Scale or Fail

How to Build Your Dream Team, Explode Your Growth, and Let Your Business Soar

Allison Maslan

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119461036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Scaling a business is not for the faint of heart. It's a mind-bending journey that causes millions of business owners around the globe to either throw in the towel—or avoid risk entirely and suffer from smallness and mediocrity.

Most of these businesses fail because they are ill prepared to face the real challenges involved in scaling. Either they don't have the bandwidth to keep up with the sales demand or production, miss out on major opportunities due to fear, or keep making the same mistakes over and over because systems and processes aren't in sync with the rate of growth.

To truly scale, you must upsize your strategic practices, implement new marketing strategies, find new ways to build your team, and expand your mindset to break through whatever is keeping you stuck at the same level. Then you must be willing to take the leap into the giant unknown – to make your impossible possible. In Scale or Fail, author Allison Maslan—who has successfully scaled ten companies from scratch and has guided thousands of small businesses to do the same—shares her revolutionary SCALEit Method ® for successfully growing, replicating, and expanding your business. She also shares pivotal mindset strategies she's used to break the fear barrier as a trapeze artist so you can move past any obstacle, take strategic Big Picture risks, and fulfill your dreams of business expansion and skyrocketing profit.

Featuring a wealth of real-life success stories, visual tools, and exercises that are prescriptive and inspirational, Scale or Fail offers proven scaling strategies and a proactive approach to:

• Create your Big Picture Vision and build a plan to achieve it
• Produce an ever-flowing stream of cash flow with consistent profits
• Establish a powerhouse team that functions well without you
• Become a true leader and feel like you deserve your success
• Improve systems and processes that facilitate scaling
• Get past the mental and strategic pitfalls that cause revenue bottlenecks

Scale or Fail is adaptable to any type of business—manufacturing, consumer goods, a brick and mortar, a digital service, a wholesaler, a consulting service, and everything in between. Whether you're six figures and scaling to seven... or in the seven figures and scaling to eight or even nine, Scale or Fail provides the roadmap to multiply your business growth—and empower you to soar in the air with the greatest of ease.

1
It All Starts with the First Leap

Leap and the net will appear.

—John Burroughs, naturalist and essayist

My Story

One morning 20 years ago, I woke up feeling buried by my business. No matter how hard I worked, I could not relieve what felt like a 1,000-pound weight on my shoulders: constant work, unrelenting chores, never-ending bills, and round-the-clock parental responsibilities raising my 2-year-old daughter, Gabriella, by myself. I was running on empty with no time or energy to do the activities I liked or be with the people who brought me joy. In fact, I had lost the motivation to seek out joy because all I could think about was the oppressive stress that was running my life – wondering how I was going to get everything done before collapsing after midnight, only to start the cycle all over again the next day. To top it off, I was constantly wracked with the guilty feeling that I was a horrible parent. Ironically, I had started this business to become the master of my fate – to live a life of freedom and creativity and build a wonderful life for my daughter.

At the time, I was running my company, The Barali Group, a full-service advertising and public relations firm in San Diego, California. Business was good – no, it was better than good, it was shooting through the roof. I was being slammed with business from Fortune 100 companies such as Ben & Jerry’s, Supercuts, Allstate, and Charlotte Russe. The cash was flooding in. I should have been counting my blessings, right? My ship had come in. Unfortunately, this was not at all the case. I had no time to breathe, much less any free time to spend all of the money I was earning.

What was going on? Was I just being ungrateful for my good fortune?

I tried to sort out the problem, as something was dreadfully wrong. While the front end of my business was booming, the back end – the glue that held everything together – was nonexistent.

For one thing, I had a small, talented team, but needed to face the fact that I was naïve and ill-prepared to lead them. Rather than delegate tasks to my staff to free myself up and live my life, I continued to be involved in every aspect of – well, everything! I performed an honest self-diagnosis and came to the conclusion that I was a total control freak. (As I later discovered, this is a universal trait among people who start their own businesses from scratch.)

Meanwhile, I was a control freak who didn’t have anything resembling a blueprint for growth and, of course, no plan in place to scale and adapt to all of the changes occurring in my business. Although I was a whiz at bringing in clients and had a knack for building successful ad campaigns, I was sorely lacking the ability to manage anything beyond that and unable to concede enough authority to empower anyone on my staff to rise to the occasion and fill in the gaps. We haphazardly bounced from one project to the next. My team and I suffered many all-nighters loaded up on coffee in order to meet crazy deadlines. We were all breathing our own exhaust.

My Big Wake-up Call

Most of us can look back on our lives and recognize the wake-up call that set the course for our future. The moment when our lives took a drastic turn and the universe tossed us out on our derrieres, forcing us to make a change – whether we were ready for it or not. In most instances, we were not.

When you are under constant stress, one of the side effects is that you are never living in the moment. You are constantly trying to figure out what you need to do next, rather than paying attention to the brilliant opportunities for joy and prosperity right in front of you. You fail to see or feel the vision, as you are focusing so much on your day-to-day workload, your frustrations, and your own stuckness. (Yes, I admit I just made up that word, since that is the best way to describe the sensations involved.)

My wake-up call occurred on the day when I managed to run over myself with my own car. Yes, you read that correctly: I ran over myself with my own car. This feat was clearly the biggest faux pas of my life.

It happened when I was picking Gabriella up at daycare. I was in a rush from another long workday – running late, as always – and parked my Ford Taurus in haste. I began my leap out of the vehicle in a panic, feeling the shame of being tardy to pick up my child and exhaustion from hours of toiling nonstop at the office. I’m sure you can guess what happened as I exited the car.

Surprise! I realized too late that I had failed to use the parking brake. As the car began to move with me in its grip, halfway out of the driver’s seat, it dawned on me that my frenetic pace was doing me in.

The car rolled back, dragging me underneath the front tire and out into the middle of the street. If having a 4,000-pound car running over you does not cause you to drastically reexamine everything about your life, nothing will. Once the car stopped rolling, I realized that it was only by some incredible miracle that I had survived in one piece (except for the tire tracks on my legs, which lasted for a year). I knew my life had to change.

The following question popped into my head loud and clear: Do you want to be in the same place a year from now, and 10 years from now?

The thought of living like this for another year – much less another day – lit a raging fire under my feet. I made a drastic decision and walked away from everything. I essentially handed my half of the business to my partner, left my failing marriage, and rebooted. I went back out into the world as a single mom with no money, no revenue, no prospects, and no idea what I was going to do with my life.

The result? I was happier than I had been in years.

From that point onward, I made a decision that I must be 100% passionate about everything I did – or else I would drop it. The choice was either “Hell yes!” or “No way!” There wasn’t anything in between. I loved the idea of business and making money, but I arrived at the conclusion that there had to be a better way than riding myself so hard that I ended up literally running over myself.

My Business Blueprints Are Born

I spent the entire following year rebuilding my life. I made a list of all the parts of my company that worked well and separated out which ones were broken, faulty, or missing altogether. Next I dove into each individual aspect to figure out why some things worked while others didn’t. I also studied my clients who ran successful companies, examining the systems and processes that had turned them into well-oiled machines functioning with fluid perfection and garnering sustainable results over both the short and long term.

“Every successful business owner has that pivotal moment in their lives and careers. I call mine “the moment of impact.”

Mine happened to occur during a “wonderful thing” called the Recession. It was a terrible time for everyone. All of my eggs were in one basket with retailers. But I was afraid to go to them and continue to do business. Buyers I had worked with for years had lost their jobs, and I was worried. Stores were shuttering. Companies had filed for bankruptcy.

I had spent so much time and energy pleasing my buyers, doing things like sending them cupcakes. But my company wasn’t going to survive this way. The Recession taught me that I no longer needed to worry about my buyers. I needed to worry about my customers.

My focus completely changed. My business started going direct to consumer. We weren’t going to worry about our wholesalers and retail partners anymore. Of course, we still did business with them when there were opportunities – but mostly I redirected everything to customers.

I had only seven employees at the time. I maxed out my credit card and line of credit. I pulled out of the rep groups and opened my own showrooms. I built a direct-to-consumer website. I created the “color bar” where the customer could design her own jewelry; she’d pick the colors she wanted and choose her own metals.

We did the unthinkable and opened our first retail store. It was a calculated risk during the Recession. But retailers were shuttering, so space was cheap and I was able to negotiate my own great lease.

Everyone thought I was out of my mind. While everyone else was pulling out, I was trying to do something disruptive, innovative, and creative.

I wasn’t going to allow anyone to speak for me again. I was going to build my own relationships with customers to find out for myself what they loved and hated. And that’s when the magic started.

Years later: I now have a $1 billion business and 2,000 employees – all due to that moment of impact.”

—Excerpt from my interview with Kendra Scott, chairman, CEO, and lead designer of Kendra Scott, LLC. To watch my full interview with Kendra Scott, go to: www.ScaleorFail.com/bonus.

From all of this, I developed two strategic blueprints: one to grow a business and the other to scale a business. I diagrammed these blueprints like an architect renders drawings for the construction of a new building. I subsequently adhered to the...