by, and then they look at the list, and they're like, okay, yep, we're on the same spot, and it goes nowhere.

Strategy is a system, it's a system. So if you feel like you have to do everything yourself, if you feel like the more the company grows, the more chaotic it gets, or if you're making money, but you feel like you don't know how to step back without everything falling apart, this is how you could do it, installing the strategy execution system.

So many companies struggle with execution, that's the key. So in order to create this system, at Coltivar, what we do is we just take a goal, a strategic goal, and we break it down into its component parts. This is where we came up with the framework called IARs. This is proprietary to Coltivar, but you could copy this. You could use this in your business.

And essentially what we do is we identify a problem in a company, this problem is the constraint, and then we say, okay, how are we gonna overcome that? And that typically involves identifying the initiatives we're going to pursue in order to overcome the problem.

Now, initiatives are broad in general in nature, and they should do four things. They should help you, number one, to overcome this problem. Number two, they should help you to enhance the customer experience. Number three, they should help you to foster innovation. And number four, they should build competitive advantages.

Like I said, they're longer term in scope. They're more broad. They may include one to three years to complete them. And for example, an initiative may be, we want to scale the business and increase our reach. That is a terrible abbreviation, but that's an example of an initiative. Very broad, scale the business, increase the reach, right? But it's directional, and that's good enough.

Then you have to get in here and define the actions. So the actions are, how are you gonna scale the business? Now, the key is that an action is just a hypothesis. You're just hypothesizing of what experiments you're gonna go run to advance this initiative, and then the initiative should help you to solve the problem. That's how it all works.

So the actions are gonna include, maybe to scale the business, we're gonna put in place a lead generation system. We may also need to put in place a CRM. We may need to do training, whatever it is, right? These are actions that you're gonna take in order to advance the initiative.

And then the results over here, the results are gonna include, okay, if you do this, what do you expect to happen? What are the outcomes? That's what I was talking about over here. And so one outcome may be, we wanna get 15 leads in 90 days. We may also want to decrease turnover by 10%, just making this up.

But these are some outcomes that can come from doing more training, by having a lead generation system and a CRM. And this turnover is important because you can't scale the business if employees are turning over and you don't have a repeatable system for sales.

So identifying the IARs is a part of installing this strategy execution system. But more importantly, you have to have strategy review meetings. And so we do this with our clients. We have these strategy review meetings where we look at the initiatives, the actions, results, we calibrate, we challenge each other. We say, okay, are we focusing on the most important things?

And we combine these strategy review meetings with financial strategy review meetings, which happen once a month as well. This is the system.

If you want to get out feeling overwhelmed, feeling like everything is on your shoulders, if you want to eliminate key man risk in your business, because it's a massive haircut on your valuation, right? You don't wanna look like this, okay? This is a haircut of your valuation.

But if you go to sell your business and you have key man risk and you don't have these things in place, you can expect a 20 to 30% decrease in what you could be getting. So imagine that, you go to sell your business for a hundred million bucks, and you walk away with 20 to $30 million less because you didn't put this in place.

All right, if this is making sense to you, can you drop a yes in the comments box? Also feel free to put comments down there so we know what topics are of most interest to you. I'm here to create value for you and your business so you can create a scalable and a sellable company.

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All right, until next time, take care of yourself. Cheers.