“The biggest barrier to scaling up is your ego – because you needed that ego at the beginning, but then you need to get rid of it in order to become the stupidest person in the room.”
This week’s Hardcore MBA guest, Verne Harnish, wants to help make your business into a gazelle – that’s a term for a business that has expanded by at least 20% for four years running. This is important, because I’ve seen too many entrepreneurs start their own business and have their enthusiasm slowly fade away as they find themselves working 80 hour weeks just to keep afloat. The only way to avoid this is to scale up to the point where you have other people working for you, taking on the boring but necessary work of running the business day-to-day, and ensuring you receive the benefits of owning your own company while getting to focus on the stuff you love. Verne is an expert in helping people to do this, and is the author of the book Scaling Up, so I’m very pleased to welcome him to the podcast.
In this week’s Hardcore MBA, Verne and I discuss:
- The need to ‘delegate, but not abnegate’
- The four elements of a business that need to be focused on in order to scale up.
- The importance of hitting ‘the wave’ at the right time – that is, entering an industry while it’s still forming and the dominant players have not been established yet, just like Kimbal Musk has done with his food business.
- And why you need to become ‘the stupidest person in the room’ rather than the smartest one.
Scaling your business up and delegating responsibility to others should be the key aim of anyone starting their own business – and is one of the central points of my own book, Never Work Again. Verne has been helping people do this for years, and after listening to the podcast you should make sure to grab a copy of his book, find out more about Gazelles, and consider applying to join the Entrepreneurs’ Organization.
What key actions have you taken recently to scale your business up and give yourself the freedom lifestyle? Tell us in the comments!
