week 120: cleaning up for scaling up
starting fresh again
thank you to over 11,000 of you who read this weekly and share with your friends and family for behind the scenes on building zero to 10 million dollar business from scratch and beyond.
i also include a personal note in the end so i am grateful that you let me do that without judgement.
every few years in a start up phase, you are back to cleaning up.
what worked the first year seems almost impossible to do in the second or third.
some fundamental business principles remain but the change in team, market, products and customer expectations guides and decides the future.
here are few things that are tried and true ways to clean up to scale up that i am focused on:
re-evaluate my team to get back to being lean - it’s never easy to let go of people at anytime but if you are still in a problem market fit, you need dreamers and not doers to make things happen - this is the hardest path of doing business
hire fractional not full time - we are at a place in the company that except two of the partners, everyone is fractional in nature. meaning the business cost is minimum and focused on great business for the right reasons and not just to run payroll
get back to sales - every so often you have to get back to the basics of the business, that is sales. if you have sales, there is momentum and when there is momentum there is energy and excitement
the only way to scale up is to clean up all the things that are keeping you from being as strategic as possible, every single day.
on a personal note, one of the best things we get to do as a family is create routine that works.
so last nite, we put together the following routine:
daily options for breakfast, lunch, dinner, sports activity and family activity.
it was a spirited debate from which day is the fav pizza/movie nite to who decides “fun” activities.
i realized that we have become so busy with so many things to do that we haven’t really taken the time to scale up our relationships.
we have to slow down.
one of my goals was consistent 1:1 walk with my wife and i have completely failed in that area. that sucks and it takes a toll.
another big realization is that we have to clean house on things that don’t matter and focus on things that really do.
it’s the small things that matter.
so Kiara is leading fun and nightly prayer
Krish is in charge of food options (of course, he is a teenager)
Manmeet is guiding worship and crazy kids schedule
and i get to lead daily morning devotional and weekly bible study (we do a text each morning on a verse in the Bible and share thoughts on it - trying to use tech for the right reasons)
leader point: in business and in life, scaling up requires cleaning up because doing more is never the answer to getting better.
Regarding quantity versus quality, your post remains me this text from Baltasar Gracián, a Spanish Jesuit (sec XVII): "Value intensity more than extensiveness. Perfection doesn't lie in quantity, but in quality. Everything truly good has always been scarce and rare; excess discredits. Even among men, giants are often the true dwarfs. Some value books by their bulk, as if they were written to exercise the arms rather than the mind. Mere extensiveness never surpassed mediocrity, and it's a plague of universal men to want to be in everything, yet end up being in nothing. Intensity gives eminence, and becomes heroic if in a sublime matter." Love it.
Love this. “another big realization is that we have to clean house on things that don’t matter and focus on things that really do.” May I suggest the book Radical Together by David Platt if you haven’t already read it. Everywhere he uses the word church, replace with “Family.” I read it twice and the third time when I changed the word, it was a game-changer.