Question · Growth strategy
How do I double my business without hiring more staff?
Answered by Nathan Frater ·
The short answer
Stop asking how to double it, and ask what would break at ten times your current volume. Fix those breakpoints and you can grow revenue while the team stays at today's level of busyness.
The goal is double the business without staff, and then do it again. But if you only plan for double, people just squeeze more out of their own capacity. That burns them out, and it isn’t sustainable.
Plan for 10x and the real breakpoints show up straight away.
The first is one-to-one customer communication. Handling every message by hand won’t survive ten times the volume, so 80 to 90% of it needs to become semi-automated. The second is information stuck in people’s heads. If only one person knows how something works, get it documented. The third is data being copied by hand between systems. Connect them, so nobody is typing the same details in twice.
Ideally you end up with fewer problems than you’ve got now, too. You won’t always get all the way there. But technology now makes far more of it possible.