How to Build an Online Business that Scales

“It’s been a nightmare!”

- he says with a tired look on his face.

“We had to completely re-do the structure so that we can add the second story to the coffee shop…

To do that, it took a team of engineers almost a year…

Look at this beam right here” - he says pointing to a massive piece of wood.

“If I would have known that it would be this challenging, I would have just moved into a bigger building instead of trying to expand this one…”

I could feel his frustration.

And couldn’t help but think how similar his situation is to starting and scaling an online business.

When you build your business for scale - you prepare for the second story ahead of time.

Meaning, you add in the necessary infrastructure required to grow.

“You prepare for the bottlenecks before they happen”

- my first business mentor would say to me.

For my online basketball training business this looked like:

1.) Choosing software and technology that would scale with us as our business grew.

Ex: Having a CRM that would be able to handle the number of contacts we predicted, or building our website on a flexible and scalable tech stack that would be able to handle 30,000+ customers all logged in and streaming videos at the same time.

2.) Predicting growth bottlenecks and hiring someone ahead of time so that they would be trained into the position and ready to navigate when the time came.

Ex: One of the very first hires I made was a part time customer service rep, because I saw that I would not be able to maintain my sanity while trying to answer hundreds of emails a day.

3.) Preparing capital in advance so that it could be deployed towards business growth when the time was right.

Ex: Preparing a healthy budget for ad spend so that we could test and optimize our ads without running out of money or shutting them off prematurely.

Did I do a perfect job at all of this?

Um, no.

I made a lot of mistakes.

(Like that time I messed up our predicted website traffic during a product launch and ended up crashing our servers several times... oops)

But by planning for growth ahead of time, we were able to scale rather quickly.

(And sidestep some (not all) of the headaches along the way…)

Can you prepare for everything?

No.

Part of the journey of entrepreneurship is adapting to the hurdles as they come.

But…

When you prepare for growth, you build differently.

So…

What is it that you want to build? And are you planning accordingly?

Some rather valuable questions to contemplate if you feel called.

I’m off to the gym.

Have a great Wednesday.

-Adam