The Harsh Reality of Scaling a Business

Welcome to episode 118 of Dawn of a New Era with myself, Dawn McGruer, the business growth coach. In this episode, we're going to get really controversial, but this may be controversial, but honestly, I don't care because we are going to be covering something that is so important to address and to get out into the arena. So many times this topic has been suppressed, and we often see on social media a completely different reality. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the harsh reality of scaling a business.

So what I want to do is have a real talk about what actually goes behind growing a business, and it's time to break through the illusions and get down to the nitty gritty truth. Because scaling a business is not all sunshine and rainbows, luxury holidays, and a glamorous lifestyle, contrary to what we might see on social media. And yes, those things can absolutely become your reality once you start generating consistent cash months. But getting there takes effort, strategy, and some hard knocks along the way.

So if scaling your business was that easy, we would all literally go from zero to hero in our first month. But the harsh reality is that only 8% of businesses actually achieve significant growth and scale. So when you put that into perspective, if your business is continually growing, you are part of the elite few who are actually making it happen, and that's something to be really proud of. If we go back to how the business started.

You were the person who took a blank piece of paper, a blank canvas, and crafted a business model. You created a business that was going to impact hundreds or thousands or even millions. That in itself is a huge, huge accolade and something that you should absolutely celebrate each and every day, because so many people do not take that leap, do not become business owners, and they sit on an idea or a passion and they don't bring it into reality. So now let's talk about the reality of scaling.

Now, I personally scaled my own business through the following things, and this is the truth behind what it takes to build your empire. The first one is probably the most important, and that is mindset shifts, believing in the possibility of big success for yourself. And having this belief is one of the fundamental changes that actually is the catalyst to growth. And it sounds crazy, but so many of us play small and we keep ourselves small because we don't want to raise our heads above the parapet.

The reason for that is that we fundamentally don't have the belief in ourselves. We see other people's journeys and we compare ourselves, but we don't actually believe that we could have limitless, infinite success, you know. And this is a really difficult thing to get your mind and your inner self and your inner voice to start truly believing this. Now, once that happens, believe you me, everything changes.

And the second is embracing failures. They became my biggest learnings and stepping stones, and I do not regret them. It's sometimes quite hard for me to look back on some of the epic fails and feel into those in a comfortable way, but some of them bring up big emotion. And this is great because I remember the feeling of maybe not enjoying, you know, what's happened.

Maybe something that I put a lot of heart and soul into hadn't worked. And I remember the feeling of having to bounce back and build that resilience. But the thing that came after, these are the spells, regardless how bad it felt, these are my biggest spells of growth, honestly, across every single business. And the thing is, is if you're not trying and you're not doing and you're not testing, you know, this cycle has to happen to be the next catalyst of your scaling and growth.

And what you have to remember is if you don't try or you don't do anything, nothing changes. You don't develop an understanding or learning. Now, what's happened is I now know every single pitfall, well, it feels that way, to avoid in the future. And again, this helps me with clients because if I can see a pattern or I can see the trajectory heading towards this, I can help navigate and move them out of the way so that they can get to the result quicker.

Now, I've gone through all of this. I've walked the walk. I've literally lived most situations as a business owner in the past 24 years. So as a business coach, I feel like that is one of my superpowers because, you know, I can see where things potentially might go awry.

I can see opportunities for huge, huge success and huge scaling. This brings me on to number three, and this is one of my favorites because I started out really looking and assessing and researching and literally being addicted to other business owners. I was online scrolling, looking at what people were doing, and I literally kind of hit a point of overwhelm. We know that when we hit overwhelm, everything stalls, and it's really difficult to see, you know, a way out of the fog because all clarity goes.

Because we are literally absorbing so many different ideas, so much inspiration, that we start to kind of get excited by the opportunity, but then we've got so much information, so many things going on in our minds that it just becomes impossible to unravel, and you just stall. And that's what happened to me because I had to learn really quickly to put my blinkers on and create more than I consumed. So stepping away from online FOMO, this whole fear of missing out, and stepping into productivity, and that was my focus. Really laser focusing on my goal, not caring about other people's journeys, not caring about what other people thought, because do you know what?

I'll be really honest here, there'll be people who talk behind your back every single day of your lives. There'll be people who want to try and bring you down because guess what? When you evoke jealousy in somebody and they see you moving forward, then that creates that sort of talk, and that's when you know you're moving in the right direction. Because people love to have an opinion, and it could be a good opinion, it could be a bad opinion, but you have to remember that advice and opinions are great, but sometimes they can impact quite badly in terms of what your initial thoughts were.

So when you're building strong foundations, one thing I would encourage you to do is get your idea, move forward with it, and keep stum. Do not share every single bit about it. It's great charting the journey behind the scenes and all of that. That's great on social media, but I mean keep everything focused.

Do not start Talking to people about it, because two things can happen. I have seen a lot of entrepreneurs lose ideas quickly because someone else thinks, Oh my goodness, that's amazing. I'm going to jump on that. And the second one is, is everyone has an opinion.

Everyone tells you when you start your business, you have to do this, this and this. Everyone is an expert in what they do, right? And this is not a wrong thing for them to do, but they will share their opinion of why you need whatever it is they do. So it could be that you meet somebody and they say, Oh, you absolutely need to have my service without this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You have to be very careful that when you build your strong foundations, that you're prioritizing on the bricks before the shiny things. And that is exactly the thing I did, because the best advice is that until you have consistent, steady cash flow that is hitting your money goal coming in each and every month, do not focus on anything else outside of that foundation, because you will soon start to see pressures on cash flow. You will soon see that your time and focus gets put onto something else that maybe isn't aligned to your goal. I see this so many times when business owners decide, I'm going to do a podcast or a book or whatever.

These are amazing tools for your business, but there has to be a right time, okay? If you are just starting out in business and cash flow is really tight, then investing in writing a book that could take months is not the right priority, because that's not going to bring fast cash. It's not going to bring consistent cash flow. You have to think about the things that will facilitate you reaching your priority goals.

And we all know that financial security and financial growth has to be part of being a sustainable and profitable business. We have to make sure that from a mindset point of view and mental health, that we are not putting unnecessary pressures on ourselves. Business and life is hard enough. We want to be feeling the ease in business.

Now, it's not always going to be easy. There's never going to be perfect balance. And, you know, I—

Thing is, is if we win 90% of the time, or even 80%, we'll feel in flow. So don't get too hung up on what other people are doing, okay? Now my next one. This is fairly controversial to many marketers, but this is all about having a sales-first mentality.

Now, in the entrepreneurial space, as a business owner, right, we have to face facts. If you make sales a priority every single day, guess what? Your business will grow. And so many people say to me, Oh, I hate selling.

Well, it's not that you hate selling; it's you may not feel comfortable with some methods of selling, okay? Sales has to come first. We have to be making sure that every single day, if we have leads coming into the business, that they are the number one focus. I meet people every single day who have people who are like, Yeah, I want to work with you.

They haven't sent invoices out, and they haven't sent contracts out. And this is crazy because your sales process has to be slick. It has to be keeping people in the momentum whereby they went from interest to desire to buy your product or service in the first place, and you need to make them feel safe and secure. And by doing this and making sure you have a process in place, believe you me, you'll feel ten times better.

So look at your process. You know, if someone says yes. What is the next stage? How does that flow?

Is everything ready to go? What we do not want is buyer's remorse, which is basically someone says yes, nothing really happens. It all gets a bit kind of like, Oh gosh, you know, I've not heard from them. I don't know what's happening.

And then they start to make a doubt in their mind and they go, Oh, I don't want to do it anymore. Too much time going on between you making that sale to then actually them getting their product or service is going to cause people to doubt. And then that is going to impact on your business growth because we don't want to spend time on the sales process. We want to have a slick process that makes the person feel safe and secure in their decision, that they feel supported, they know the next steps, they know the process, what's the timeline.

All of those things are really important. And it's the difference of maybe coming off a sales call and going, Great. So the next three things that will happen is you'll get a link to the contract, a link to the invoice. As soon as you've got that, you'll get X, Y, and Z.

People need to know what the process is, okay? And people need to know that when they've bought something, if they were excited, what's happening next, okay? So you have to remember that if someone is making an investment, this is an emotional decision. And if our emotions are left to run riot, then we start to, you know, make things in our head.

We start to make stories of, Oh, well, if the person hasn't come back to me by now, what would it be like when they're working with me? Oh, well, I haven't heard this, or I don't have a date in this. Oh, do you know what? I'm just not going to do it.

It doesn't feel right, okay? So even if there's no sense and logic behind it, we don't want to make the person doubt. We want the person to be excited. Now, that said, we also need to focus on the fact that every single day, the first thing you should be focusing on is not all of your to-do list.

I see to-do lists with hundreds of things in. Literally every single day, you need to be focusing. On three things. Number one, if you have customers, is there opportunity for any lapsed customers or existing customers to buy more, buy more frequently?

Is there cross-sell or upsell opportunities? Remember, customers will spend 33% more with you as a business because they know, like, and trust you. So don't forget customers. If you have a lapsed customer, get in touch with them.

If you have amazing customers, your advocates who support you, are they referring people to you? Could they be an affiliate? Could they promote your business? You know, we have to think about these people first in business as the first priority to look after, to serve, to make sure that we are creating the impact that we said in our business we would.

So every single day, we have to focus on not just working with the client to achieve these amazing transformations and results, but we also have to look at opportunities that lie within the customer base. Second thing is leads. If you have leads coming into the business, are they the first thing you handle? Do you manage them through?

Do you get people onto a call or whatever it is that you need to make that sale? And we need to make sure, the third thing, we have a steady flow of leads coming in. So look at things like your social media, you know, and be truthful with yourself. Is your social media turning into paying customers?

So are those connections that you're making each and every day actually adding to your business revenue? So we have to think that whatever your effort is that, you know, we want to spend less time and effort on our marketing. Are we getting the return on investment for what we're doing? You know, delegate into clutter.

Focus on the things that matter in your business and the things that will actually scale your business. No one will die if you don't do the other things, but you have to remember that if you operate with these vast to-do lists, it doesn't create productivity, it creates overwhelm, and we start to burn out as business owners. We need to make sure that we have a strategy, okay? Because a goal without a plan is just a wish.

And we need to know that everything we're doing each day, every ounce of effort we're putting in as a business owner or a marketer is actually gaining traction, and it's actually achieving the goals that we set out for. The last one here is attention to detail. So being laser focused on the numbers and understanding the dynamics of your business. And what I mean here is, is that we have to know what our daily sales goal is.

We need to know then how many leads we need to generate to get to that point. We have to know not just what sales we make a day, but what costs we make a day. Why? Because we need to know what profit.

We can't wait for 30 days, 60, 90 to assess these things. We need to be dynamic in the way we approach it. And the thing is here is that once you really understand your business, you'll make decisions based on fact. And this is the difference of scaling a business.

So my advice is here that when you know your numbers and you really understand what it is you have to do today and each and every day to drive that business forward, then you'll start to behave very differently. You'll start to see that everything becomes easier, everything flows more. And then when we think about why you set your business up in the first place, your why, you know, your mission and your vision, the dreams and goals that you had, you start to realize that actually you're living those because you're aligning your activity to actually achieve the goal. And every effort you're putting in there is taking you one step closer.

This is the key. So when you come across those luxury millionaire lifestyle posts, remember they can be absolutely 100% inspiring, but your definition of success is unique to you. It's all about following your own dream and staying true to yourself. Wherever you are in your journey.

Now, I've personally climbed the ladder to five to six figures to multi-six figures and even seven figures in my businesses. So I can assure you of one thing: I have lived the reality of scaling. And if you're ready to make your dreams a reality, it's time for us to talk, and you know how to reach me. So my final parting gift to you is remember why you started your business and dream big and make it happen.

So I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, and I'd love to know more about your reality of scaling your business. So you can follow me at The Usual, at Dawn McGruer, or check out our resources at dawnmcgruer.com. Take care, and I will see you on the next episode.

Thank you for listening to Dawn of a New Era podcast, and for your free checklist to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit and success, and join our community, go to dawnmcgruer.com.