The 4 Vs of Thinking Through Scaling

Greetings Operators!

Its great to be back on schedule again! Throughout the week I am reading anything and everything I can get my hands on to learn about industries, businesses, business models, strategies, and more.

Everything I hear, read, watch gives me ideas for my businesses and my clients. I try to share the most interesting each week, along with a concept that will help you build your business better, with less friction.

As I do, please feel free to reach out, say hello, and ask any questions you might have related to scaling your business!

Read | Watch | Listen
Level Up

• 📖 Understanding the Landscape for AI in Business, and figuring how to scale value.

• 📺️ Listen to Richard Semler challenge traditional management in this keynote given a few years ago.

• 🎙️ David Senra shares so many great aspects of building a billion dollar empire in his coverage of Amancio Ortega (I couldn’t stop taking notes the whole time).

MAIN ISSUE
Scaling Your Small Business: A Comprehensive Approach to the 4 V's

When scaling a business, we aren’t just scaling “a business.” We’re scaling multiple components of a larger system.

We want to scale:

• Hiring and talent pipelines

• Leads and sales conversions

• Production and value delivery

• Reporting and financial tracking

The Business Sub-Systems

We can categorize these into major business areas. A business has sub systems consisting of

• Principles & Culture

• Strategies & Directives

• Systems & Cadences

• People

• Sales

• Operations

• Finance & Data

If one of these doesn’t scale correctly, the entire system will crash at that weak point.

Your business is as strong and scalable as your least effective system.

Most focus on scaling sales for revenue, and operations out of necessity, leaving the rest as a low priority.

The result? Constant fires and issues. An ongoing struggle in your business. A feeling that you’ll never be proactive and strategic again, because all you have time to do is respond to the immediate crisis.

The answer is scaling everything together.

Create a scale plan for each area of the business. Find key questions for each area that need to be answered and work through what needs to be developed. Choose to scale the business slower because you are scaling the components together.

It takes time, it takes resources… but it’s the safer, long-term method to develop a sustainable business.

The Planning Framework

A few questions to get you started. For each question, you can apply to any area of the business, and you’ll need to do 4 things:

1. Structure out a non-quantitative answer and describe “what it looks like to you in an ideal scenario.”

2. Find the systems, cadence, tech, and operational setup you’ll need to handle it

3. Find the people, skills, partners, vendors and other help you’ll need to handle it

4. What investments will I need to make, projects will I need to undertake, what is my expected revenue, margins, and cash flow? In short, what are the actions and expected results, so I know if I’m on track?

Scale Questions (The 4 V’s)

1. Volume: How do I handle 10x the volume? This is simultaneous work. If you close 10 projects a week, how would you do 100 a week? If you ship 30 packages a day, how would you ship 300? Remember… volume often implies resources pre-activity. Ie… if you are shipping 300/day, you’ll need a bigger warehouse, a better stocking system, and inventory control systems… maybe even monthly inventory checks.

2. Velocity: How do increase the speed? If leads currently come in at 20 per week, how do I move it to 50? If we can produce 40 a day, how can I produce 100? If we close the books on a branch with 20 human work hours, how can we close the books in 10 human work hours per branch?

3. Variety: How do we expand in market, service, geography, etc? There are significant cultural and managerial implications in scaling to different customers, different areas, different geos. Start to consider variety on every level. This builds robustness into your business. You want a focused business model that can approach from multiple points… your variety is in your approach angle, not your business model or strategy.

4. Value: How do we make each aspect more valuable? In this case, let’s call value the time-weighted extractable cash flow from a thing. How can each customer be more valuable? Each employee? How about each operation that we do to deliver value? Each patient hour in the facility? You understand… you can’t always increase quantity… but you can take the same quantity of something (time, hours, people, customers) and make each more valuable, resulting in scale.

Note: Each of these are positive and negative consequences. For example, as you increase variety, you

• Reduce risk through diversifying

• Increase organizational complexity

• Increase opportunities to operationally fail

• Increase your opportunity set in the market

Make sure you consider what risks and costs you are willing to take on, and those you are not.

This simple exercise will help you start thinking about how to scale your business.

1. Take each subsystem

2. Pass it through each V question

3. Consider a box plan for each area

4. consolidate into a full scale plan for the company

The result will be a comprehensive plan for the next 12-18 months to build a larger and stronger company.

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Coaching Sessions

II currently work with CEOs and COOs to help them build a scalable operation. If you want to see if this arrangement is right for you, book a quick call and we can talk about

• The SMB Blueprint

• How it helps scale

• If the coaching or consulting engagement is right for you

• How I might help you besides any of this!!

I only take on 5 at a time given the actual businesses I am building, but these tend to be great and high leverage 3-12 month engagements for my clients!

AI in SMB
Using <XML> Tags For Better Output Control

Business Owner Health
Combatting All Day Sitting

Small business owners are always tight on resources, especially time. So following prolonged morning or health routines usually isn’t in the cards.

I scoured the internet for small, quick ( < 1 min) wins that can help

• combat sitting

• improve cognitive function

• increase focus duration

Here’s what I found:

1 min of body squats every 20 minutes increases executive function, task completion time, and and combats mental fatigue. This pairs well with the Pomodoro approach to focused work.

Going for a 5 min walk every 30-60 min can reduce fatigue, improve mood, and increase cognitive performance.

Dan Go shared this compact and useful video for fighting the negative physical aspects of sitting all day.

Last, here is a comprehensive list of stretches and movements to do to improve posture and combat the negative effects of sitting all day:

Neck & Shoulders:

• Neck rotations (10x each side)

• Shoulder shrugs (10x)

• Shoulder rolls (10x each direction)

Back:

• Cat-cow pose (10x)

• Child's pose (hold 30-45s)

• Cobra pose (hold 30-45s)

Core:

• Plank (hold 30-60s)

• Bird dog (5-10s hold, 2-4 sets each side)

• Russian twists (10-15x each side)

Hips:

• Hip circles (10x each direction)

• Knee raises (5x each leg)

• Fire hydrants (5x each leg)

Legs & Knees:

• Hamstring stretch (hold 30-45s each leg)

• Forward lunge with twist (hold 15-30s each side)

• Deep squats (10x)

Hands & Wrists:

• Wrist flexor stretch (hold 15-30s each position)

• Finger stretch (5-10s hold, 4x per hand)

• Prayer stretch (hold 30s, up to 4x)

THIS WEEK
A Few Things You May Have Missed (but shouldn’t have)