Learn From My Mistakes In Business - Scalability

Hi Steemit! @mazzle here.

As some of you know, I am a small business owner. I jumped in to small business about 2 years ago. And as with many things I do in life, I jumped in blindly so that I could learn everything through necessityand by experiencing it all first hand.

It’s been an incredibly steep learning curve. But an absolute hoot of a time. I thought I’d start documenting the things I have learned here on Steemit so that I have a record of my experiences, and to pass on my mistakes, experiences and lessons to people who may be thinking of doing something similar.

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So on to today’s lesson! Let’s talk about scalability.

Scalability is defined as; the capacity to be changed in size or scale.
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In business, scalability is essentially the potential a business has to grow or expand. Think of scalability like a tree. The tree will start out tiny, as a sapling. In time, the tree will grow bigger and bigger, eventually until the tree is many metres tall. In time, the tree will reach is maximum size and can’t grow any more. Scalability is working out how big that tree can grow, so that you know what to aim for.

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I’ll use my gym as an example. My gym can house up to 800 members comfortably. So I know that my maximum membership base is about 850 people. This gives me a target membership base of 800. I don’t want my members to be uncomfortable while exercising.

This also gives me an indication of my maximum income level for the business if I were to solely rely on memberships for income. So if I want to grow my revenue beyond the maximum membership income, I need to look at the options we have available:

• introducing retail items for sale (supplements, merchandise, clothing etc.)
• Introducing new services (remedial massage, kids fitness, seniors fitness etc.)
• and my favourite, adding extra locations i.e. building new gyms

So what would make a business unscalable?
Most businesses are actually scalable. The key thing that makes them unscalable is when the owner refuses to hand the bulk of the work off to an employee, or simply cannot afford to remove themselves from the business through employing others to do their work. There are also some examples of business owners who have such a unique skill set, that they cannot train an employee to do what they do. This is very rare though.

So, put simply, a business that cannot be scaled is one where the owner of the business has to work in the business rather than on it.

When I first bought my gym, I was planning on getting my personal training qualification with view to running classes, taking on PT clients and helping to introduce new members into the gym. If I did this, a huge amount of my working week would be spent working in my business. The only benefit here would be that I wouldn't be paying wages to someone to do that work, but it would make it very difficult for me to remove myself from the business should I decide to do something as exciting as opening a second location. It was a bad idea, so to this day, I don't have personal training qualifications.

Applying Scalability to Your Work
Scalability isn't just about how big you can grow your business. It can also be applied to the things you do on a day to day basis.

I regularly apply the concept of scalability to my marketing campaigns. For example, advertising on Facebook is highly scalable. If I want to reach a tiny audience, I can reduce the reach of my campaign by area and budget. If I want to advertise my services globally, I can select every country I want to market to, and add a few hundred dollars to my budget.

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A marketing campaign isn't scalable when it relies on you and your time to execute. I still do marketing campaigns that don't scale, for the simple fact that they work. I personally deliver paper flyers to local businesses and residential letter boxes on an almost daily basis. The only reason that I do this, is because I then have full control of where I distribute my flyers. I also know that my flyer will be the only one distributed at that time, rather than paying someone to do it, who will most likely deliver many flyers at the same time.

So there can be a time when unscalable work is be a good thing. Unscalable work is only a bad thing if it prevents you from improving your business or impacts on the quality of your life.

I hope this information is helpful for you. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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