Build to Enough

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Keila Hill-Trawick: Hello, you're listening to Build to Enough, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to scale at their own pace. I'm your host, Keyla Hill Traywick, and I'll be your chief storyteller and cheerleader in a world that glorifies endless expansion, we're tuning out the noise and discussing the beauty of enough. Each episode will dive into inspiring stories, practical insights, and strategies to cultivate sustainable success on your [00:00:30] own terms. So whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, or aspiring entrepreneur, get ready for a refreshing take on the entrepreneurial journey. This is build to enough.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Today, I want to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart and is really what this podcast is all about, and that is scaling sustainably. So we want to highlight the importance of sustainable growth in contrast to like rapid growth. This idea that you are on a rocket ship and going as fast [00:01:00] as you can to the top, what would it mean instead to slow down and be intentional about what next steps in scaling means? When you are growing sustainably, you have long terme success. You can minimize a lot of the risks that come with growing too fast, and it helps to maintain a positive company culture. So let's jump right in. So when I talk about sustainable growth, what I really am discussing is steady controlled expansion. So [00:01:30] this means that you're not doing the quick fast in a hurry growth, which can often lead to instability.

Keila Hill-Trawick: And instead you are doing them with intention. You are thinking forward about what you want to achieve and taking it one step at a time to be able to meet those goals when you grow too fast. There's cons to that, right? Yeah, there's an opportunity for you to make a ton of money really quickly, but you can also destabilize your processes within the company. You can overextend resources and ultimately compromise [00:02:00] quality both internally and externally to your customers, because your focus is directed on going as high as fast as you can. All right. So let's start by talking about assessing your readiness for scaling. Contrary to popular belief, everybody shouldn't grow right now. There is a time and a place for when you want to get bigger and when you want to expand, and everybody hits that at different points. But this starts with evaluating your company's financial health. How well are you [00:02:30] doing? How many clients do you already have, and what kind of bandwidth do you and your team have to support them? What market opportunities are there for the product or service that you're offering? Is this something new or is it tried and true? And you have a pretty good sense of who's going to pay for it and how much. Finally, operational capabilities beyond your team, do you have the systems, processes, SOPs set up to take in customers to make sure that they have an amazing experience and offboard them with care [00:03:00] when the time comes? If you don't, it might be really easy to get people in, but then cause a lot of turnover when they're ready to leave.

Keila Hill-Trawick: After they realize that once they've gotten into your systems, they're not necessarily getting what they were promised. This means that you've got to have some kind of business plan. And I'm not necessarily talking about the big B business plan. The idea that you have laid out these long terme goals where you know exactly what's going to happen, but you do got to have some sense of where you're headed, [00:03:30] whether it's for the remainder of the year or for the remainder of the decade. You want to have something laid out that says, this is what I want to achieve. This is what I want my life to look like to get there. And these are the resources that I think I'm going to need. Resources are incredibly important, especially capital and manpower. You're always going to need money, and you're always going to need people. And knowing how much you have available in each of those areas is really going to help you determine whether it's time to grow right now, or if there's some other [00:04:00] foundational things that you need to do before you take that next step. So we talked about that business plan. And to flesh that out a little bit, I am thinking more about setting really clear goals and objectives.

Keila Hill-Trawick: I'm talking about things that are not just Smart goals. Um, which if you know the acronym, you know, I'm not talking about just those. I'm talking about big picture. What do we even want to do here? What kind of org chart would I like at this company? What kind of services do I want to offer? Are we already [00:04:30] offering those or is there something standing in the way of us doing that? Those clear goals are essential because they allow you to track progress and let you know whether it's time for you to make a shift or not. It also helps you to maintain focus during the scaling process. There are a lot of shiny objects and everything everywhere is trying to sell something to you to tell you that you need them in order to get bigger and better, and that may or may not be true for your business, but once you set these goals, you have a sense of what is [00:05:00] the thing that I need to actually get me close to that as fast as possible. Now, one of the goals that we had was to lower the number of tax returns that we took every year, for a lot of reasons. One, I wanted to make sure that we could offer the promise of excellence and care that we said that we would give people, and the more people that we have to answer to, the harder that gets to do when you have a really small team.

Keila Hill-Trawick: I also wanted to make sure that we could implement some of the things that I think are really important beyond just the tax [00:05:30] return, such as estimates, tax planning, um, reasonable compensation, all of these pieces around taxes that would come up, that get lost in the sauce when you have a million tax returns to prepare. And so what we did was we made a shift to do holistic tax service year round, and limiting the number of people that could come in to service. I'll say it's not easy. It's hard to say no when people are willing to pay you for a service. But our goal [00:06:00] was that we weren't taking as many people, and our method for doing that means that we had to pivot the kind of service that we offered, so that we were doing what we promised for the number of people that we could reasonably handle. Setting realistic goals. Make sure that your objectives are actually attainable. Once you start writing those out, it may be really clear to you what things you can actually get to and what are the items that you need to put to the side, because they're nowhere near the scope that you could actually achieve right now? And again, nothing [00:06:30] wrong with that. Nobody's saying that you should do all of this at once.

Keila Hill-Trawick: We just want you to have kind of a roadmap for where you're headed, so that you can make really intentional decisions on how to get there, and not just moving fast and breaking things. We do not want that for you. Now, it may surprise you to know that financial stability is really the cornerstone of sustainable growth. You have to have money available to you when you are in fight or flight mode, when you are in a scrambling [00:07:00] mode. When it comes to money, it is hard to think about making strategic decisions and being intentional. At that point, you just feel like you want to take all of the money that's coming in, and so you want to make sure that you have the cash cushion that you need to really support the business while you decide with these next steps are going to be remember, if you choose to maintain instead of growing, that's realistically a cap on the amount of revenue that you can generate per customer, and you just want to make sure that you're prepared for any of those adjustments if you need to. You [00:07:30] also want to make sure that you're prepared for any hiring that you need to do. So a lot of times when we start thinking about how we can manage our businesses better, we have to start thinking about who we can hire to kind of take some of that stuff off of our plate.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Everything from outsourcing to hiring internal team members to really support us. But team members cost money, and so we need to make sure that we have enough to really be able to support them so that they can do for us what we need to in order to focus on what we want to do. And intentionally growing one thing alongside [00:08:00] financial management for historical purposes, is having a budget and a forecast to tell you where you're going in the future with your money. And the difference between a budget and a forecast is think of the budget like a plan that is going to lay out for you exactly what you think is going to happen in various areas throughout your business. The forecast is telling you what the weather is actually looking like, right? It is giving you some sense of like, yes, this is the plan that we put in place. But based on the invoices that I'm [00:08:30] seeing coming in and how much contractors are costing us and how much travel you're doing, this is where we're probably actually going to end up. As you start looking at those numbers, it does give you some insight as to whether or not you want to grow. Does that feel good? Based on all of this information that I see? Is this the business that I want to keep growing, or is growth going to need to happen in order for me to achieve the other goals that I have, hiring people, doing more outside of work, things like speaking engagements or writing a book. [00:09:00]

Keila Hill-Trawick: Those things can only happen when the business can run financially in a way that makes sense, and your description or determination of what growth is going to be starts with that foundational finance. Finally, when we talk about growth, I am always going to bring up operations or operational efficiency. Sometimes we think we need to get bigger when really we just need to get better. Behind the scenes. It can be easy to throw money or people at a problem and say, oh, the reason that this [00:09:30] isn't getting done is because I don't have a person, right? So, for example, um, we had a client a long time ago or a potential client a long time ago who said she did not need ongoing accounting support. She really just needed like, ah, help. She needed to make sure that her invoices were paid on time when actually she needed operational help. A system that was put in place to take money as needed at the very beginning to make sure that there were reminders sent when invoices weren't paid. Maybe some automations [00:10:00] behind the scenes to send a different kind of email when something was overdue, and that that was more important than just having a person that could press the button to say, send this invoice.

Keila Hill-Trawick: The reason that I bring that up is because that didn't necessarily take a person. It just took using her accounting system tool better. And so when you're thinking about whether I'm going to grow, whether I'm going to scale, what I'm really looking for in terms of how big this business gets, some of that can be kind of shrunk down to what [00:10:30] can I already do within the business with the resources that I have? What policies and procedures do I have in place to make sure that we are doing the common, the things that we need to do and that we offer uncommonly well, and then figure out where I need to add on top of that in order to increase the client experience or the number of clients that join our firm. Technology can streamline your operations. So take advantage of software and tools, really get into it and figure out how it can assist you in increasing productivity and [00:11:00] reducing costs. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that you're using tools and resources that actually support where you're headed and that you're using them to the fullest extent based on what you actually need. So as I always say, little fish is just like our ideal client. We are a lot like you. We are a small professional service provider, with one owner and a really small team that has been growing over the past almost six years to where we are today.

Keila Hill-Trawick: And though we're not done, there are a couple of things that [00:11:30] I have learned along the way that really helped me to lean into this idea of sustainable growth and make it our mantra for how little fish will move going forward. The first is hire before you need to. I know you want to have a budget. You want to make sure that you have enough money to pay them. And I by no means am telling you to go into debt or skip looking at your numbers in order to hire. But a lot of ways, it feels like it's never really going to be the right time. And you need to hire somebody before you're so desperate and so overwhelmed [00:12:00] and burned out that you hire the person that comes next. Always be looking. Always be on alert for people who might be a good addition to your team. Once you note that something is going to be needed in the future, start making a plan for how fast they need to come on again. You want to do this before you need it because by the time you need it, it's often too late. The next thing that we have done is to invest in the areas that save us time and create efficiencies. So this meant investing [00:12:30] in better tax software that would really allow us to do reviews in a more efficient way.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Firm management software that allowed us to communicate with clients and each other in a way that made sure that things didn't get lost behind the scenes. We even hired automations help this year to help us to figure out how to make our tools talk to each other, so that there was less of a manual process in between. All of this took time and real talk took money, but it is a lesson that I learned around not just trying to do it myself, [00:13:00] but trying to figure out what is it that we exactly need, what are our pain points, what are we trying to fix, and what resources do we have on hand to actually account for those? Another thing that little fish has had to contest with is pricing updates. When you under price at the beginning, it is really hard to get out of that hole. And so one of the things that we have done is we've been very careful every year with renewals to think about what will this cost look like for our clients next year? What, if anything, [00:13:30] have we changed within the service, and how can we make sure that our current clients feel valued while not underpricing ourselves indefinitely, while new clients pay more? And while that can lead to some really uncomfortable conversations, for me, it has also led me to be clearer about what we offer, how good we are at what we do, and who we should be serving.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Remember that episode? All money ain't good money. Even some of the people that told us yes shouldn't necessarily be customers. And so when we start figuring out what that financially looks like [00:14:00] in terms of payments to us, it is a much better conversation and assessment of who should stay with us as we're deciding how many clients we're going to take on overall. Finally, think about your service offerings. This will come up a lot, but is what you're offering the right thing? And I'm gonna put right in quotes because we never know if it's right or wrong and who is even picking that. But I mean that to say, if you started out at the beginning of your business doing this and you've [00:14:30] just been doing that without thinking for the past so many years, but you're actually interested in offering it differently, you want to make sure that you're not accidentally scaling and growing this business, that you don't want to do that you may have to shut down or pivot later. Make the balance between the clients that you need to take on now and your future ideal clients. But don't get drowned by work that you don't want to do, because you were so focused on growth that you forgot to think about the business that you actually wanted to be running.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Remember, scaling a business [00:15:00] is not just about growth. It's really about achieving success on your terms while maintaining the integrity of your brand. That means you got to think about stuff like cash flow, reputation, what you're doing behind the scenes, and how you make sure that the next step in scaling is done on purpose, that you're not accidentally getting big, and then looking back, trying to figure out how you got there, but that instead you're being intentional, that you're looking forward to what your next step is going to be. Stopping, taking [00:15:30] some moments to figure out where you are and what you need to change before you take your next step. At the end of the day, the well-being of your team, your clients, and yourself depend on this idea that you're not growing by any means necessary. So take your time. Figure out what you want your business to look like, think about your enough, and then get going on making the next best step to get you closer to your idea of success. Thank you for tuning in to another episode [00:16:00] of Build to Enough. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the love with your fellow entrepreneur friends, and make sure to sign up for the Build to Enough newsletter. The link is in the show notes. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to redefine success one intentional step at a time.