Business Growth Strategies - When and How to Scale Successfully

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season, continuing our series, continuing our lives. Basically, we are building better developers this season. We're building better businesses and we are also developer noir. I am Rob Broadhead. I am one of the founders of Developer Noir, also a founder of RB Consulting, where we are what they called a boutique consulting firm. In our case, what that means is we sit down with you, understand your business, and then we help you craft a way forward. We look through all of the stuff that's out there, the technology sprawl that exists, whether it's already there with your business or whether it's just out there in the world. And through simplification, automation, integration and innovation, we put all those things together and we tie it all up in a nice little bow, basically, for you. Say, here you go. Here's what you need to do for today. Here's how you can leverage technology along with a roadmap and a plan so that we're not coming back six months later saying, okay, it's a whole new world and you've got a whole bunch of new stuff. We're actually going to help you build for the future. Whether that is software, whether it's stuff that we build for you, whether it's stuff you buy, whether you have to build a team as well and maybe even an entire organization We can help you navigate those dangerous waters. Good thing and bad thing. Bad thing is, it's not one of these two sides of a coin right now. Bad thing is, is just life is freaking chaos right now. In the middle of downsizing and working on selling a house and businesses all like, business is booming, which is a good thing in itself, but it's just like lots of stuff going on, crazy times, exhausting. I laid down at bed at eight o'clock the other night and I was suddenly out cold. It was just one of those, I didn't wake up until two and then of course I was automatically wide awake, couldn't go back to sleep. Other problems. Good thing is that we sometime in the past, it's been months ago now, converted the family over, we all converted over to new phones, a whole new provider, a cell provider. And because we did that, because we moved, we got all these little coupons and stuff. So now we're going to add a new iPhone to our family fairly soon. Like maybe, maybe not today, but maybe tomorrow. So that's always a good thing is adding a little bit more like new high end technology. It's probably a little bad because it's not going to be my phone, but hey, as long as it's in the family, that's what counts. Also what counts, but he's not in the family and I know we look like twins separated from birth, but as Michael on the other side, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Melosh. I'm one of the co-founders of building better developers, otherwise known as developer. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we help small to mid-sized businesses, clinicians really look at their software stack, figure out what their business needs for software. We use similar tools like Rob, we use automation, testing, but what we do is we come in with a quality assurance mindset. We look at your processes from the user stories. We help you identify the processes you need to streamline your business and make your life easier and let the technology work for you, not you work for the technology. Good and bad this week. Good I am probably about 20, almost a month into detoxing, getting myself off of caffeine, anxiety's dropping, so feeling much better, getting a little more normal-ish sleep for me. Bad side, the weather again is turning funky. We go from these weird seasons in Tennessee, we have like two winters, two springs, all this weird stuff. Right now the temperature's dropped again, but now we're up to like 30 to 40 mile an hour winds and it has just been a weird howling day. I can't tell if someone's knocking at the door or if it's just the wind. That's, it's usually like you get two seasons in a day is part of the problem. You can get this stuff, it just gets a little bit out of hand as does occasionally some notifications so I'm going to turn that off. This episode we're going to talk about something about when and how to grow and not really just I mean we always want our company to grow, we always want our business to grow, but it's really more about the process of going from maybe solopreneur or startup into a business and maybe you start, we've talked about contractors, employees, but it's starting to add an employee here or there, maybe your contract here or there and then moving up. Now there's a lot of different ideas around this. The challenge to this though is that the biggest idea, the most important thing, the one that most people will tell you is a key thing is to be able to be able to do the growth in time to support whatever that new work is. So for example, if you're suddenly going to have a bunch of new customers, you want to have your team in place to be able to support that customer or those new customers. You don't want to get all the customers and then have everything falling down about your head and shoulders and go, oh yeah, I need to expand. That in itself is very, very challenging. And I'm going to push you in this one to think about essentially expanding yourself more than your company because there is a whole line of thought around, you've got a certain number of employees that support a certain number of customers and as they grow, then you have to have more employees and you can do some metrics around that and you can do some things that can sort of math your way through it and say, if I need one employee to support four customers, if I go to eight customers, I need two employees, that kind of stuff. You can sort of figure those things out. There's other stuff around it. We can use technology and things like that to leverage our people better and to grow, but there's generally some sort of a, you know, like we can apply some formulas to it and make it work. I want to talk about the tougher things, which are the things that you do, and this is particularly when you start out and I'm going to confess, this is totally something that I'm running through right now, is that when you start out, you have to do everything. Now if you're lucky, if you're smart or lucky or all of the above, then even when you start out, you're already pushing things off to other people. You start out already with an organization of some sort, even if it's like virtual assistants or contractors or something like that, or even like one offs, where maybe you've, maybe you need to have like a website design, and so you just go and do a little project based thing, have somebody do your website, boom, you're done, you're off and running. However you do it, if you do it the easier way, you from the start are building your organization and everything in a way that you can very easily scale that out and sort of carve off pieces and put those elsewhere. If you're like me and some larger number of people that are out there, I think, because if you listen to any of the entrepreneurial type businesses out there, a lot of what the challenge is, is when they take those steps to grow from small business or side hustle into something real and they now have to scale up. Because now all the things, one, all the things that they did and that they knew and that they assumed are no longer useful to anybody else because that person is not going to know and assume and understand what you did. Nor do they know the history or anything else. So one of the first things you have to do is figure out what do other people know. So for example, if I hire somebody, I may know and not even care what my PTO policy is and some things like that. If I hire an employee, I may not even, honestly, if I'm doing a side hustle, I may not even know when I get paid or how much I get paid. Employees like to get paid and they like to know when they're going to get paid. It is not going to be a happy place if you're like, surprise, you got a little paycheck or surprise, you got a little bit more. It should not be surprise, should not be part of your paycheck unless there's like bonuses or something like that. So you need to set things in place. Now one of the ways we can do this because I don't want to just complain, it would be fun but I'm going to throw some extra stuff out there. One thing we can do is we can at some point before we take on our first employee is we treat ourselves as our first employees. We start thinking through what does it look like for an employee and basically get yourself off of the habit of working for yourself. So it is things like setting business hours, setting some and we'll talk some more about this. Michael doesn't know it because I just thought of a great topic for the next episode. But anyway, we're going to talk more about this but it's things like setting your work hours. It's things about having a workstation, having work supplies, having a work phone number, a work website. If you have virtual machines or cloud stuff like Google or Amazon or Microsoft or any of that, it's having a work environment. It is also things like utilizing tools for work. There's a lot of people and I've even done that. Right now I have a Dropbox account that is on a non-work email because it's been around forever and I always just used it for work stuff and then some other things as well. But primarily there and now I finally got points like, oh, I got to find a way to move that off or figure my crap out. So you want to be able just like with banking, we've talked about like have a separate bank account, make sure that you've got all of that stuff set up and that's more of the legal side. But there's also the practical side of things like having a work device, a work environment. The documentation around it is things like when do you take holidays? Even if you work on a holiday because we all do when we're side hustling, you should have something like, okay, for example, like in America, July 4th is going to be a holiday. I am not going to work. Even if I'm going to work, I'm going to say it's a holiday. So I'm going to tell my customers we're closed that day. Things like that. You may still work, but you need to have something so that when you have an employee, you can say, hey, you get to take a day off. Unless you're a miser and you're like, no, you never get to take a day off, in which case you're not going to have an employee that long. Think about benefits. Things like, and you can even treat yourself a little bit. It's like, okay, benefits is we're going to have pizza Fridays and we're going to go out and grab a pizza. If it's just you, you're going to get fat pretty quick, but like have a slice of pizza Fridays or something like that. Start thinking about things that are, they're going to be things that you would like to have at the place that you work and start implementing that with yourself before you even start bringing employees on. Because then when you do bring on employees, some of these things will be in place and you will be able to either hand those off to somebody to help manage and administer some of those stuff, or you'll be able to inform your employees what the culture is like and things like that. Now I know that seems weird when it's like just you because you are the entire culture basically, but it is useful to start putting those things into place and get those wheels in motion. Because what you don't want is a situation where you're like, and I, like I said, I've lived this as I got all the way through. I've got a nice big, I'm overwhelmed, which is usually what I do. I grow it to the point where I can't possibly handle it anymore. And then I start carving pieces off. Well the thing is at some point you have to carve those pieces off beforehand. You have to be working on that stuff. And then you're good. The first couple of employees, it's going to be painful. It's just so higher people that you know have got thicker skin or whatever it's going to be because it is, it can be very painful to get that crap out of your head. So the sooner you start, the sooner you try to do it. And honestly, you'll thank yourself because some of that stuff you'll do it. You'll come back six months later and you're like, oh yeah, that's what I was thinking. So now six months after we started this podcast, I'm going to throw this over to Michael and see if he remembers what our topic even was. So thanks Rob. We're talking about when and how to grow our business ourselves within our business. You kind of touched on a lot of different topics. I kind of want to take this and dissect this from a different angle. So one of the things as entrepreneurs, as developers, when we build our businesses, unless you're lucky and you have endorsements, investors, free money, we have to bootstrap a lot of things. So we take on a lot of things on our plate at the beginning and we essentially have to do everything. So we're overwhelmed by necessity. One of the things, and I think it was Tim Ferriss in this book years ago that I read was don't look at as you're growing your business or you're running your business, don't look at it as you are an employee. Actually look at it that you're the owner. How can you extract yourself out of the company or out of the business? How can you hand off the tasks so that your business can run self-automated? Essentially what if you got sick or what if you got hit by a bus or what if you had to take time off? How is your business going to run without you? So one, how I want to tackle this is when you want to grow your business as you're building the business, what are the things like Rob mentioned that you can hand off to other employees? What can you automate? Essentially every task that you do, look at it through a microscope and say, hey, is this something I should be doing? Is this something I can automate? Is this something I can hand off to a virtual assistant? Is this something I need to hire someone else to do? Because one of the benefits of doing it this way is if you have these policies and these procedures in place, you can start hiring people, then start pulling in the business. And then your business is already in a state to scale and grow without you being the bottleneck. Because early on in the businesses, we are the bottleneck. We are so passionate. We are the business. The business is us. In our minds, no one can run this business but us. Yes, we hire people to do tasks, but we are the only ones that can run the business. And that is the mindset you need to break. You need to look at your business as it is a job. It is your business, yes, but as Rob said, work for yourself. So establish yourself as the business owner, then set yourself up as an employee, and then figure out how to carve out your role for other employees or other contractors or virtual assistants so that you can divvy up the work, hand it off, and know when to scale or when you need to scale versus, like Rob said, he gets overwhelmed with businesses and then he needs to run out and hire people. In software development, this is typically when we need to test our applications. Because the companies didn't hire the QA people, we're ready to go to production, and now suddenly we need to hire 20 or 30 people to test our software. At the last minute, we find all these bugs, the deadlines shift. You don't want that. You want to be better prepared and scale to necessity versus scale to, not diversity, but to scale under pressure. You want to scale ahead of time, be ahead of the curve instead of being behind the ball and really stressing and trying to keep things moving forward, but then maybe lose a customer because you can't meet the demand. These are just some, an alternative view to some of the tips that Rob mentioned. The other thing to think about is that handoff. Look at, again, review your processes. What are you really doing that you need to be doing that you can't hand off? One of the best things I've ever done was to essentially go out to all my billers or all my vendors and set up auto pay. I literally once a month go look at my invoices, look at my bank statements, balance the register and everything's paid. I don't need to go do bookkeeping except for once a month. That saves you time because if you get a letter from a biller and you're like, oh, I got to pay this, you forget to pay it, you get late fees, you go pay it today. Oh, tomorrow you get another one. You gotta go pay. That time adds up. So those are either things you can automate or if you have a virtual assistant, have that mail go to a PO box, let them pick it up, let them handle. Just look for things that you can strip out that you don't need to be doing. Even think of it this way. Is it something that anyone should be doing? Is it something that you can just automate and forget and then it's gone? It's handled. Maybe review it once a month, once a quarter, just to make sure the money's still going where it's going. Your credit cards haven't expired. But that's just one of those little things that you can think about that you can apply to many different areas of your business. If you have websites, you maintain different websites, set up routines where they do daily backups or weekly backups. If it goes down, have it send you an alert. Little things, again, you can set up where you don't have to mainly do it. You can get an email or you can just get an alert saying, hey, something's not working. That's when you go pivot and take the time to work on. Or you have someone else go to. Those are just some tips and ideas that I see on when and how to grow your business and even yourself. Because in your daily lives, what are some of the things that you're doing that you are wasting time on or that you could batch or similarly automate? Look at ways that you can carve back time, that you can basically get time back and still get things done. So you definitely went a different direction in that. And I think I'll stay off of that because I think we've gone into the automation piece in depth. So I do want to swerve us back into the challenge side of it. And this is really it is. It is along the same lines of automating. Is that you have to first identify something. It's sort of like, what is the problem? What is the task? What is the repetition? And for automation, we do that because like, what is the repetition? What am I doing? What is the thing that is sucking up my time? When we want to expand, it's not that much different because it's what is it? But it is a little bit because it's what is taking my time that I don't need to. It gets a little bit more into priorities and some things like that because there are some things that you need to do. For example, let's say it is networking of some sort. It's talking to people. It's reaching out there and having a human touch. It has to be done. Automating it actually negates the whole value of it. But it may be that you're not a people person. So maybe it's better for you to go hire somebody that does sales and marketing and networking and some of those kinds of things. And then there are some things that it's just it's not. It gets back to a little the idea of the value proposition is is this the best spent use of your time? What is it that you bring to? What is your secret sauce? What is your skill? What is your value set that you bring to the table? And then honestly, everything that's not that you should be looking at ways to carve that off. Now, challenge for the week is to look at your day and write up essentially, and this should be something you don't have to get nuts, like just even five or 10 minutes is right up essentially like a let's say like a job proposal or position description of what would it look like if you were to hire somebody to do this set of tasks. So for example, it could be something like I don't like accounting, let's say. So I'm going to go in and I'm going to I want somebody that's going to balance the books, you know, every month, let's say they're going to deposit checks, chase down, you know, maybe they're going to deal with receivables and things like, you know, payables and receivables and chase those down and swap vendors away or whatever they need to do. I basically put down a job description for that. And then the follow up to that is going to be what do you need to give a person to be able to do that? Now, there may be things like user IDs and passwords and stuff like that, which is fine, but even those you should have somewhere like have a booklet or a document or something of like, this is the stuff for this process and just start that and grow it because and then this is sort of a rinse and repeat thing. So once you've done that for a bit, go pick another area and another area and another area because sooner or later, what you're going to if you're going to have like a lot of nice little notes, at least if not documents or organizational structure of like, oh cool, I need to really hire this person right now. Boom, I've got a lot of stuff because trust me, you don't want to do it in reverse. If you go hire the person, then you're having to do it. It's usually while it's very busy and you may even be doing stuff like, I don't know, downsizing and selling a house and having your company growing and like all that kind of stuff at the same time. So you want to try to get ahead of the game, just like everything else is let's try to get ahead of the game on that. So that's your challenge. And I think I'll thank you before it somewhere down the road when you do grow enough that you're like, oh wow, I got to like offset that stuff. I don't have time for it anymore. But you do have time to send us an email right now. So send us an email at info at developandor.com and let us know what you think. Where would you like us to go next? What are some questions, some topics, suggestions, all that kind of goodness? Because we are here for you and we want to make sure that we are going down paths that you guys want us to go. Even if it's some crazy little rabbit trail, let's make sure that it's one that we are all at least entertained by, if not informed as well. You can also reach out to us on the developandor.com site. They have a contact us form. You can leave us comments and responses pretty much everywhere, including the Developandor channel out on YouTube. There's just anywhere you see podcasts, you can leave us review there and leave us notes and comments and things of that nature. Out on X, we are at Developandor. There's a Developandor Facebook page. We are everywhere. It's sort of. Wherever you're looking for somebody, we're there. If you're looking for us somewhere and we're not there, let us know and we will get there. We're doing our best to just get out there, get a nice big footprint, because we want to connect with you because that is what it's all about. This community and all of us helping each other, pushing each other, that iron starved iron kind of thing is like, let's be better developers all around. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developandor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Thank you.