Strategies for Scaling Service
Hey aspiring business tycoons,
Welcome to the Better Business Brief, where I share takeaways from:
- running a business I’m building to sell for millions
- my consulting with business owners building to sell for millions
- tips and tricks you can use to do the same
This one is for all the homies with service-based businesses or that work with people running service-based businesses: I’ve learned a whole lot about scale from growing and selling my business and now working with all kinds of different service businesses. The truth is that there is not one single thing responsible for allowing a company to scale. It’s actually a ton of little things working together usually. I sat down recently and decided to make a list of 20 of the biggest strategies I’ve seen, observed, heard about, and used personally to have success in scaling things up.
So today, in less than 5 minutes, I’ll give you:
🚀 The Only 2 Ways to Scale Service
🏆 My Favorite of the 20 Scaling Plays
🧠 Why & How Each Helps You Scale
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At the end of the day, when I sat down, I realized that all the strategies I was thinking of fell into 2 categories of how to grow a business:
They all involved either getting more customers or making each customer worth more money. That’s it. And I don’t make it so simple just for sake of ease - I actually found that when I boiled it down to first principles like this, it was easier to think through the strategies and how they actually help a business grow.
The truth is that people (myself often included) spend so much time doing things that do NOT help their business scale, and if you use the lens of those 2 categories, it makes it easier to check yourself on whether or not you are doing the right things.
Now within the 2 categories, I realized each had 2 subcategories as well. That’s where things got interesting:
Let’s talk about getting more customers first. There are really only 2 ways to get more customers, and they are CAPTURING demand, and CREATING demand.
If you are capturing demand, that means people are already looking for your service, and you simply make it easier for them to find you. This should be used specifically for services that are well understood, regularly sought after, and needed and wanted by people already. A couple of my favorite examples of strategies here are:
Running Google Search ads for your service is really the holy grail of capturing demand, and typically is the backbone of most local service companies. It doesn’t ONLY work for local services, but it works really well for them. The reason these are so good is that people are already searching for whatever you have and if they find you when they do, they are often ready to buy. The way you scale for real with these is you figure out how much it costs you to acquire a customer through them, then you crank the ad spend as long as you can make it profitable and have enough man hours to fulfill on the service more.
2. Pre-Qualified Outreach: |
This doesn’t work for every business, but whenever possible, this strategy is a good one to use. What this means is simply finding, creating, or buying a list of people who have already shown through some kind of intent that they have interest in buying some kind of service, and then reaching out to them via call, email, mailer, message, or whatever. An example would be a realtor buying a list of people looking to buy a home and contacting all of them. This helps you find more customers regularly as well, maybe less expensively than Google search ads but probably also more time consuming.
The other choice obviously is creating demand. This is a tough game to be in, and I know that because I’m in it now. You often have to do this if you have a complicated service or something newer or less recognized by the masses. It’s important that you call out the specific types of people you’re trying to serve on a granular level. Here’s 2 of my go-to methods:
The cool thing about social media ads is you can embed your service offering into someone’s experience a little more. Examples would be running Facebook or Instagram ads or YouTube or TikTok ads. There are many places to run them. The biggest tips I have here are to use a very clear call to action at the end of them, to make them feel native to the platform they’re running on and as organic as possible, and to only run them on platforms where you know your ideal customers hang out already. The difference with these and all creating demand tactics is that you need to spend more time educating about what you do in your service up front because you are literally creating interest in something people didn’t know they needed.
This one may be my favorite on the list and the one that is most personally rewarding. I define this as simply putting yourself in situations where you are seen as an expert or authority and where you have the opportunity to speak about your experience and what you do. Being featured on podcasts, speaking in front of crowds, running small workshops. These all help you get your message in front of people who may become customers if they get the right exposure to who you are and what you do. My go to methods here personally are going on podcasts and doing speaking engagements. I think these just get the most reach and establish the most authority.
Now you also have the option of trying to make your existing customers worth more. The cool thing about these tactics is that they are often less costly and maybe even easier. Often, the hardest work is getting customers in the first place. Again, there are 2 categories here, which are offering more service and offering bigger service. I’ll give you my favorite of each:
1. More Service - Incentivizing Repeat Purchases: |
This is worth so much for so many reasons - if you can convince your customers to purchase your service regularly, it eliminates so much work, makes your revenue more predictable, and actually makes your business worth more money if you want to sell it. An example here I love is that I started talking with the owner of an HVAC company that has 300+ people on what he calls maintenance agreements. That means they pay a certain amount per year to have someone check their Air conditioning system a couple times per year and make sure it doesn’t break. It allows him to understand how much he’ll make each year better and schedule out his service better.
1. Bigger Service - Finding Richer Customers: |
This one is pretty straightforward. Richer customers have more money to pay. If you find yourself struggling to get paid by your customers and not making much from each one, you can always just look to customers with MORE MONEY. They often value their time a lot, and are willing to pay more for services that save it for them. You may end up having to do a bigger version of the service, but if you can charge 5x as much for a service that takes you twice as long, that’s a BIG win. The key here is that you need to really step up the level of professionalism you have in order to work with richer customers. They’ll expect that, and if you don’t have it, they’ll go to someone who does. With my staffing business, our big unlock was when we started getting contracts with universities. They had FAT budgets and wanted our full level of service, and they paid much more for it than most customers and with less complaints.
Those have only been 6 of the 20 strategies I mentioned. It would be a lot for one newsletter, but I made a video where I go over all 20 in great detail and use personal and other examples to show how each works and is best done. Check it out here and see how they can work for your business:
https://youtu.be/dblJCruTjUE
There’s a lot more than this to learn, but these are the key things I’ve found can really help you scale service. I hope this has been helpful for you in your journey. If reading this sparked ideas about a play you think you can make in your business, I’d love to talk about it: Grab some time here and we can talk about how I might be able to help.
Be great. Keeping growing and aspiring. And as always: I hope you got something from this.
If you did, share it with a friend who may too, as this is the best way for me to grow it and make this better.
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Happy value-building to all of you!
See you next time for Better Business Brief,
-Brody
