5 Tips for Scaling Your Business and Community
Ten years ago, I got a call from Genevieve Custer Weeks, Founder of the Tutu School, asking me for lunch. She was seeking my advice. As my first company, Bump Club and Beyond, had begun to scale outside of Chicago, she was curious about how I was doing it successfully. HINT: At first it wasn’t and we face planted in a few of our markets.. But, you can keep reading for how Genevieve and I both scaled using very different but successful tactics.
Growing and scaling when it comes to your business has two different meanings. When you GROW, you are adding resources and as a result you are growing at a similar pace. You are spending for growth. But, when you SCALE, you add revenue without adding much cost. You kinda keep doing what you’re doing….just bigger (at scale!)
You can also apply these definitions to your community.
When you GROW your community, often it is the result of paying for advertisements or promotions, or perhaps adding a new revenue stream. But when you SCALE your community, often it is because you are able to replicate what you are already doing and offer it to MORE people.
Ultimately, these two concepts go hand in hand. When you scale your business, there is a direct correlation to scaling your community.
This week on Dear FoundHer…, Genevieve Custer Weeks discusses how she chose to franchise her business in order to scale. By doing so, she also scaled her community by offering her product/services to MORE people in MORE places across the country. In basic terms, she took the model that was working for Tutu School and packaged it up. Entrepreneurs who want to run their own business, but who want the support of a larger entity can pay a fee to buy access to her package and start a Tutu School of their own. In top-level terms, what you buy when you buy a franchise are the name and instructions to open that same business in a new location, along with the support from corporate HQ—including the branding, brand awareness and marketing generated by ALL of the franchises being out in the world together.
This is one way of scaling. When Genevieve came to me ten years ago for advice on how to scale, I had just launched four new cities with my first company, Bump Club and Beyond. We had a model that worked in Chicago to grow community for parents and parents-to-be through education driven initiatives. We took that model, and while we did not franchise, we hired brand ambassadors and set up a revenue share model for moms in other cities to expand our brand by offering EXACTLY what we did in other cities. And while a story for another day, some of those cities weren’t successful at first (see my tips below.) Eventually we had over fifteen “Bump Clubs” across the country, and we were hosting events in over three dozen markets.
This worked because out of pocket costs and overhead was low to hire a brand ambassador in each market. There were revenue bonuses in place, AND they had freedom to work with local partners any way they saw fit. They were the faces of our company in their city. But our company OWNED the community, and we had total control over marketing, messaging and ultimately the final say in how our business was represented. This method also worked because our business wasn’t a brick and mortar.
Whether you have a serviced based, product-based, virtual, or brick and mortar business, scaling your business is truly the North Star and something you should strive for to ultimately experience bottom line growth. Regardless of HOW you want to scale your business, a few important factors to keep in mind when making the decision to scale:
What additional resources are needed to scale your business? Some resources could include headcount or communication technology. But before you put a plan into action, it is best to figure out and decide what this looks like. Remember—scaling ultimately should be replicating what you are CURRENTLY doing with little to no additional cost.
How does geography impact your ability to scale? When I scaled Bump Club, we did the EXACT same thing in LA and San Fran that we were doing in Chicago for our first go around. Guess what? It didn’t work. There were geographic factors in these markets that made what we were doing in Chicago impossible to replicate. It took a bit to work out the kinks, as well as some bigger partnerships to drive awareness before we were really underway in some of the markets.
Who is the ideal person to help you scale? This is important too—regardless of if you are hiring headcount OR franchising, the WHO is the most important. First and foremost, it is BEST when they come to YOU. Second, you have to make sure that they have the skills and capability to run a business. And third, You want to make sure that the person or people representing your brand is a fit for your mission, believes in what you want to achieve and is willing to truly help make it happen.
Think about your partnerships—past, present and future. How can your partners of all degrees help to share and spread the fact that you are going to scale and offer your services/product/open more locations in a larger way? Your partners and people who believe in what you are doing are imperative for growth in many circumstances, but especially when you are scaling your community.
What is your end goal? This might change. It probably will change. But what is the ultimate result you want to achieve in scaling your business? Write it down in front of you and build a step by step plan to get there. Don’t forget, it won’t happen over night.
Genevieve Custer Weeks said it perfectly on Dear FoundHer. She said, “My number one piece of advice for any business owner, as there is literally no downside to it, is to set up your business from the beginning like you want to scale it.”
I could not agree with her more. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you can use some assistance in setting the stage to scale your own business and community. In the meantime, make sure you listen to Genevieve Custer Weeks on Dear FoundHer…. without a doubt you will walk away with some incredible tips for scaling your business.
For more advice on building and monetizing your community, make sure you follow @lindsaypinchuk on Instagram. And for more advice from some of the greatest female founders in the world on founding, growing, scaling and even selling a business, make sure you subscribe to Dear FoundHer…so you never miss an episode.
