growth vs. scale

Summary

growth and scale aren’t the same thing. mixing them up will keep you stuck longer than almost any other mistake in business.

growth is the messy phase. you’re trying to become something you’re not yet. it’s expensive. it’s painful. it’s full of wrong turns and rebuilds. the goal of growth is transformation.

scale is what comes after. you’ve already built something you like. now the job is to make it bigger without breaking what works. that requires solid profitability, real systems, and a process that doesn’t depend on you being in every room.

the analogy I use is car manufacturing. you don’t scale a prototype. you scale the finished car. if you try to scale a prototype that’s still missing parts, you just produce a lot of broken cars.

the question to ask honestly: am I trying to scale a business that hasn’t actually proven itself yet? if the answer is yes, the move is more growth, not more scale.

Transcript

introduction to the topic: the critical difference between growth and scaling

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right. Do you know the difference between growth and scale in your business? This is the Better Human Business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I think this is really important for people to know. You need to know if you’re in a growth stage or you’re in a scaling stage.

And to be honest, most entrepreneurs that I hear out there today, they’re using these interchangeably, like they are synonyms, like they can be the same word. I’m going to grow my business. I’m going to scale my business. They really are not the same. OK, when you’re going through a growth stage, whether that’s the beginning, trying to grow or you are stuck at a plateau and you need to grow, that is different than scaling.

detailed explanation of what growth means in the context of a business

Just by definition, it’s not even the same. And growth is not fun. That’s what people need to know is growth is not fun. It’s not fun in business. It’s I mean, it’s not fun anywhere, like it’s not fun in like creating new habits personally to become a better, better human. That’s not fun. To have the habit, that’s fun to for it to be easy to exercise and eat right every single day, that’s fun to have those things established, that’s the fun part.

the painful but necessary reality of business growth

That’s more like where scale is at. Growth is the messy, awful part of getting there. It’s like, oh, gosh, I’m trying. I’m not succeeding. I try, try, try, fail, succeed, succeed, succeed, fail, start over, you know, and growth in business, it’s incredibly messy. It can be very expensive. And like I said, it’s very painful.

Growth should not last forever. It doesn’t mean your business numbers are not growing, but growth itself should not last. It’s when you’re trying to make something better, you’re trying to improve it. You’re trying to make it something that it’s not right now. It is not what you want it to be right now.

You need it to grow. That is growth, that is growth in a business scale. Is efficiency, it’s sustainable, it’s elegant, scale is the game you want, but you can only do it once you have the right foundation to scale is to improve constantly and forever. It’s to take something you already like and to make it bigger.

transitioning into what scaling means and how it differs from growth

Scaling is a delicate balancing act. So let’s talk about this a little bit more. What is scale if it’s different than growth? Well, you have to build something that you really like. Now, if we if we talk about scaling when like in modeling, like if I build a scaled down version of a car like a prototype, I can build a car that sits on the size, you know, the size that sits on my desk.

Right. It’s a small car, but I can work on all the aerodynamics. I can make sure that this car is perfect. You know, this is what they actually do when they’re designing new vehicles. So you make sure that it’s aerodynamic. It looks beautiful. You like it. People like it. It’s functional. You build the prototype and it’s awesome.

And then you’re like, you know, it would be even better if this car was life size. And then you put in all the work to take exactly what you have scaled up times 10. So it’s actually usable bigger. But everything’s the same. It’s the aerodynamics are the same, how it functions the same. All everything’s the same.

the analogy of scaling a car model to understand business scaling better

You’ve just made it bigger. That is scaling. That’s actually how scale works. So to scale your business means you have to take something that you already like. Okay. So that means the profitability is kind of where you want it to be. So we have good profit. We have a good process. We have good system.

We have good operations. We have all of these things and we know we can force more inputs into the front of this and get more outputs to the back, but it just needs to be bigger and we can scale everything. Scaling, like I said, it’s very delicate balancing act because it’s like, it’s like you’re juggling multiple plates.

You’re like trying to lift them all at the same time and to do that, that’s when you scale. So, but then you might get to this new point where like, Hey, okay, I have the car, it’s life-size car now. Like, what do I do? Well, it might not be scaling anymore. It might be back to growth. And again, we’re, we’re in that painful, messy, expensive stage.

discussing the delicate balance and challenges of scaling a business

It’s ah, profitability is going to suffer or I got to fire a person or I got to hire four people. Like these are all the tough decisions. So you have to know if you’re in a growth stage or a scaling phase, cause they’re both up into the right, right there. They’re both moving numbers up, but when you know where you’re at, whether you’re in growth mode or scale mode, scaling is optimization.

It’s efficiency. It’s making everything bigger at the same time. Growth is just getting bigger at all costs. It’s painful. It’s messy. It’s expensive, right? It’s like going through these growth stages. And the reason I wanted to highlight this is not to harp on definitions and making sure that you’re saying the right thing, growth or scale.

I don’t care about that. Use them interchangeably, interchangeably. It doesn’t matter. But what I want entrepreneurs to understand, so you don’t feel so lost and alone out there is that both of these things are always and forever. Okay. Both of them are always in forever. It’s not like, okay, you go through the growth phase at the beginning and then you get to scaling and everything’s beautiful and you just maintain profitability.

the cyclical nature of growth and scaling, knowing which phase you are in

And this is, you just have this well-oiled machine that just functions perfectly. That’s not the reality. It’s, it’s more like up into the right growth stage. And then you can kind of level out scale. You can still increase income, but it’s overall operational efficiency of the entire business. This is where you can breathe.

It’s not necessarily a flat line. It’s not a plateau. It’s just slower growth because you can’t go up into the right hockey stick growth year over year. You can’t triple your business every single year forever. Cause when, when I, when I put in forever, that’s where it stops everybody. Right. I would argue you can’t triple your business every year for the next 10 years.

Like just do the math on how big that would have to be. Like you can’t always have this hockey stick level of growth, but you can scale, which is still growth. Like, but we’re not talking about three X in a year. It’s like, oh, well, we’re going to grow 20, 25% this year. It’s like, okay. Yeah, but we’re going to scale.

emphasizing the importance of building something you want to scale

We’re going to do this with operational efficiency. We’re going to go up. We’re in scaling mode. I want, I like everything that I have. I just want to make it bigger and it’s a more comfortable place to be, but it’s also an incredibly important place to be because you are working on the operational efficiency, but if you don’t go through the scaling phase, you never actually build the business that you want.

You stay in growth mode. You’re taking your growth hammer to a scale project. You’re going to break everything and you’re never going to have something that you like, love, and enjoy. And that gives you the financial and time freedom that you want. You’re just going to stay in this growth mode and you’re going to break every single thing, not only in your life, but in your business to where eventually it’s not something that you want.

It’s not even something you’d want to scale. It’s not something you’d want to make bigger in every facet, because if you build something that’s nasty and inefficient, you can scale that too. You can build a completely ugly car that has, it’s basically a box with no aerodynamics and you can make that life size.

concluding thoughts: starting with the end in mind for effective scaling

You can scale anything, but what you have to focus on is scaling the right thing, building what you actually want. So the big takeaway here is start with the end in mind. What do you want? How much profit do you want? What do you want your business to look like? Who do you help? What’s the company culture like?

What are your employees doing each and every single day? What are you doing every single day? How much time off do you have? These are all the things that you want to scale, not just, oh, let’s scale Facebook ads, that’s, that’s where everyone’s brain goes. But when you’re talking about scaling a business, it’s in every area.

It’s making the whole damn thing bigger. And do you even want it all bigger? So make sure you’re starting with the end in mind, you know what you’re scaling, know when you’re in growth mode and know when you’re in scale mode. And like I said, it’s always in forever. Sometimes you’ll go through a growth mode.

You’ll be in scale mode for two years back to growth mode to break through some massive plateaus back and forth, back and forth. Just know which one you’re in, know what you’re optimizing for and try harder.