Among nonprofit consultants and small businesses, the term “scaling up” gets used a lot. But what exactly does it mean to scale up your business? And how can it help you?
Scaling vs Growing Your Consulting Business
First off, let’s distinguish between growing your business and scaling your business:
- When you grow your business, you’re adding both revenue and
- When you scale your business, you’re adding revenue but few, if any, expenses.
Growth is essential up to a point, especially in the first few years of your consulting business.
As part of growing a consulting business, you:
- Identify your most popular, profitable, and enjoyable services.
- Build your reputation and professional identity.
- Hone your consulting niche and ideal clients.
- Get comfortable marketing yourself, your business, and your expertise.
- Learn the nuts and bolts of running a business (not just delivering services).
But once you hit a certain level in your business, continuing to grow either requires adding more costs (that you then must worry about continuing to pay for) or investing more of your time. This can quickly become unsustainable and lead to burnout.
Scaling Is About Earning More without Burnout
Besides income and expenses, the most important currency in your business is your time.
Your time is one of your most valuable resources, but it’s often one of the hardest to quantify.
When you pay a virtual assistant, their time translates to expenses. The same happens when you pay a graphic designer, a copywriter, a grant writer, or any other subcontractor or employee.
But your own time doesn’t come with a price tag. Instead, it comes at a cost to you personally.
That’s why scaling isn’t about just doing more. Scaling is about shifting your focus and creating the type of efficiency that enables you to earn more while demanding less of your own time.
Scaling Is About Shifting Focus
According to Natalie Eckdahl, who hosts The Biz of Nonprofit Consultants Podcast, the key to “scaling up” is finding and refining a “scalable offer.”
What exactly is a scalable offer? Per Natalie in Episode 74 of her podcast:
“A scalable offer still draws on your expertise but is designed to be teachable and repeatable. It can be delivered by others on your team using your process. That’s how you create more impact, more profit, and more ease in your business.”
If you come out of the nonprofit sector, striving for and finding both impact and ease can feel like a contradiction. That’s one of the reasons so many nonprofit consultants struggle to scale. We’re conditioned to believe that effort equals impact.
But I challenge you to take a minute and imagine what ease would look like in your business.
Maybe you want fewer deadlines and less client stress. Maybe you want more time with your family and less time doing (or thinking about) work. Maybe you want to make a difference for more clients, without working yourself into the ground.
These are all possible, especially if you’re ready to embrace scaling up. If you’re looking for one-on-one support to scale up in your business, our personalized business coaching boot camp might be right for you.
