The 4 Stages of Hands-Off Growth – E4

Scaling a custom service business is challenging. Most growth models out there do not address why that is, and how to actually scale custom high ticket services. You’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into building your company, and now that it’s time to grow, there are obstacles you never saw coming. Today, Mandi talks about the 4 stages of growth you’re likely to experience as you scale. More importantly, she reveals how to move from one stage to the next.

Listen to the Episode: 

Stage 1

As a stage 1 CEO, you’re only doing about 20% of the service delivery, and you’re still doing most or all of the marketing. This can be difficult if the services have all come from you in the past, especially if the services you offer are highly customized. You’re solving too many problems for too many people in too many different ways. You’re very much like a freelancer – what you offer is high value and that’s why people buy from you. It’s your skillset and your brains.

Stage 2

At stage 2, you’ve trimmed down your service delivery to about 5% and you’re doing about half of the marketing. You’ll set the criteria for how projects need to be happening and communicate what success looks like for each project before handing it off to your team. When you’re pulled in, it’s for higher-level, strategic reasons. With that extra time, you can focus on growing the company through some of the marketing and all of the sales.

Stage 3

When you hit stage 3, you’re still about 5% of service delivery and doing half the marketing, but you’ve turned over about half the sales as well. If you’ve been doing the work in stage 2, you’ve already got great processes in place for marketing and the sales you’ve been doing exclusively until now. Your next step is to decide what parts of the process need you and what parts you can delegate. (A side note: if you have a low-ticket product or service, you might have already delegated sales, which is great! The higher-ticket your product, the later you’ll hand off the sales portion of your business.)

Stage 4

Finally, at stage 4, you almost completely out of service delivery, marketing, and sales. For all intents and purposes, you fill the CEO role in your company. To put it simply, you provide the ‘what’ and ‘why,’ and your team provides the ‘how.’ We can’t stress enough that you can’t get to this point without spending the first three stages streamlining your business and getting very clear on who you serve, and why.

(If you listen to the episode, you’ll find out exactly how to get from one stage to the next!)