The Three S’s of Success
How To Scale Your Business in the Creator Economy
To successfully scale a business you need:
→ Stamina
→ Systems
→ Strategy
In that order.
If you’re struggling to scale your business, you most likely have a sequencing problem. But before we break down the three stages you need to successfully scale, let’s define terms.
Stamina: The ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort.
Systems: A defined set of inputs for an intended output.
Strategy: A plan of action to achieve a specific goal.
Now we’re aligned on our definitions, let’s walk-through the three S's of ‘success’ and understand why each stage is sequential and important.
Stamina
When you start a creative business it’s all about stamina. Stamina to get sales, stamina to get seen, stamina to become reliable and stamina to get viable. This initial sustained effort in the pursuit of delivering value, cannot be learned from theory alone.
You can’t buy stamina. You can bring it with you, as experience, or compound your training with mentorship. But to build a business—let alone scale one—you need to build stamina. Meaning you have to do the work. You cannot lead from the back.
Many businesses start in the general direction of a specific goal. Which in the beginning, is all the strategy you need. (Don’t let anyone sell you different).
A lack of rigidity in the beginning allows for your business—and your offer—to pivot over time as you begin to better understand your customer, your market and your minimum viable audience.
Just because you purchased the URL, printed the label, designed the landing page, claimed the username or wrote the hook for the VSL, doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind as you gather more data. (Trust me).
→ Get viable before you get visionary
→ Get profitable before you get pretty
A preexisting strategy can quickly become redundant and hinder success. In my experience, early stage strategy will almost always dilute into a sunk cost. Especially, when early stage capital is allocated to strategy during research.
Which is easier said than done when you’re in the aesthetics and ideas business. But the reality is, if you want to work in today's creator economy, you’ll need a little entrepreneurial spirit.
Insights:
Whichever creative mountain you decide to climb, you’ll need stamina and altitude training to get there. The view from the summit might be life changing, but the air is thinner, the path is steeper and the fall is greater. When you scale, everything scales. The good and the bad. This is why you need stamina—there are no competency shortcuts.
→ Skills are built from stamina
→ Problems are solved from stamina
→ Results scale with stamina
The field notes gathered at this stage will inform the systems you need to implement to increase volume as you scale.
Takeaways:
Consider building a nimble mix of full-time employees and freelancers. This allows you to expand and contract as you grow. It’s important to note that the people you build with, are often not the people you scale with—grow your network.
Systems
It’s worth repeating that a system is a defined set of inputs for an intended output. The desired output during the systems stage, generally speaking, is to improve quality, efficiency, communication and reduce costs.
If stage one was about building stamina to climb the mountain. Stage two is about building an ecosystem with optimal conditions to succeed on the journey.
Stamina without systems, at scale, causes burn out. Even if you don’t exceed your capacity until four back-to-back proverbial ultramarathons—burn out is coming. During the stamina stage of building your business, you will have intuitively built systems. Terribly inefficient, labour intensive and decision fatiguing systems, but systems all the same.
The goal is now to analyse each system. Understanding each step of a process helps you to simplify, optimise, automate or remove it entirely.
Aim to build resilient systems that can withstand the strain of increased volume. Not only will you deliver a better product, service or experience to a broader customer base, but it will also become easier to identify potential break points.
If you are the bottleneck for day-to-day tasks that are stealing your bandwidth from instrumental tasks—this is a signal for systemisation. The core objective is to free up your finite resources of time and attention to focus on tasks only you can solve.
A system is not just the implementation of technology. A system can just as easily refer to people as it can to software.
A French kitchen uses the ‘Brigade de Cuisine’ system. The distribution of labour via delegation, communication and responsibility. A French kitchen relies solely on the competency of a system that, at its core, is built on trust. (As will your systems, if you wish to scale). During the systemisation stage, the delegation of responsibility via an experienced manager or expanded C-suite is crucial.
A little infrastructure can go a long way towards de-escalating your fear setting and scarcity mindset from the stamina stage. This high functioning anxious state is very (very) productive when survival is the goal, but unsustainable long term. Stress is not conducive to creativity, systems are.
You must know when to release your grip and delegate responsibility via people, technology or both. This includes automation, but beware hidden costs. Switching costs and intangible costs are real when systematising a business. The wrong systems can have the inverse effect and require more of your attention and resources.
Just because you can systemise a process or set of tasks, doesn’t always mean you should.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs —Thomas Sowell
Writing down the recipe for the secret sauce only you know how to make, so it can be replicated when you’re not there, is a type of system worth your attention. Automating your cold outreach and lead magnet funnel across multiple third-party enterprise software, might not be. Or perhaps the reverse is true. That’s why it’s crucial to have people in the room who know what to do when, that you trust to execute.
Insights:
If you find yourself caught in planning paralysis, hire someone who has done what you haven’t before. Knowing what to systematise and what to live with (for now) is important when allocating resources. The price of the right system at the wrong time, could cost you your sanity, as well as your business.
If you delegate too much too soon, that you become too far away from the front line of your business, you may not see a crucial obstacle or opportunity to pivot from or towards.
The stamina you built during stage one will uniquely tune your radar to steer the business. Loosen your grip, but don’t let go.
Takeaways:
Use the Pain Gain Decision Matrix to help avoid systems that have high switching or intangible costs.
Only integrate a system if it delegates responsibility toward your team and away from you. Once these conditions are achieved, begin to focus on the strategic vision of the business.
Seek mentorship. Someone out there has done what you’re trying to do and will happily tell you how they did it.
Strategy
If stamina builds training, and systems optimise conditions, then strategy is about defining a direction.
Strategy is a plan of action to achieve a specific goal. Setting goals requires vision. At its core, a strategic vision is a mission, with a set of behaviours, anchored by values, delivered as a story, articulated as a rally cry. ‘This Way!’
Achieving a creative vision at scale, requires flawless clarity. A clear and concise vision can turn a business model of value, into a belief system of change. While an unfocused vision can blur a business into obscurity.
Vision is as much about leadership as it is about leverage. To scale your business, you will need to attract game-changing, dedicated and trail-blazer talent. Each member of your team must believe in the direction, purpose and pursuit of your business. Meaning they must believe in you, just as much as the business.
Without a clear vision, mission and set of values to unite your teams over time, your business will begin to fracture. Silo systems will begin to develop and silo departments will begin to emerge. The most common example being the disconnect between product and sales.
Insights:
If you don’t define a vision, mission and set of values in the pursuit of a worthy purpose before scaling, the expanding team will become apathetic to the energy required to scale and your culture will suffer.
The calibre of managerial talent you hire must be the best you can find or afford. Validate their experience to ensure they have the specific type of stamina and systems knowledge that align with your business. Your managers will help pioneer the vision, so they need to believe in it as much as you do.
Takeaways:
Hiring (and firing) your optimal team for growth is crucial. Hire the right person to hire the right people.
Success
An economist would define a successful business as: A business that delivers consistent value to its customers via recurring purchases of products, services and experiences, with sustained profitability and satisfaction. (This For That, Forever). I am not an economist.
It’s important to note that success is not exclusively defined by scaling a business.
→ Not all businesses want to be scaled
→ Not all businesses need to be scaled
→ Not all businesses should be scaled
Success is whatever you define it to be. But there are clues that say ‘success’ is the achievement of a worthy goal. (Which sounds like a vision to me). As mentioned in the strategy stage, a vision only has power when shared. And a vision can only be shared as a story.
So when a group of people come together to achieve a worthy goal, guided by experience, powered by systems, inspired by a vision about a story of impactful change. That may sound like a business, but it feels like success to me.
If stamina builds training, systems optimise conditions and strategy defines a direction, stories are the reason we climb.
Need to clarify your vision to scale your business? Book a free discovery call to see if I can help your story succeed.
