Mentors Magazine: Issue 3

MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 3 | 49

Over the past three years, Miller Center’s

Replication and Scaling team has worked

with more than 50 entrepreneurs to ex-

pand their reach, helping them to create

greater impact more rapidly, with less risk

and fewer investment requirements. We

have established a process that can make

scaling possible for every entrepreneur.

Here are some of the important coaching

tips we use.

Shift from Running the Business to Under-

standing How Your Business is Running

In the first few years of a startup, your big-

gest and most persistent challenge is keep-

ing things running. It’s a constant struggle.

In startup mode, entrepreneurs typically

spend all their time working just to keep

the wheels from coming off the enterprise.

Premature scaling — the attempt to grow

aggressively before your business model is

robust enough to stand up to the rigors of

massive growth — is one of the major

causes of failure.

Before making the commitment to scale,

you need to make sure you have an organi-

zation capable of producing, selling and de-

livering much larger volumes of your prod-

uct or service – without diminishing quality

or impact for existing and new customers.

In addition to running the business, you

need focus on understanding how the busi-

ness is running, to identify the operational

capabilities that need strengthening.

To that end, your leadership team needs to

make an honest appraisal of what they

have created. Here are a few things to ask

yourself:

Do customers think we deliver the best val-

ue? Don’t ask your team for their opinion:

You need data from customers. To be suc-

cessful, you must ensure that the value

you’re delivering is a clear winner in the

customers’ eyes, and that your products or

services have a distinctive advantage over

alternatives. If you don’t have proof of a

winning value proposition, don’t bother

scaling.

Has our business model evolved? It makes

no sense to scale inefficiencies and grow

parts of your business that waste money –

that’s a fool’s errand. Good luck trying to

get investors to fund that business model.

You need business processes that are sta-

ble and improve over time. For example,

you should be able to consistently and

quickly acquire new customers at costs

that decrease over time. In other words,

you need to manage your business model

so the cost per social return on investment

improves as you grow and mature. If not,