3 Ways To Make Your Business More Scaleable

A recent book is helping me take my business to a new level, and it might help you, as well.

Several entrepreneurs I respect recommended reading Built to Sell by John Warrillow. This book has changed the way I think about my business.

Built to Sell is a story of how a business owner revamped his service business to sell it. While I’m not ready to sell my business just yet, the powerful ideas in this book can be helpful to anyone contemplating building a business. The book explores the essence of what makes a company scaleable and attractive to buyers.

Here are some insights I gleaned from the book…

3 Ways to make your business more scaleable

1. Specialize – Be amazing at one thing. This will let you devote more resources to the creation of an offering that will delight your customers. The book gives an example — an advertising agency that decided to specialize  in logos…in just creating amazing logos. This single minded focus allowed the owner  to systematize processes and freed up resources for hiring the best of the best talent to create the logos.
2. Think long long term – Many of the insights in the book take time to implement.  You need to start implementing these concepts early, so when you want to exit (if you want to exit,) you’ll have the flexibility to do so.  It took the author approximately 3 years to sell his business. However, the process over time enabled him to build a more profitable company, while working less.
3. Make yourself redundant – Spend time putting processes in place so  the business is not fully dependent on you for sales and execution. Invest time in training people to handle the various aspects of your job, so instead of focusing on the execution of day-to-day duties, you can focus your energies on building the dream team.

From my vantage point, this book can help you create a more scaleable and sustainable business that can operate with  a relatively smaller investment of your time.  This is a particularly worthwhile read for entrepreneurs with exit strategies on the mind.   Food for thought…

Have you found similar books you’d recommend? Let us know in the comments section below…