The three elements that are important when creating a million-dollar business are speed, limits, and automation. If you align your business with those three components accommodated, you are guaranteed to succeed.
Three questions we should ask ourselves to make sure we tick-boxed those points are
- Can the system that generates revenue be smoothly replicated?
- Can the revenue cap be removed?
- Is automation possible once the above two points are achieved?
To prevent stagnation and continue to expand revenue, it is necessary to create a system and build on it. Because of that system, the growth in the company will stack up for the long term, not temporarily.
Additionally, it is important to have a perspective that reminds us of the importance of automation when you think about scaling your business.
The reason I encourage my business partner to take bookings for massage clients less than before is that the container we want to create is too small to fill in.
No matter how hard she tries to brand herself and fill up her schedule with booking as much as she can handle, I think the maximum productivity is around 10,000 dollars per month.
Some people can achieve 30,000 dollars per month, but they cannot “continue” if they do it themselves. Moreover, since they have to be at the center of the operation, revenue won’t grow once it hits the ceiling there.
Of course, it is okay if that is the goal you wanted to achieve. However, In our case, it was different, and the environment setting I feel happy and my business partner’s picture of her future self won’t be materialised if I let her keep doing massage by herself.
I find joy in the scale and growth and doing things that nobody else has done. I don’t get bored because I can do things I don’t know or haven’t seen before. That curiosity and excitement drive me to a new discovery that will never end.
The key is in the system and composition.
Everything depends on them. In the future, when looking at various services, it may be helpful to look at the system and composition that underlie them rather than just the surface services that are offered in the market.
I would like to dig deep a bit into this concept by sharing the episode I had with my business partner. This episode articulates how important it is to have an integral discussion with whoever is involved in the same project to align understanding on everything involved in the business such as speed, limits, and automation.
However, we need to go dig deep to collect the evidence that we use to decide the speed, limits, and automation.
So my business partner is working in the frontline as a massage therapist as well as educating new therapists. And my role is to look after marketing and management of the whole business. We communicate with each other pretty much every day, but 99% of our conversation centered around the operation of the business such as clarification of specific inquiries from potential customers, discussion around how we can support our new therapists better, etc.
That leaves us small space to look out for each other to make sure we are in alignment with the goal and vision we want to achieve. Although it will be ideal to ask each other to hold each other accountable towards the vision on a daily basis, making a decision to run the operation comes as a priority so our actions and our thoughts take priority to be looked out, which leads to often our heart and soul tend to be the forgotten part that can be neglected to be reflected upon.
We run our casual small group recruitment event every month. It was such a success that we felt all those attending were so keen and tick-boxed all the criteria and requirements we ask to be qualified to join our franchise. We celebrated together, but I somehow thought that I need to check on her to see if she is really happy.
There are a couple of signs that signal me subconsciously the warning that I should raise the flag and stamp it down, but it was so subtle that I nearly ignored it because there was the joy of celebration wrapping around it.
Anyway, the first warning come to me when I shared with her the email we received from one of attendees who joined our recruitment event the day before indicating she is keen to join us.
I thought she would be so stoked and appreciate her commitment, but rather the reaction spoke otherwise. She seemed a bit surprised and told me if she really wants to join us now even if she needs to wait till her new house is built which is about a year later.
I reminded her that we should still appreciate her for making a decision to join our team as a franchisee especially even if she needs to wait for a year to start. Only after my comment did she mention her kind of reluctant appreciation.
I felt something misaligned, but didn’t raise a flag here as it was early in the morning before breakfast and I was not feeling the best because I was having a hard time adjusting my body temperature. This is another story to talk about the wonder of the human body which is totally applicable to business.
Anyway, the next signal appeared during our recruitment event when we were talking about if my business partner need to retire by asking another therapist to look after her customers because she is getting too busy. In that conversation, she reacted somehow with a reluctant agreement and showed the emotion of irritation. Because it was in the midst of the event, I didn’t pause it to make sure what is underneath her emotion, but it was obvious that she felt uncomfortable about retirement.
These two episode of her reaction was enough for me to feel alert so I was waiting for the timing to come and creating the space to initiate the conversation with her to check on her if she is okay. My question actually was more specific about if she is aligned with her being with the pace of growth of the company she is running together with me.
She opened the conversation by saying that she felt sad when she heard the word “retirement” because she feels the energy and alignment when she massages clients. Also, it was me who made her feel sad and she is disappointed that I want her to retire completely from frontline operation even though I have never ever said that she should remove herself from it completely, but she interpreted it that way.
I had to pattern interrupt her and told her that I had never said to her to remove herself from the operation, but she still can continue to keep your repeat customers, but maybe not new customers. Also, I pointed out that she blamed me for creating a negative impact on her to feel sad about retirement, but in fact, it was she who could not digest her sadness in the process of growing the company and the radical shift in her position of the role and that triggered her to blame me being guilty of making her feel sad, but to me, it was a sign of her inability to process her feeling.
Because she got frustrated with herself not being able to process it, she subconsciously decided to hold someone else accountable for the feeling that is causing trouble. She pretends as if she gave me the driver’s seat even though she has been the one who has been driving when the accident happened.
Anyway, I told her that she should not use me as an excuse not to look at the emotion she does not want to sit on. Because it was painful to sit on the feeling of sadness, anger, embarrassment, and shame, we often ignore, skip and keep going as if nothing happened, but we also knew those feelings will explode when they stack up to overflow from our container.
What I loved about this her is her openness and her brutal honesty. I know my comment hit her hard, but she did not reject it, rather accept it, acknowledge it, and told me that she knew it existed within her, but ignored it.
Anyway, this was a hard conversation by checking on each other, you can hold each other accountable to make sure that we both are in the same boat in terms of speed, limits, and automation.
