Maintaining Control While Scaling - Episode 194

 Scaling is the dream, right? More revenue, more impact, and maybe even fewer hours. But for a lot of business owners, scaling becomes a stress test, not a strategy. Everything gets busier, more complex.

You hire people, you sell more, and somehow things feel harder. Let's clear something up. Scaling isn't just about growth.

It's about growth in a way that doesn't rely on you doing more. It's building a business that runs with systems instead of guesswork, with people instead of your own two hands, and with a clear vision that your team can actually follow. So today, we're talking about how to scale without losing control.

Because real freedom doesn't come from hustle. It comes from structure. Welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast.

Good day and welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Bridges. In each episode, we dive into practical business strategies that you can put to work in your business right away.

We also focus on inspiring stories from leaders who are shaking and making things happen in their industry. It's all about giving you the tools and insights to take you and your business to the next level. So get comfortable and let's jump right in.

All right, all right. We are on episode 194 of the podcast, and today is Friday, April 11th, 2025. In this session, we're going to be wrapping up our four-part series with one of the most powerful topics yet.

The past few weeks, we talked about how to get unstuck, how to plug profit leaks, and how to reclaim your energy. Today, we're putting the pieces together and talking about scaling without losing control of your business, your sanity, or your freedom. And here's what we're going to talk about today.

We're going to cover a quote from James Clear to ground our conversation. We're going to talk about why scaling breaks most businesses, the three shifts you need to scale successfully, and how to stay in control without doing it all yourself. Now, for our quote of the week, James Clear from Atomic Habits said, you do not rise to the level of your goals.

You fall to the level of your systems. If you have big dreams, but no systems, ultimately, you're just gambling with your time and your energy. Systems are what turn chaos into momentum.

They make it possible for your structure of your business to actually move forward because you're all moving simultaneously through the same set of systems, the same set of processes, and the same functionality. Now, while we may understand that point, let's look at what often happens in a business owner's mind when the word scaling comes into the conversation. So let's talk about why scaling goes wrong.

And let's get real for a second because, you know, scaling sounds exciting. But if we look at what the words scale or scaling mean, we have to kind of come back at this from a different point of view. Scaling ultimately means increasing your capacity and your impact without increasing your workload in equal proportions.

It's what I like to call growth with leverage. That being said, here's where things go sideways. Many of the business owners that I meet, if not most of them, think that scaling means more of everything, a more culture, right? More clients, more hours, more team, more hustle.

But the reality of all of this is kind of foundational in terms of if your foundation is shaky, scaling multiplies your problems. It's like trying to build a really tall building on an unsure footing for that building. You're going to get things out of balance.

They're not going to go the way you think they are, right? And what's ultimately really happening? If we look at these businesses as an example of some of these shaky foundations, you are probably still the center of everything. Your role and the people around you, they're not clearly defined. No one knows who's responsible for what.

And ultimately you're flying blind because you don't have systems or data to guide your decisions. We'll be talking about that in a few minutes. But the result of this is you feel like the bigger you grow, the worse it gets.

And instead of enjoying the success, you're stuck managing the mess. So let's talk about three critical shifts that you can take that will help move you into a better position as a scalable business. Number one, move your thinking from owner-centric to systems-centric.

And let's first define what a system really is. It's nothing more than a repeatable process that can be followed and get you to a point you know what the outcome is. And ultimately it can be improved as you go without starting from scratch every single time.

Now, if you're the only person in your company who knows how to do something, it cannot be a system. It becomes a bottleneck. And making this shift from owner-centric to systems-centric means the shift you stop being the hero.

You start becoming the architect. You document what works and you train your team to follow it. And then you step back and watch it run.

And you're going to be evaluating on time because when you're in it and when somebody else goes and does it, you may see things differently. That's one of my strengths is I can just look at the situation and spot all the holes. When you're in the system or you're in the work and you're doing it, you might be missing some pieces of the puzzle that come from experience and show up as mistakes in others.

So you end up in this situation where the growth stops feeling chaotic, right? There's not so much chaos and it starts to feel scalable. But we're not there yet. This is just taking the first step.

The number two thing we can do is build leadership capacity, not just headcount. You know, it's a common thing. We just think we can throw more people at it, right? But adding people without adding clarity is like pouring water into a leaky bucket.

You know, so many businesses scale by just hiring more help, but help isn't the same as leadership. Help isn't the same as vision. I suggest owners start hiring people who own outcomes.

If you have to hire own outcomes, not just complete tasks. Give them clear lanes. Help them establish clear metrics and work with them on those metrics and let them succeed without needing your approval every step of the way.

This is building leadership capacity. It's freeing you to allow other people to make some of the decisions and drive some of the results. They won't be waiting on you to make every call.

Now, I know that a lot of people say, well, Randy, that's easy to do. I delegate. No, this isn't delegation.

This is freeing management and vision and top-level thinking leadership to allow your people to grow under you. Okay. Now, there's still one more thing we need to add in order to have a system for scaling.

We need to number three use data to lead not just react when I'm talking about data. I mean this as information coming back to us. How well are we doing? Right? If you want to stay in control without micromanaging use data information, whatever you want to call it.

In other words, a feedback loop to provide you with clarity and perspective on what's working and what's not. I recommend people even if they don't want to go into a full tilt really build a complete dashboard. Think of building this simple dashboard with a handful of key numbers.

Number one, what's your revenue? Number two, your profit, your fulfillment rates, the leads in your pipeline, the client retention and project timelines. You don't need a full-time analysis. You just you just need visibility into different areas of the business.

What's coming in? What's going out, right? You want to see profit because as we'll find out, you know, in the coming series that profit as we've mentioned before is one of the first turnkeys that you can make work for your business to begin this scaling process as accelerating. Okay, ultimately this comes down to you can't improve what you can't measure and the sooner you see a problem the sooner you can course-correct without all the necessary drama. So now that you've seen those three we have to ask ourself:

How do we stay in control of the business? And here's the balance point vision doesn't mean you have to be in every room every decision every email now that you have a working system. You need to move out of the way and move up in your role. You want to rethink your own role and we've talked about this but it should shift in relation to setting strategy building relationships and guiding the future this way you can lead with vision and not necessarily volume.

That's the wind that makes scaling possible and when you use systems protect your time and when you use systems to protect your time and people to extend your reach you finally create a business that works without working you to death. That's what it really means to me to be able to truly scale. So let's recap all of this.

We did cover a good amount of information today. Scaling without systems turns growth into chaos. You need to shift from owner-centric thinking to system-centric build real leadership.

Not just you know, a group of people use simple data to drive confident decisions and design your role around vision not management. Now if you're looking to kind of get a little bit of a handle on all of this and really get into it firsthand. I have a program called built to scale.

It's really five programs in one because not all companies need the same set of expertise at different levels. So if you want to get involved in that you might be interested in it. Head over to my website and book a complimentary business impact session.

I'll have the link down in the show notes. We'll get a good analysis of where you're stuck and what you can do to scale with control and again the links going to be down in the show notes. Now next week we're diving into the one-page business dashboard.

This is kind of the addendum to today's episode and also the whole four part series. It's going to become your new best friend for clarity control and confidence in your growth. And we'll look at the details and use some of the pieces that we looked at in today's lesson to build out a bigger dashboard to give you a better view of what's going on.

That's it for this episode. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. If you want to keep the conversation going or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out.

And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this with someone who needs to hear it. The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. For The Budding Entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you.

Take care and we'll see you back here next week.