Scale with Speed

The #1 Formula for Massive Success in Today's Marketplace

Judge Graham

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781642791419
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Emprendimiento

In a rapidly changing environment, the ability to move efficiently with speed not only determines survival but provides the opportunity to build massive success.

Written by serial entrepreneur Judge Graham, who sold his last company for several hundred million dollars, Scale with Speed reveals the formula Judge used to build his businesses quickly from nothing to generating millions of dollars in revenue. It's a practical guide to achieving transformational growth by working faster, smarter, and more strategically. Speed is the new currency and without it, businesses die. With Scale with Speed, business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs alike achieve the financial freedom and the life they've always dreamed of.

Part 1

Start with Your End Game

“You don’t have a business if you don’t have an end game.”

– Judge Graham

You are not running a real business until you know your end game. That is, what do you hope to do with your business in the future? How will you get the most value from it?

If you were to retire today, is your business at a point where it can operate without you and still provide enough positive cash flow to maintain the lifestyle you want for the rest of your life? Would other companies be interested in acquiring your business for millions of dollars if you put it up for sale today?

If you answered “no” to both of these questions, don’t be discouraged. Once you learn the SPEED formula, you’ll be in a position to answer “yes.”

So, let’s dive-in on the “S” part of the SPEED formula: Start with your end game.

What it Means to Scale with Speed

Speed is the new currency – it determines your success. We’re living in a technology-driven, global economy that is 24/7/365. That’s a fact. And if you can’t be responsive and keep up with the pace of technology and innovation, your business will fail. Operating with speed is the framework that will drive successful growth.

Companies that learn to leverage speed gain an insurmountable competitive advantage. Those that can’t, go bankrupt.

If you’re not able to keep up, making decisions and executing faster than your competition, you’re out of business. Period. Twenty-four percent of all startups fail in the first year and 48 percent fail by year two, says the SBA. Your odds of sticking around are about 50 percent, but your odds of tremendous success are far lower. You need to scale with speed to reap real financial rewards.

You’re in a high-stakes battle for profits. Focusing on productivity improvements, efficiency gains, and hiring strategies simply isn’t enough. You need to create processes that compress time and enable you to leapfrog other companies in your space.

This book is about scaling yourself and your business in an ever-changing world. It’s a scary world that’s moving faster than ever. If you can’t keep up, you’ll fail.

Have a Sense of Urgency

This was never clearer to me than right after I joined the company that had acquired my startup, back in 2015. We had gone from being a small fish in a big pond to a moderate-sized fish that now looked even tastier to larger predators. The market was in a feeding frenzy, with large agencies buying up smaller ones left and right.

We wanted to be bought. We also knew that the feeding frenzy would end in the not-too-distant future. We needed to prepare to be acquired or get left behind, squeezed out of the market, quite literally. We had to act fast.

From Day One, my focus at the company was on positioning us to be bought by a larger agency. I did that by analyzing the market we were in and identifying a pain point that no one else was addressing. Then I studied the top-performing agencies as my role models, mimicked their operating practices, and created an entirely new solution in the marketplace that went beyond what any existing agencies offered. We created a niche we could dominate.

I had a heightened sense of urgency because of my personal experience in my last company; I had been days away from selling it when we lost our largest client. The deal fell apart and took months to piece back together. I didn’t want to lose another opportunity because we weren’t ready to move when a buyer indicated interest.

Within a matter of months, the largest agency in our industry—we were number 2—had two bidders trying to buy it. We knew that meant that the losing bidder would likely turn its attention to us, the second-largest agency. As soon as the other deal was signed, we wanted to be ready to woo the unsuccessful bidder.

That’s exactly what happened. They lost out, wanted to quickly move on to their Plan B, which was acquiring us, and because we were primed and ready to move, the negotiations and due diligence were done in record time.

Because we were ready, we were even more appealing as an acquisitions candidate to the buyer. And because we’d been prepping, we could promise the deal would take less than half the time to close. Speed was on our side.

Not only did our preparations and speed make the deal possible, but it raised our value. The purchase price of many hundreds of millions of dollars we accepted was higher than we had initially expected. Had we waited for overtures of interest, it’s possible the buyer would have expanded their set of acquisition candidates, reducing our negotiating power.

More importantly, speed allowed us to stay relevant—to stay in business. That’s becoming increasingly challenging.

The Need for Speed

In the business world today, speed is the new big, according to the Boston Consulting Group. It’s the straight path to market domination, aggressive growth, and profitability.

As a society, everything is moving so much faster today than it did 10 or 20 years ago. Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz eloquently made that clear in an article in 2017:

“The Wall Street Journal noted it took the landline telephone 75 years to hit 50 million users. Vala Afshar, the ‘chief digital evangelist’ for Salesforce.com Inc., tweeted that it took airplanes 68 years, the automobile 62 years, light bulbs 46 years, and television 22 years to hit the same user milestones. But to really see how the pace of change has accelerated, consider the impact of technology since 2000. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter hit that 50-million user mark in four, three and two years, respectively. That may sound astonishing when compared with cars, television and light bulbs, but it’s nothing when compared with the Angry Birds app, which took a mere 35 days.

Technology has hastened the pace of change and made possible mind-blowing innovations and breakthroughs. It has also made delays and a slower pace of work a major disadvantage. Can’t keep up? You’re out of business.

Changes Around Us

This is even truer for companies that are trying to scale—to grow exponentially. The slower you move, the harder it is to scale.

And competition is springing up all around you. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, three new startups are formed every second. Almost nine more were formed since you started reading this sentence.

It’s almost overwhelming.

Just look at the flow of information on social media, for example. The pace of information-sharing continues to accelerate. According to Domo, every 60 seconds:

• •Facebook users share nearly 2.5 million posts
• •Twitter users tweet almost 300,000 times
• •Instagrammers upload close to 220,000 photos

We’re seeing similar increases in communication. According to an article in Lifewire, the average office worker receives 121 emails a day and sends out 40. That number is also increasing, according to the Radicati Group, which found that an average of 205 billion emails were sent daily in 2015. Just two years later, that average had climbed to 269 billion—an increase of 31 percent.

Exponential growth and progress is happening all around us.

Once you get ahead, it’s time to scale. Speed and scale are your one-two punch.

Scaling with speed is a chance at massive success.

The average office worker receives 121 emails a day and sends out 40.

While two-thirds of startups won’t last a decade, according to the SBA, a small fraction will hit the jackpot. According to the Kauffman Foundations’ report “The Constant: Companies that Matter,” of the 552,000 new businesses formed each year, only between 125 and 250 will ever hit $100 million in revenue. That’s .02 to .045 percent that scale with speed.

I’ve actually experienced both success and failure in business. My first venture, which I started while still in college at Texas Christian University, was in web design. With the help of my business partner and best friend, we grew steadily and quickly to the point where we had 30 employees and thousands of square feet of space, but not enough recurring revenue. We couldn’t scale, I learned too late. Our business model simply wouldn’t allow it.

Start Where You Are Now

Don’t think that you have to run a massive company to benefit from the principles of scaling with speed. In fact, the smaller your business, the more you have to gain.

Of the 28 million small businesses in the U.S., reports the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 22 million are single-person operations—meaning they have no employees. These solo operators actually have the greatest opportunity to scale—to grow their businesses from ventures dependent solely on the owner to enterprises that can continue to grow without daily involvement from the owner.

There are four requirements for scaling with speed:

1. 1.You serve a niche market
2. 2.You have a quality product or service
3. 3.You have an end game in mind
4. 4.You have to be fully committed and take massive action

If you have those, you’re ready to go.

How to Scale

Scaling is the new business objective. Forget revenue targets and headcount, companies today want to achieve transformative growth. They don’t want slow-and-steady, iterative growth. No, they want revolutionary up-leveling.

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