Loading...
Answers
MenuBiggest keys to watch when scaling from $1M to $3-$5M?
Business: wedding venues, rentals, wedding planning services. I'm absorbing Verne Harnish's Scaling Up as we speak, and wanted feedback from others who have made this journey. I have another business that's at $3.5M, but that was acquired at that level.
Answers
The success of scaling-up, irrespective of logical explanations, relies on people, support, and contribution. Opinions and views of stakeholders, internal-external, should be taken as a due diligence exercise. That's where you need to have a steering group to visualize the future, and collaborative team to run the show. The reason being, at the end of day every aspect of your business will demand enhanced commitment to protect your bank account from bleeding out. As much as possible, try to scale remotely or something that help you save nickel dime.
Secondly, ensure you don't compromise with your quality standards in haste to scale up. Invest your time, energy, effort, and capital behind best people.
Have an eye fixed on customer engagement, experience, and support while you scale up. Serving few is always easier than serving too many. Ensure, you adopt necessary tools and process to have satisfied customers at the end of a day. Likewise, ensure to set up system and process for other business activities as well.
Keep an eye on financial numbers, especially cash flow. Few pending invoices may have larger impact once you scale up.
Hope above helps!! Looking for anything specific? Am just a clarity away!!
You are in wedding business, so focus on how would you scale knowing:
-Your business has a climate effect (cold less revenue, hot best part of the year-sales)
-There is a limit on the size of wedding on each venue, revenue per guest. How would you increase it?
-How can you own the whole wedding ecosystem? Add decoration, flowers, music, DJ, catering, etc
Scale is a measure of value multiply by the number of customers. You can affect one of the variable and it's the value you provide. Find it and the customers will bring the growth
Related Questions
-
What is the best sales material to use to support a B2B outbound strategy. And what should be the order of outreach? I.E email, phone call, mail?
People hate calls. People hate emails. People hate mail. Do you really want your first impression to be that of an interloper and a pusher? Then again, most recipients aren't event going to look at what you send them. What is your niche? Office managers for private family healthcare providers in Peoria? Athletics department directors for NAIA schools? Sales managers at wholesale car dealers that make over $180 million per year in gross revenue? Know your niche and define your buyer (and it better be the CIO or VP). Is your buyer female or male? Older, middle age, or younger? What about her or his college education? What does he drive? Where does he live? Where does he eat his lunch and get his coffee in the morning? What does he read? Etc. Go to your buyer. Find congregations of your buyer. Professional associations. Conferences. Meet-ups. Trade shows. Offer to do free presentations--not on your product but on best practices or trends you observe in the industry. Make your presentation about solving problems your buyers deal with every day. Write blogs or columns for media they read. Again, focus on what they need/want to read. You will have a hard time keeping enough business cards in stock and click-throughs from your byline. This is a true "targeted outreach campaign." Don't waste your money and time with anything less than this. You're going to do great. Please let me know if you'd like to talk about it more!BI
-
Who are the top 5 thought leaders on scaling companies?
Nichole's list is comprised of people who talk about growth marketing. Although growth marketing is a component of scaling-up, scaling a company is much more about operational issues. Everything from tech stack to culture to legal and compliance and almost always sales. On growth, there are a lot of people who talk about the principles of growth from a marketing perspective and a couple of people on Nichole's list are known for *talking* about growth but I'm generally wary of people who are more known for *talking* than actual notable accomplishments in growing products. Ivan Kirigin (formerly on Dropbox's growth team, now running a company I invested in called YesGraph), Gustaf Alstromer (AirBnb growth team), Elliot Shmukler (helped LinkedIn grow from 20m to 200m members, now in-charge of growth at Wealthfront who has been absolutely killing it), Drew Dillon (an early PM at Yammer, now Head of Product at AnyPerks), are all active on Twitter. Actually Elliot isn't but you can still search quotes he's made about growth via Twitter using his name. If you have more specific questions, am happy to try and point you to the right resources.TW
-
What is a good/average conversion rate % for an e-commerce (marketplace model) for customers who add to cart through to purchase order.
There is quite a bit of information available online about eCommerce conversions rates. According to a ton of sources, average visitor-to-sale conversion rates vary from 1-3%. This does not mean the Furniture conversions will be the same. The bigger problem is that visitor-to-sale conversions are not a good data point to use to measure or tune your eCommerce business. All business have some unique friction factors that will affect your final conversion rate. It's very important to understand each of these factors and how to overcome them. The best way to measure and optimize is to take a conversion funnel approach. Once you have defined your funnel you can optimize each conversion rate to better the total effect. For example: Top of the funnel: - All web site visitors, 100,000 / month First conversion: View a product page, 50% of all visitors Second Conversion: Add to Cart, 10% of people who view products Final Conversion: Complete Checkout, 80% of people who put items in a cart In this example we see that only 10% of people who actually view products put them in to a cart, but 80% of those people purchase. If you can figure out why visitors are not adding items to their cart and fix the issue to increase the conversion rate, revenue should increase significantly because of the high checkout rate. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to give you a wealth of information about your site visitor and their behavior or there are some great paid tools as well.DM
-
If you had to pick the most important metric from Dave McClure's AARRR? What would it be and why?
Retention - if you build something people want/use AND come back and use often, then you can usually figure out a business model to make it work (if there's a big enough market).DM
-
How has Uber grown so fast?
Obviously, they do the fundamentals well. Good brand. Good experience. Good word of mouth. Good PR. Etc. Etc. But after my interview with Ryan Graves, the head of Global Operations at Uber (https://www.growthhacker.tv/ryan-graves), it became clear that they are operationally advanced and this is a huge part of their success. I'll explain. Uber isn't just a single startup, it's essentially dozens of startups rolled into one because every time they enter a new city they have to establish themselves from essentially nothing (except whatever brand equity has reached the city ahead of them). This means finding/training drivers, marketing to consumers, and building out local staff to manage operations for that city. This is where Ryan Graves comes in. He has a protocol of everything that must be done, and in what order, and by who, to ensure the best chance of success in a new city. So how has Uber grown so fast? Essentially, they figured out how to grow in one locale and were relentless about refining their launch process to recreate that initial success over and over in new cities. No plan works for every city, and they've had to adapt in many situations, but it is still a driving factor for their success.BT
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.