You can drive yourself crazy looking at the seeming success of other owners in your industry, and you can do it every single day if you want.
But social media is a trap for business owners, no different from if we were all a bunch of teenagers. What you see on the internet is only the very beginning of the story, and it hides the truth that most of these businesses have the same problems you do, if not more.
In fact, those who look like they’ve scaled very quickly might have specific problems that aren’t visible at first.
First, they look like they have a bunch of shiny, happy people around. However, this also means they have to do more management. Hopefully they have good processes and procedures in place because scale can break things down. Onboarding and training new people is a much bigger task that most people expect. And, most owners are used to doing a lot of functions themselves, and it takes time and effort to transfer those over to employees.
As volume increases, fulfillment feels the strain. Delivery time, quality control, and customer service will all be challenged, so you must take action to grow your capacity for all of these inevitable changes.
Scale means more moving parts and more opportunity for breakage. Software, machinery, relationships, and a host of other parts of your business that feel strain where you’re at, might break with additional weight, if nothing else changes as you take on more volume.
The chance for new, unexpected issues, like lawsuits, employee defections, or increased competitive pressures, also increases.
The impulse to keep up with the Joneses is pervasive in American life. Social media is the ultimate example of this - it’s set up to drive people to want to match the “best” thing they can see out of the thousands of people around them.
Don’t fall into the trap of steering your business the way other competing businesses might look - we can help you to carefully count the costs for that which merely meets the eye.