Years ago there was a great commercial of a little boy at the dinner table playing with his mash potatoes. He was pretending like he was driving a race car complete with racing noises and using the utensils like a shifter.
As the boy is ‘racing’ with his dinner, the boy’s father chimes in to critique his driving technique and says something along the lines of ‘Jonny I told you before, you need to accelerate through the turn!”
Turns out (as usual?) Dad’s right! This is a common racing technique and helps you improve your lap times. So why am I telling you this story? Well, this strategy can help your service based business grow more effectively.
I’ve been studying CPA firms lately and what I’ve realized is that when they begin to grow and scale many seem to reach a bit of a breaking point. For them, it happens around $10-$20mm in annual revenue. At that point they start to fear for the next phase.
You see once you’ve reached that level of growth, everything changes.
If you don’t make major upgrades to prepare you to grow to the next level ($50mm+) then your firm’s fate may be sealed. Many firms don’t make it past this level because they wind up becoming a victim of their own success.
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They expect what got them to the previous level to propel them to and through the next phase and that doesn’t work. Instead, what you need to do is invest in improving operational efficiency to match your growth trajectory stride for stride so that you don’t get bogged down when that growth kicks into high gear.
So what should you do instead?
Invest in boosting capacity and operational efficiency before you fully hit your stride or just listen to Dad here and accelerate through the turn.
PS. The commercial in question is hilarious and adorable at the same time. I did some Google-fu to try and find it with no luck (sorry!). If anybody else can find it please feel free to send over and I’ll make sure it gets out there in a future email.