6 Principles to Scale & Grow Your Business (The Wheel of Scalability)
Once you're profitable in your business, it's really important that you keep on growing because as they say, maintaining the setpoint in your business is kind of like going backwards. So in this episode, I'll teach you my six key principles to scaling your business. Hello, hello, and welcome to The FastForwardAmy Show, the show where we lift your life and business with simple strategies. I'm FastForwardAmy, your host and coach and I'll bring you a new episode every Tuesday. Over these past couple of years, I've been able to scale my business going from one-on-one coaching to group coaching, to having a fully scalable group program with separate modules. So I thought today might be nice to tell you about how I did that.
How I went from one client to four clients, to nine clients, to 17 clients to 30 clients to 375 to now over 1,000 active clients. So that's the gist of this episode. And I know that for many people, scaling feels really uncomfortable because you might be in a phase in your business where you're really focused on just getting that first client. Then this episode might not be the episode for you, but it will give you an insight as to how you can scale further along the way. So maybe it is an episode for you, but if you are in this phase where you feel like you're currently stuck, your client roster is full. You don't know how to get out of the day-to-day and how to really work on your business so that you can scale.
I don't know what I was saying, but this episode is for you. And today I'm going to share with you my six key principles to scale your business, how I formatted them into my Wheel of Scalability. Now, before we get started, this is episode 101. So welcome to this over 100th episode. So exciting. I used to look forward to this point. I used to be like, okay, if you're consistent for more, for like two years, then you can get that 101st episode.
And here we are today. So that's fairly special. And if you ever want to read a recap of an episode, because you are currently walking around or doing the dishes or whatever, then know that through fastforwardamy.com/101, you can find the full written recap of this episode with all of the links and visuals included that I'll be talking about because if you're watching me on YouTube or on IGTV, you can see later down the line on my screen that I'm going to be showing you a visual of what I'll be talking about, the Wheel of Scalability. And that means that if you're listening, it might not make sense.
So just telling you through fastforwardamy.com/101, you can find that visual. It's been a while since I've recorded so I'm just going to try and stick to my plan. I have this very elaborate plan on my papers here of how I'm going to explain this to you. And basically what I want to talk to you about is, okay, so you are at a point where you're fairly profitable and successful in your business, but now you want to keep on growing. How do you do that? I think it's kind of relatable to when you're first starting out and you don't know, should I publish my website first? Should I start an email list? Should I be posting on Instagram? In the beginning, you're stuck with all of those things.
What do you do first? And then later down the line when you're scaling, the same type of questions come up. But the difference there is that in the beginning, you don't know what's more important. And when you are scaling, everything feels really important. So I'm going to show you the six areas that in my opinion are most important and that you can move through every six months in your entire business. And the first one is magic data, by the way, it's not going to come as a surprise, but these six key principles are also the basis of my scale up program, The Boss Up Mentorship™️. If you're ever looking for information on how to scale your business, you can go to fastforwardamy.com/scaleup
and there we will be adding new information on which programs we offer for you. So that's /scaleup. And as I'm saying that my team can write that down because I made up that link right before recording this episode. I thought it'd be nice to just give you one spot to go to scale. Okay. So magic data. I love data.
I love numbers ever since I was a kid. So when I was 10, I started my first business and I had this like, Hello Kitty little notebook for my accounting. I started my first jewelry business. I remember other kids made jewelry too, but I took it really seriously.
I was also sick at the time and I knew already back then like, okay, I need to track what I'm doing. So I used to make these bracelets. Then I would sell them.
And I was really wondering like, hey, what should my profit margin be like? So I went to the store where I bought all of the pearls and I talked to the store owner. I was 10 years old and I was like, so which profit margin do you take on these pearls and profit? And what do you recommend for the jewelry I'm selling? And I remember, and I still have the notes of that, I kept track of all of my costs and I kept track of how much revenue and profit I made. I made 800 euros in profit in that same year.
I had a lot of time on my hands. This was before kids had iPhones and stuff. So I was just focused on selling. And to this day, those things are really still, I'm still profiting from the things I learned back then, because some of the things I learned back then is when you are selling, you shouldn't really push people, but you should just smile. You need to make things people really want, you want to be flexible in which colors people want. So long story short, my first business venture was actually a product-based business.
And back then it was just costs and revenue and profit and amounts of pearls and inventory that I was tracking. But as I grew older, as I turned 16, 17, I was just always keeping track of everything. How much money was going out. Later on, a few years later, I was especially focused on how much money is coming in. And as I was growing my fitness coaching business, I started keeping track of everything I made in a week from which clients what? And I started seeing these patterns, I started seeing, okay, Tuesdays are a high day.
Thursdays are a high day. Saturday, well, there's a lot of cancellations on Saturday. And it costs me a lot of effort because I'm tired so I might as well skip the Saturday and just stop coaching sessions on Saturday. Friday afternoon my energy is low, my clients aren't as interested in training on a Friday afternoon.
So I'll stop working on Friday afternoon and work on my business at that time. So by looking at my timetable, by looking at my revenue, I started seeing patterns, I started seeing which clients gave me 80% of my revenue and which clients were actually only coming in every so often that they weren't really good for business anymore. You know, my income started increasing 'cause I started tracking everything. So what they often say is what you measure is what you know and that's fine. But I believe that what you measure is what you can increase.
So what does that mean for you as you are scaling your business? I recommend that you start keeping track of everything. And the biggest objection here is that I see a lot of starting entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs who are making between 5k to 10k, and they tell me, "But Amy, I don't have any data yet." --------. Even if you have a store where only one person a day walks in, you have data, one person walks in, how often do they make a purchase? If it's one out of one, amazing, you have 100% conversion rate.
If you do sales calls, you do five sales calls, and five people buy, okay, that's a 100% closing rate. Maybe you close four out of five people on average. Then by knowing all of that, later down the line, you can calculate the targets of your traffic that you need that we'll look at later. So by tracking everything, you're going to learn so much. How much traffic does your website have? How many people come to your shop on Shopify, for example? It's really easy to look at all of that data. So what I would recommend for you, as you want to scale your business, I would start tracking as much data as possible.
Just start by using a really simple Excel sheet and start looking at patterns, start looking at numbers that really pop out, things that are staying the same, but that could have an impact. For example, for us, we've seen in my second business that if we don't host the podcast, immediately our sales drop, our email subscribers drop. So we know that our podcast is a really important trigger for everything in that business, where we do almost everything passively. In the FastForwardAmy business, we know that our stats for a launch are really important.
We know that if we want to get 100 new clients for a program, we need to get 750 new people in a webinar, for example. So by tracking all of those different stats, we know how we can go and make passive income. We know how we can prepare for a launch. We know what the marketing team needs to do and all of that. Now, this might seem like far away for you, but even when you are by yourself and you want to scale, data is the way to go. You need to start tracking.
Are you hosting a webinar? Amazing, set up an Excel file. Just Google Sheets, it's free, where you just track okay, this many people registered for this webinar, that many people attended, that many people bought my offer at that price. Amazing. Now you have your conversion rate. Now do it again. Do it again. Do it again.
Start looking at if you're running it evergreen, for example, that it's automated, which converts better, a live that you're repurposing in evergreen or one that you actually recorded to be an evergreen, which converts better? Now you know where to put ads, where to spend your money. As you know more and more of your stats, you'll be able to redirect your resources to the right spots in order to make more money. I have no idea if this was interesting, I'm going to look at my team.
It was interesting. They are nodding. Okay, cool. It's really cute. They're just sitting there on the couch looking all cute.
Yeah, where is the days, you know, back in episode one, I record that by myself in my PJs in my little apartment and I edited everything myself. It's amazing how much can happen in such a short time. That's not even two years ago. And I think that's very fitting for this episode, is that not even two years ago, I was terrified to launch my podcast because I thought maybe no one will listen or what if they will listen, but they won't like it? And I postponed launching my podcast twice, but the podcast was very pivotal for me. And if I now look at these different keys to scaling, I kind of get why, because a podcast for me was this linchpin that changed so much because I started being really focused on data because the podcast gave me new data every week of how many people were listening on a Tuesday and how many people were actually signing up on my email list on a Tuesday. Not only that, but it really pushed me to get hyperorganized, which is my second key to scaling.
And my team, again, they're sitting there, they're like, we're not that organized. It's because we're in a new phase of our business. But imagine that I was running a group coaching program of 30 people and I was launching my podcast. I launched an entire podcast launching party by myself in just like a week's time. And like so many people showed up.
It was amazing. And doing the podcast every week and launching with five episodes, I think when I started was an incredible challenge. So what I did was I figured I can't do this by myself. I need to get organized. So I started writing out all of the different steps that went into publishing every episode. So I ended up with, in the end, 106 steps that went into publishing every episode, because obviously I didn't want to just publish my podcast and be like sayonara, I wanted to publish the podcast and be hyper-consistent.
And ever since that launch, I haven't missed a single Tuesday and that's because we have processes and workflows in place. And we're also like we've built a dashboard, not everything is automated yet, but the dashboard of the data, but those processes and workflows, they really forced me to create a process of how do you create a new lead magnet, to be like, okay, how do you publish a new podcast episode on Buzzsprout, all of those things we started writing them down tracking them. And I was able to focus to start focusing on my own zone of genius, which was actually creating a podcast and not so much executing all of those different tasks. And that's because I started to document and plan out all of the next episodes. And I'm always like, I catch myself doing this so often.
I'll joke about it. My team will tell me, "Amy, cut yourself some slack." I'm always like, "I'm not organized. I can't plan." It might be more difficult for me because I'm like a very creative person, always like looking way further ahead. And by the time I figured out what my idea is, I'm not actually excited about getting it organized anymore. But if you want to go forward with your business, you want to scale, that part does need to happen.
So what I would recommend is just anytime you do something more than once, so for me publish more than one episode, publish more than one blog post on your feed, make a reel in a certain set of rules more than once, you start documenting it. I have started documenting everything. It is a pain in the ---, but it has allowed me to grow my teams to more than 10 people in both businesses together. And it allowed me, I mean, I won't say there aren't any mistakes anymore, honestly, I still wake up sometimes fully grumpy or I can't sleep or worry about things, but there's also a lot more times when that's not the fact and there are so many things in my business that are kind of running on autopilot without me intervening. I'm not in the systems anymore, and like never, and when I do, I probably ---- it up and my team hates me because I put everything in the wrong spot in Google Drive. You want to document anything that you do more than once and what you want to do as you're doing that or as you're helping your team members do that as you will be scaling more, by the way, you can also scale without having a team.
You want to be three steps ahead. And that is the gist of getting organized. And that's how I'm hacking myself right now because these six key principles, I'm still moving through them all the time.
I'm hacking myself right now to start looking at planning ahead as being like this finish line that I want to meet. So I'll kind of go back and you might not know this about me, but I drive competitive historic rallies with my dad. We drive a rally about once a month, once every two months, depending on the season, and what you get when you drive rallies, you get a road book and in the road book are different situations, like 200 meters to the right, 500 meters to the left, 600 meters to the left. You never get the full picture because you literally don't get an address or whatever. But if you're driving really fast, it is really important that you always know not just what the next situation is, but what the next next next situations are going to be like, because sometimes at the bottom of the page, there will be a situation and you'll think you have time, but when you flip that page, it will be like 100 meters to the right again in like this little narrow street.
If I'm not always focused in the rallies, not just on the next situation, but on the next four or five situations, we will drive in the wrong street. And it's the same with your business. You want to get organized, not like the goal is not getting organized, the goal is moving forward. And if you want to be moving forward with your business, if you want to be scaling, you need to make sure that your organization is going to support you in doing that so that you start wasting less and less time on the things that are actually coming back every week so that you can stay focused on the goals you want to hit in the future.
So what I would recommend there is that in your planning, you create the milestones that you want to achieve, and then you work backwards and you make sure that your processes and workflows are supporting you and your team members in doing that. Sounded so smart as I said that, I hope my team is impressed now. And they'll be like, yes, let's plan ahead. And I really have to get rid of my own limiting belief that I'm not good at it. Sometimes you just got to suck it up and you got to do it. And that's going to be coming up a lot as you scale your business.
'Cause you know what, when you start, the gratification is instant. You'll launch your website, yay! You have visitors. You start an offer, people like it. People are like, yay, good for you. But scaling is so ------- lonely because for me, for example, so many people literally think all I do is just make stories. And I think my clients, they really know that's not the case, but from the outside, people are even like, what does your team even do? People don't even realize how many processes, how many workflows we have, how much content we make, how many coaching clients we have, like hundreds, thousands at the same time, it's immense.
So it can be really lonely. And that's why I hope this wheel will help you to figure out what you need to be focusing on. You can't focus on everything at the same time.
So you want to create these kinds of baselines for these different topics. And then for example, in my Boss Up Mentorship™️, each month, we focus on one of these principles full-blown like with workshops, with business cases, everything so that you keep improving all of them. And the gist of it is that as you go through this Wheel of Scalability, you keep going through it just like we were still going through it.
You go up and up and you end up exponentially higher with your business because you put everything in place. Like those processes don't disappear. The podcast used to be a lot of work for me. Now it's a lot less work, but the results are the same or higher.
So that's what you want to be achieving when you grow exponentially. Obviously that means that you need to be doing everything as well as new lead generation, which is our third key success principle, because we have spent a lot of the last year on our organization to the point where I made the mistake of making that the goal, which is not what you should be doing. You need to have different goals, goals in terms of traffic, in terms of sales and have your organization support that. For too long of a time, I was focused on organization as a goal. And that led me to actually not spending enough time on our lead generation, for example, on growing the podcast. So I was really proud the podcast was there, but now we're at a point where we need to make sure we grow the podcast, which is different.
There's this baseline of the content, which is what we call our boss content plan, where you create evergreen content, like our podcast that can just live forever. And that generates 10 times the eyeballs you would have normally with your content. So what we do is we batch our podcast and then from each podcast, we create at least 10 different pieces of content. We make an email, we make an article, we make a shorter clip on Instagram, a longer clip on Instagram, a story, a mind map, a list post, a carousel guide. So we make 10 pieces of content out of one piece of content and we push that out into SEO, into all kinds of things.
And that's how we can create an evergreen lead machine and we keep attracting people because we keep making content about what's happening in people's brains. And that means as we are launching, we will add a different layer of content where we will attract specifically the leads we need for a certain launch or for a certain topic, but the podcast will keep going. And often we'll also make sure that the podcast is also focused on that launch, but it would also be fine if we have a different series of content in our boss content plan, that is something else that is just going all the time, and basically it's attracting, for example, starting entrepreneurs.
That is our boss content plan. We take one piece of content, we turn it into multiple pieces of content and we keep attracting new eyeballs because, eyedballs? Eyeballs. Because one of the biggest mistakes or the biggest reasons you can scale your business is because you have one or multiple pipelines in your business, but you are not focused on filling your pipelines with new potential clients because you're too busy serving those who come out of the pipelines. So that's why in the Wheel of Scalability, consistent lead generation is so important because you are never, be that in a starting situation in your business or in a later situation in your business, you're never allowed to stop the marketing. You're never allowed to stop filling the pipelines with potential leads, okay? So you always want to be increasing your pool of potential customers no matter how busy you are. You always want to make sure that you're attracting new people as well.
That's a third key success principle to scaling your business is consistent lead generation and automating that so that not everything is dependent on what you do in that moment. For us, that's actually, I think of all of these together with passive profits, which is the sixth key I think what we're focusing on most right now, and that doesn't mean that we're not focusing on the other principles. It just means that for the time being, we're going to be really focused on hitting targets in the profits in the lead gen and I know that in order to do that, we will be focusing on magic data because what did we do this morning as we prepped this episode, for example? We looked at, okay, we're recording new podcast episodes.
And by the way, we should have done that prep sooner, but we're not always that organized. We do so many things at the same time that we also have to be with some things like magic data, like, okay, we might be less focused on that data, but this morning we took 15 minutes to look at which podcast episodes or topics have done really well. What can we learn from those and implement that into our lead generation success principle three to scaling so that our lead generation is optimized and we're being more efficient with the resources we have? So this is a really great example. We used magic data to improve our lead generation so that we can increase our pool of potential customers on autopilot. Pool of potential customers on autopilot, try saying that 10 times. Key principle four to scaling your business, very big, very confronting, the most difficult thing you'll ever do probably, well I haven't given birth to a baby, so maybe not, but growing your team.
But as team, the key success principle to scaling, I wouldn't necessarily say that just having a team is the goal. Again, it's not a goal. I see so many people like, oh, I want a team.
And let me tell you, you don't want a team. As an entrepreneur, being an entrepreneur is one thing. Being a manager is something completely different. It's been the wildest ------- ride of my life growing a team. But the biggest switch for me, I promise there's a point so that my team won't hate me as I'm saying all of this, I'm always like, it's so difficult, it's so difficult.
And you're like, are we that difficult? The thing is the moment you get team members on board, in my case full-time, which is a really big difference with just working with freelancers, I want to put that out there, I know it's very American to only work with freelancers. I applaud that. In Belgium, you can't because it's just way too expensive. And I like having people who are like literally in the mission all the time. We also have a blast with a lot of things, what I wanted to say is, yeah, you get a team to grow your business, but the moment you get those team members, it should be a part of your mission that you grow your people. So whenever I get caught up in the business, I try and really look at it again as like, I want to be able to let my people grow so they can grow the business, but so they can create a really big impact so they can get into their zone of genius, so they can feel like they are becoming experts in their area of expertise.
And in the beginning, I was like, just do this for me because I'm the expert. And now I've realized, also thanks to talking to my dad a lot, is that it should be my goal to help them grow. And it's a lot like working with clients in a service-based business. I know that the more clients I can make an impact on, the more people they can make an impact on with their successful business. That's how I started business coaching for fitness coaches because I wasn't fitness coaching anymore, but I was helping fitness coaches with the same values so they could have an impact on more people.
So you increase your impact, that's what you can do with a team. But only if you realize that they're not a means to an end, you really need to focus on them. And you need to make sure that you let them grow.
They're not your puppets. They're not your slaves. You should really try to foster ownership, accountability, growth, so that they can start feeling more and more confident in their role. I wanted to say that because for example, in our Boss Up Mentorship™️, we have huge modules on communication, delegating, hiring, firing, onboarding, all of that stuff.
And I've been through it all in the past two years. But I think if we're looking at the key principles, is my key principle here is not get team members so they can grow your business, but just let your people grow. And then the business will grow with them.
I think that's what I wanted to say there. Sounded very serious, sorry. The next key principle number five is automation.
So when you start in your business, I think you're so focused on like giving it your all to make sure you can run your business and you can support your business. And you go all in, you'll work from 7 AM to 10 PM and all of that. And then at a certain point, you go so way too far and you got to take a step back. And that is a phase that honestly I'm struggling with, especially with the whole C situation of the past two years.
It's like I got so caught up in my business even more than before. And now I'm in a situation where I need to step back and I need to make sure we are automating things, the way we work, the way our systems work together so that you can get to a point that you're no longer supporting your business, but you're building your business in a way that it supports you. That's the shift that you need to make going from starter to scaler is basically what you need to do is you're no longer supporting your business. It's time that your business starts supporting you.
That's what I want to say there. And what you can do there is you can focus on automations, templates, email templates, workflows. Again, a lot of the organization comes back here, but this is more like in the day-to-day and you can definitely what I would do if we look to the team part as well is make sure that you keep focusing on education, make sure that you keep looking at processes and workflows. Like this is episode 101 of The FastForwardAmy Show, I haven't really looked at the process in ages By the time this airs I will have because we're changing things. But yeah, there's no use in doing something 100 times the same way and not getting faster or better at it.
That makes no sense. So you need to make sure you keep improving as you go in those automations. And last but not least, obviously where it all comes down or comes together in the six key principles of scaling your business is principle number six namely passive profits.
What I teach to my starting entrepreneurs who are in my Business Freedom Elevator™️ is we teach them launching. We teach them selling. We teach them so many things about content and just like hyping it up and making sure you get those sales, you have those successful launches. But if you want to be building a business that supports you instead of you supporting the business, it's going to be time for passive profits. It's going to be time that you get consistent everyday sales that aren't dependent on you and your face, but that you actually have passive funnels that convert for you.
So if you're making sure you're focused on that lead generation and you're getting in new leads every day, on semi-autopilot, then it's going to be possible for you to be running your conversions kind of on autopilot. So that means, instead of doing a live webinar, you can be doing an automated webinar and you can be using evergreen content like your podcast to fill up that webinar. I have a really good example for you, by the way, because we have a webinar on scaling to 20k months. If you're interested in that, by the way, I'll add the link in the description. The link to that webinar with me is fastforwardamy.com/20kmonths. In that webinar, I'll teach you how you can scale to 20k months and which mistakes you're probably making why you're not scaling to 20k months.
So what I could do with that webinar is I could host it live and I could run it evergreen, depending on when you are listening to this podcast, it'll be running live or evergreen. Evergreen means automated. And by the time I'm running that evergreen, I could talk about it in a later podcast episode, always refer back to that, and that will be working for me.
That is going to be a passive funnel because I could take this podcast episode, pop an ad on it, have that run to my target audience. They will listen to this podcast episode, go to my webinar that's running on autopilot. And in that podcast episode, I'll be like, hey, don't you want to join my program or my course? And in that webinar, I'll pitch to that course. And that is a fully automated way of running that funnel and getting new clients.
I'm not doing live launching. I'll get everyday sales of that through that. And it would really create a lot of stability in my business, as well as in your business that you start having those passive profits. Other examples could be that you have semi-evergreen content that's just being pushed out every week.
You have new content that speaks to your audience. And in that content you're pitching to your lead magnets, like an ebook, people get that ebook, they are suggested, hey If you like that ebook, you want to buy my video training? Those are like evergreen sales. Now parts of these could be not fully automated.
So it could be that the funnel is like the way you get people to the conversion where they actually go over to being a buyer is fully automated, but that it ends the conversion, for example, a sales call for a live program, that could work. On the other hand, it could also be that you are live attracting new leads. So live lead generation by doing a weekly live. It's kind of semi-automated 'cause it's every week at the same time, it's fairly easy to do.
And there you pitch to everything else that's set up in an evergreen lead. Obviously I teach a lot more about that in my scale up programs like The Boss Up Mentorship™️. And if you're looking for more information on that, you can go to fastforwardamy.com/scaleup. But what I wanted to say is in passive profits, everything comes back.
So the mindset here, what we want to do is we want to, again, make sure the business isn't dependent on our live face anymore, which is basically the opposite of what I teach in the beginning. Because in the beginning, I'm like, hey, your name is your most prized possession. Please make sure you build a personal brand because it's going to be way easier for you to like light stuff on fire and to like start a new brand to sell a new program, but after a while, it's going to be time for you to be able to take a break.
For me, I've realized if I ever want to become pregnant and have babies and stuff, I'm going to need to not be the face of my brand all the time. I'm going to need to have ---- organized enough so that I have enough or more than enough passive profits. So the gist of passive profits is you want to be making money consistently without launching. Basically you want to be making money while you sleep.
That is the sixth key principle that you need to scale your business. When you are scaling your business, you cannot have everything be dependent on live launching anymore. And that's something we're going to be working on in the next two years actually. So I think we've taken two years to get a lot of the organization and the team and everything set up. And now what I want to do is really get it to a different level, a level where you're calm, even more organized, but hitting higher targets than ever and making sure that what we do is already good, but making everything excellent now.
That's my focus on scaling and I'm still focused on the same Wheel of Scalability. Everything comes back to those. And I think I'm so inspired after this episode, maybe when I'm in team meetings and people will talk about a challenge we have in the business, I'll be like, okay, so where are we in the Wheel of Scalability, and which tools and resources do we have to improve that? As I was just saying, I'm going to be focused on being more steps ahead, being more organized, planning out, because I know when we're planned out, everyone in the company is more planned out and we are more focused on the quality of what we can achieve. So I've gone from having one-on-one coaching to having more than 1,000 active clients at the same time.
And if you want to be scaling, don't think that you have to do that. You know, it's kind of like going to the gym and being like, oh, but I'm afraid I'll be too bulky. Don't be afraid of that. Like you would have to work really hard and take steroids to get really bulky.
Your business isn't going to scale easily. Scaling is relatively simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy and you will need this wheel. So in the webinar that is about scaling to 20k months, I'll teach you more about the wheel, I'll tech you more about how you can work on your business.
I'll teach you about the mistakes I made and I see other people making that I wish I hadn't, or I recommend you don't make. You can find the link to that through fastforwardamy.com/20kmonths, or just in the description here. And you can find everything on the website of course. If you liked this episode, I don't know how I did, honestly, if you like it, the podcast needs your support. Please come and share, and tag me on Instagram, tag me as @fastforwardamy, would love to see you there and talk to you next week Tuesday, bye.
2021-10-30 18:51
