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As you know, this podcast is about scaling a custom service business, one of the more challenging things to do. You’ve probably 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. 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. In order to move from stage 1 to stage 2, you need to be streamlining delivery, making things repeatable. Answer this question: What is the one client who we’re solving one pain point or six-figure problem for? And next, what is our customized solution for it? Notice we said customized, not custom. That’s an important distinction; it will allow you to focus on the strategic part and delegate the rest. The challenge is straddling both sides without constantly getting pulled into projects constantly. Taking this step means you need to be very intentional. 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. To get to stage 3, you should be streamlining your processes in marketing and in sales. You’re not in the service delivery any longer, but you can take the lessons you learned in handing off those tasks and apply them to several aspects of marketing and sales, keeping yourself in the strategic part of it and delegating the rest. It might be tough to hand it over, but once your marketing becomes more consistent, you’ll have a more consistent flow of clients coming in from it. 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.) One of the main challenges here is hiring salespeople. It’s completely different than hiring admins and others you’ve added to this point, and Mitch Russo has a great write-up on it. As we mentioned before, not all businesses will want to move beyond stage 3. Some entrepreneurs prefer to continue working with clients at a high, strategic level because it’s what they love to do, and there’s not a thing wrong with that. But if you’re ready to step away on a much deeper level, for example, if you want to sell the business, then read on for stage 4. 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. Many entrepreneurs want to sell their company as quickly as possible, so they try to jump to this stage and it rarely ends well. Often, it’s because they didn’t hire or develop an ‘operator’ in stage 3, so there’s no one to run the business for them or no one who can do it well. The Hands-OFF CEO Podcast We hope you enjoyed this episode! Take a little time to rate us and leave a review. It helps more than you know (or maybe you DO know if you’re a podcaster, too!), and download your free Scale to Freedom Roadmap for 180 days to a more profitable business that your team can run without you for weeks at a time.