To Grow Or Not To Grow

When is it smart to expand and grow your company vs keeping it small and lean?

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell, again, and welcome to “Marketing in Your Car”.

All right, guys and gals, and everybody else who’s listening in, I’m heading to the office today, and this is what’s been on my mind, because we’re about to do a really, really cool thing. As you guys know, I’ve been talking and bragging and being super-excited about Click Funnels. Last weekend, as you know, we did our Mastermind, and we did our live event. Some of my buddies were at the event, Garrett and Scott – they run a couple of sites. They run TrustGuard.com, ShopperApproved.com, KartRocket.com, and they’ve been really, really successful in the software space. In fact, I can’t tell their numbers, but last month they did insanely well for themselves.

What was cool is while they were sharing their pricing model and how they upgrade people and stuff like that, it opened a huge light bulb in my head, because the way our old pricing was structured, we really had some virtual limits on what we could do and how much money we could make. Anyway, that’s where things were at, and after they showed us their pricing model, it opened up the door to a whole new world, and I’m really, really excited. And then they showed us where they had this mini call center that ascends people who get a free trial, and sends them in to a yearly contract which goes from $0 up to, for a year, $3,000 or $4,000 for that contract.

I really think that that’s the route that we need to go with our company. We completely changed our pricing structure because of it, and with that, we started looking at, “Hey, if we’re going to do this model – what they’re doing, we’ve got to have our own mini call center that’s [? 49:24] ascending trial people, and doing demos, and upgrading them, and this whole thing,” If we’re going to do that, and we’re going to do it right, we’ve got to build a team to be able to do that [laughs]. We’re about a month away from rolling out Click Funnels, and we want to have people in place so that when customers are coming in, we’ve got to obviously have a support team, which is going to be big, but also a team to upgrade and to do demos and everything else. We were mapping it out yesterday. To do that, we’re going to need a small team of people, initially, of, who knows? Four or five people, maybe, which now brings me to my own personal fears.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve got fears in business. Earlier in my career, I went and got excited, and we ended up building a company with over a hundred employees, and it was scary, but it was exciting. But it went down, and so now I’m in a spot where we’ve got something that I think is going to grow, and it’s going to grow really, really rapidly, and we want to make sure that the infrastructure and everything’s in place. So what do you do? Do you not build those things out, and try to keep it small and lean, and support suffers a little bit? Or do you put the extra costs in and try to go big? There’re so many variables, and so the question on my mind today is to grow, or not to grow? What do you do?

I’m just kind of walking you guys through my mindset, because part of me wants to have this whole infrastructure in place from Day One so that we can scale, and part of me is nervous about that, and I’m sure that a lot of you guys are kind of in that same spot. A lot of people are always asking me, “Russell, we’re building our company. Who should we be hiring first? When should we be hiring people?”, and all of that kind of thing.

Some of the best advice I got was from the book, “REWORK”. He talks about in there that you only hire when it hurts, and so anyway, I have these three or four different internal dialogs happening inside my mind, and I’m not sure of the answer yet, so I’m excited to say I’m going to meet with the team and be going over that, and figure it out. Obviously if we do decide to take this span, we’re going to start with the smallest team possible, but also big enough that we’ll be able to handle the influx.

Some of the cool things that we’re planning when we roll this out, as you guys will see, we’re going to have a Tesla club. We’re going to be giving away a Ferrari. We’re going to be doing a bunch of really cool things, and to be able to facilitate that, obviously, there’s going to be a lot of growth, and we need to have things in place, and so we’re in this ‘chicken and the egg’ kind of spot, and it’s really fun, and it’s really exciting. I’m excited to see what comes from it, but anyway, that’s the game plan today.

One of my big focuses is to figure out, internally, are we going to grow or are we not going to grow? Are we going to figure out smarter ways to do it? Are we going to try to have this happen with people that are outside of the company, or are we going to try to do internal? If we do keep it internal, do we get a bigger office? What are the plans? What should we do? So instead of doing it the way I used to do it, where we would just start running – which there’re benefits to the ready-fire-aim model, but I want to try to do this right this time. I want to make sure that as we’re growing, that we’re growing correctly, and that we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t put our company at any kind of risk or harm, but in a way that we’re growing very organically, but very rapidly as well.

Anyway, it’s a fun conundrum. I don’t know if that’s the right word. It’s a fun puzzle. I don’t know about you guys, but man, business is so much fun. It’s every day waking up and you’re playing this game, and you’re trying to figure out what goes where and what’s going to be the best way of how to optimize it, but every single thing you’re doing, you’re always risking. You’re gambling, and sometimes you’re gambles pay off, and sometimes they don’t.

One of our 25K clients – I had a call from him yesterday. He’s a young, 22-year-old kid who’s crushing right now, doing over a hundred grand a month, and he’s doing awesome. It’s interesting. We test things, and he’s like, “I’ll run ten things, and eight of the ten will be losers, but those other two just blow up, and they make everything else worthwhile.”

It’s interesting, and so I look at us in our spot right now, and it’s exciting and fun in trying to decide which direction we want to go, but doing it, again, more methodically this time, as opposed to just running and jumping like I often did in the past. For you guys, I hope that gives you some excitement, and helps you start thinking about your business. Is it time to grow? If so, what’s the strategy? What’s the right way? What’s the wrong way? How do you do it virtually versus internally?    All of the fun things we’re coming up with – I’ll let you guys know in the future what we come up with, and where we’re headed.

Part of me would love to get a new office. Our office is nice now, but one that’s a little bit bigger, where we could have more space for our team to be doing that kind of stuff, but then also, it would be fun to have our own little spot where we could do our own little video studio, and a couple of other things, and so I may call my old commercial real estate realtor up here in Boise and look around and see if we can find a spot that’s a little bit bigger that give us the ability to have some cool stuff like that. So who know? I’m excited.

I’m at the office. I’m going to go have some fun today. I’ve got about two hours of work, then I’m heading to jiu jitsu, which will give me about an hour and a half to go and try to beat some people up, which always helps me out, and then tonight, we’re going to go watch Lindsey Stirling, which will be pretty exciting. If you don’t know who Lindsey Stirling is yet, go to YouTube and type in “Lindsey Stirling”, and look for the video where she’s playing the violin in the fire. She’s a rock star, and that’s who we’re going to go see tonight. It should be a fun day. I’m excited. Thanks, you guys, and we will talk to you all again soon.