Two key systems you must always master
When you are seeking to grow and then later truly scale your business there are a couple of key systems that you absolutely have to build, master and then maintain.
Any idea what they are?
They are very "attractive". Truly.
They are focused solely on attracting your potential Customers and also your potential Employees. If you are interested in growing your business then it doesn't happen by accident - you have to deliberately and intentionally set about doing it. First finding the sources of your new revenue and then fulfilling on the new business.
This requires you to completely understand the profile of your ideal Customer and where you are most likely to find them with your marketing efforts. You have to build a system for attracting and engaging with potential Customers. One that works. Reliably and measurably. Every time. Then you can grow your revenues and your business and eventually scale it to the size that you are truly aiming for.
This also requires you to build a parallel system. The one that starts with you truly understanding your organization's culture (whether your have built one deliberately or it has just accidentally evolved based upon the worst and best aspects of your leadership). Then you have to identify the roles that you need to have filled and what traits and experience you need to have in the people that fill those roles. Without hiring and onboarding great new people you cannot execute on the new volume of business that you are attracting and winning.
Blindly believing that you can just keep hiring employees in the same way that you have always done it it worse than naive. It confirms that you are in denial and actively self deluding. To do things in this manner is to walk (or run) down the pathway that leads to unhappy customers (because mistakes have occurred in the fulfilling of their work by your employees) and an inability to grow beyond a certain level of revenues ...no matter how much effort and how many resources you pour into finding and winning new customers. You cannot step up to a new level of business without ensuring that you hire, grow and retain employees that are capable of functioning at this higher level.
How do I know this? Because I have seen it. Over and over again. With companies that have $3M in revenues and those that have $50M in revenues.
Ambitious business owners usually want to grow rapidly. Yet many want to accomplish this with short cuts driven by their own impatience. Yet the results they invariably achieve is the stalling of their growth and the inability to get beyond the performance plateau. They will then resort to ideas of the month, often driven by the latest business book that is trending on the national best seller list ...yet the organization will merely be experiencing a never ending roller coaster ride of growth and collapse in various results and KPIs.
Many business owners do not want to do the hard work of objectively examining the culture that they have built. They have numerous sacred cows that are hidden in that particular landscape. Ones that they have no intention of slaughtering.
Usually this comes from the fantasy that their organization is perfect, and that the high performers that have been with them the longest and that they continue to rely upon are capable of growing the business to any size (despite this being utterly untrue for almost every organization in history). Often the leader/owner is blind to the self serving agendas of these "key" people (who have often become close personal friends) and to the fact that politics are often deeply entrenched and running counter to the best medium and long term interests of the organization.
If this is sounding awfully close to what you have been experiencing in trying to grow your business ...then maybe it is finally the time to put in both the time and effort to systematize your organization the correct way?