Why Thinking ‘Small’ May Be Best, Even if You Want to Grow Big
The first business I opened, was a small retail store.
The floor space was around sixty square meters, and ten minutes away, was Rebel Sports, a big chain sports store. The sales reps for the shoe companies used to come in, and talk about the order sizes that Rebel would make.
Ten times bigger than my orders, for any particular shoes.
Man.
I did the numbers in my head. How many shoes they must be selling. Multiplied by the price of the shoes… Plus, they sell a whole bunch of other stuff as well besides shoes.
And here in my little store, I was picking my orders, balancing my budget with what I expected to sell each quarter.
Often, I’d catch myself thinking about ‘more’. How do I catch up with these other guys?
But the fact is, our business was successful because we were the opposite of Rebel.
We grew, because instead of thinking ‘big’, we thought ‘small’.
While they focused on scale, we focused on service. Our staff were good runners. We would custom order shoes for customers. We supported local races. And, we built a horde of raving fans, that continued to buy, to the point where even after they would leave the country they would call up the shop, and place an order for shoes to be sent to them.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of chasing ‘big’, when often, thinking ‘small’ is best.
Even if the goal is to grow over time…
Let’s say you open a bakery.
Well, there’s a lot of bakeries in my town. There are cheap ones. Gluten free ones. Bakeries with a café tied to them. There’s a pet café with a bakery tied to it!
And in your bakery, you have a few customers, but you want to grow.
What are your options?
Install the point of sales systems that work better?
Get a better website or brand package?
Learn to do home delivery?
All that can work. But, what about thinking small? Zooming in to your unique business, the customer, and the story you’re inviting them to be a part of, and how this affects your products and service, so that it’s memorable enough for people to talk about?
Rather than chasing bigger, think ‘smaller’, focusing on one, two, or ten individual customers, and figuring out how to surprise and delight them, so they talk (online, offline, whatever).
(I have a friend Kat, who did exactly this with a sourdough bakery on a little island in New Zealand. And by delighting a few customers, she quickly was in so much demand she was maxed out).
Focusing on ‘small’ doesn’t mean staying small. (But it can).
It’s a way of thinking, that helps you to build your business the way you want, and service your customers, properly. Which, if you want, allows you to create scalable offers and systems, on top of a story that resonates, to grow.
Or, you can do what Ruby and I do, build a business you love that’s just the right size, so you can live the life that you want.
But how do we stay out of the ‘hype’ culture, and avoid feeling like we’ve got to ‘chase’?
We focus on three principles:
Set upper boundaries on services and offers
Drop the word ‘scale’
Realise you can lead, even if you’re in a team of one
Step 1 - Why set upper boundaries on your service or offers?
A few weeks ago, I found out that my friend had some t-shirts made for his personal training business. They said ‘Uncommon Strength’ on the front, and the graphic was a Jimmy Hendrix style font.
So I asked him for a large, and he said they were sold out. But I could put my order onto the next batch.
I’m still waiting for that shirt…
Since there was limited supply, I want one. And it keeps pulling my attention.
Another friend of mine, just announced she has some shirts for her business as well. I wanted to support her too, so I looked at the shirts. It directed me to a print-on-demand website that does shirts for you. There were ten different designs, in different colours and sizes. And, they’re always in stock, because they are printed to order.
After five minutes on the site, I left the whole thing, knowing I can go back whenever I want.
No urgency.
When you set an upper boundary, you restrict supply creating desire and demand
This often (assuming there’s a quality service), increases demand.
A little while ago, one of the brands Ruby follows, Sézane, did a ten year anniversary product drop. They had told their customers it was coming, via email and social media. When it went live, it all sold out in thirty minutes.
A lot of people missed out. Including Rubes.
In fact, some people were straight up furious, raging in the instagram comments.
But you know what? It just created more demand. And the result was, the next clothing drop sold out just as fast. Now there’s a reputation, and they’re always selling out.
But, how do you sell more?
Do you need to sell more?
If it’s revenue that’s the question, you can adjust pricing, or, you can repeat a similar offer a couple of times per year, creating a constant ‘drip’ of supply, with high demand.
Setting boundaries reduces overwhelm
The other week Ruby ran a small networking dinner for women in business.
It was a chance for a dozen women to come together, and catch up. Anyway, the first thing she did, was limit it to fourteen people. Then, when she sent out the first email with the invites, she was already coming from a place of limited supply. She wasn’t trying to get 100 people in.
Fourteen is easy to deal with. When she organised the emails, the location and the decorations, it was low stress.
Then, at the event, everyone got a chance to talk to each other.
Could she have made it bigger? Sure, but would everyone have been talking about how intimate and special it was afterwards? Probably not.
Now, she can run a second one, at a time that she chooses, and it’s highly likely a lot of the women will already want to come back.
Everywhere you look, people will tell you to chase ‘more’
And certain businesses and offers are suited for that. Many of the businesses we work with have evergreen, highly scalable offers. But what happens when we slow down and look small first?
Rather than trying to get the customers excited and market and sell with hype, we can explain the situation, see if it’s for them, and invite them in rationally.
It destroys neediness from your sales, and makes you more magnetic straight away.
Which, paradoxically for you as the business owner, means you can ship the work more easily, produce more over time, and invite more people to work with you.
Step 2 - Staying ‘Focused’ When Everyone Yells Scale
Every time I check on instagram, I’m hit with some advertisement about how so and so agency just scaled to 100k months. Or how to go from zero to ten million dollars in three years. Fact is, the entire space has been ‘scale-washed.’ Brainwashed into thinking that the only way to go is up.
The first thing to realise is - and this is from someone who’s seen behind the scenes for a lot of businesses... It ain’t always what it seems on social media.
And I won’t go into names, but more than a few of these guys might be showing the flash online, but behind the scenes the profit (and often revenue) ain’t there. I heard one guy was a big name coach, but turned out the dude is struggling to pay the bills.
Marketers know the ‘scale’ angle is attractive
It looks like you can suddenly get ‘high ticket leads’, without doing the work over time. ‘Scale’ has become go to word, to get the lifestyle of holidays by the pool at the lake Como mansion.
Now, this isn’t to say businesses shouldn’t grow
A lot of businesses we work with, grow. That’s the point. We’ve had clients from from 30k months, to 150+ k months. Growth is a great idea for the right business.
But they didn’t grow because they focused on getting bigger straight away.
Instead, on each step of the journey, the business owners check back in, to see how they can create a better service and a more compelling business story with more humanity.
When the business story is kept as the North Star, and customer service is a priority, the business owner can choose to look at systems or ways to leverage growth.
But trying to cram people in is rarely the path that gets there.
Realise you don’t have to scale
You may want to, and that’s fine.
But you might get your business to the perfect place where you can travel, take time off, work good hours doing what you love, and serve your customers or clients in the way that you enjoy.
For a lot of people, this will be the sweet spot of business, rather than trying to triple it in size.
There’s a gym based in Sydney that has ruffled a few feathers. It’s built specifically for executives, there’s a laundry service, one to one coaching. And the membership pricing is around $400 per week. More than most gyms. Anyway, what they did was limit the membership to 100 spots. In a city of millions, that ain’t a lot. From there they built a story that resonates with a particular group of people.
Within a year or so, they were full.
Now, they’re onto their second location, with the first membership capped.
They are growing, but it came from focusing on each individual member, one at a time, without racing to be huge.
And, they’re doing work they enjoy.
We found a similar thing in Creator Club, our business coaching membership
In a world where most business coaching programs are trying to get thousands of people in, we help a few of the right business owners do work that matters, that gets them to where they want to go, and have a biz-ness they love.
Some of that model doesn’t scale easily.
And that’s OK.
So, we’ve limited the spaces for the coaching. As I write this, we’re full.
And from there, we create small, specialised offers on the side for specific skills or tactics that businesses want to learn.
Step 3 - You Can ‘Lead’ Even When You’re Small
But can you become a small business ‘leader’ if you don’t grow a huge team?
I think when most of us in business think about leadership, what we’re really referring to, is the ability to take creative risks on new directions, and invite others to come along.
It ain’t about team size.
When you write your article, and ship it to the world, in a sense, that’s leadership.
When you run an event and invite twenty people to come, your leading.
A lot of our clients have VA’s, assistants, part time staff, or remote workers, and all of this can come under the banner of a team that you lead. But if you’re flying solo, you can also lead yourself, and the clients that you serve.
To lead means, not to follow
You’re creating a new business story, and opening the door for others to walk through.
All business owners should aspire to be leaders, but it has more to do with marketing positioning, than it does having to have staff or a team.
Conclusion
There’s a term I have called ‘Guru-Syndrome’. What it is, is it’s basically where new business owners come in, and when I ask them about their business, they say how they’ve been listening to the latest guru on how to get success in business. They’re fired up, and ready to go.
I say well, OK, what’s your offer? What’s your marketing?
A lot of times… silence.
This is the ‘syndrome’ - focusing on scale, rather than starting with an attractive offer for the people you want to serve, then finding more ways to serve them that are in line with that story.
And until we can circle back to the work that matters for a few people, it’s hard to grow at all.
When we take the focus off of rapid growth, we can focus on helping customers win
When we do a good job, people talk about it. They hang around. They want to come back. Instead of chasing for more, we find ourselves with opportunities to serve more.
Whether that’s more people, or the same people, for longer.
Scale, growth, and stacking revenue have a particular place and time. But if the process to ‘scale’ gets away from humanity, or the reason why you’re in business in the first place, then the end result rarely works out.
All that’s to say that if thinking ‘big’ ain’t working, try thinking small first.
Build a business you’re proud of for your particular audience.
Then, grow bigger if you want to.
Sign up for the latest articles and additional business emails: