5 Ways to Scale Your Business Ep 484

Al Shimozi, founder of Acquisition.com, shares his insights on business scaling strategies in a podcast aimed at helping entrepreneurs grow their ventures. He emphasizes the importance of starting narrow and expanding gradually, citing Facebook's initial focus on colleges as an example. Shimozi outlines five ways to scale a business: moving upmarket to more lucrative clients, going downmarket to a larger customer base, targeting adjacent markets with similar needs, expanding broadly to generalize the product for a wider audience, and narrowing down to increase value to a specific customer segment. He also touches on the importance of understanding one's total addressable market (TAM) and leveraging consistent, incremental improvements over time. Shimozi encourages entrepreneurs to apply these methods to reach $100 million in revenue and potentially partner with his company.

• Al Shimozi emphasizes the importance of starting narrow and scaling out over time for business success.
• Facebook is cited as an example of a company that started with a narrow focus before expanding.
• The strategy of starting narrow allows for specialization and a deeper understanding of a specific market before broadening the scope.

"But bottom line, if you want to go fast, go broad. But if you want to be good, you'd be better served staying narrow for a little and scaling out."

This quote underlines the trade-off between speed and quality in business expansion, suggesting that a more focused, gradual approach can lead to greater long-term success.

• The speaker views business as a competitive game and uses the podcast to share lessons from building a successful portfolio.
• The goal of sharing these lessons is to help others grow their businesses and potentially partner with the speaker's company.

"The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game."

This quote highlights the speaker's perspective that business should be approached with a strategic and competitive mindset, similar to a game.

• Al Shimozi introduces a framework with five ways to scale a business that can be applied universally.
• The framework is meant to help businesses increase their client or customer base.
• The framework was developed from insights gained at a meetup with successful business owners.

"There are only five ways to scale how many people you can sell to for any business."

This quote introduces the concept of a universal framework for scaling customer or client reach in any business.

• Observations from the meetup revealed that longevity and consistent improvement are key to business growth.
• A larger total addressable market (TAM) was common among the more successful businesses at the meetup.

"Growth just happened as a consequence of not stopping and steady, consistent improvements over time."

This quote suggests that persistence and incremental improvements are fundamental to business growth.

• Starting with a niche is common and advisable for new businesses due to ease of attraction and delivery.
• Over time, expanding the scope and market is a natural progression for businesses.
• Apple and Netflix are examples of companies that have successfully expanded beyond a niche market.

"It's much easier to attract a narrow field. It's also easier to deliver to a very narrow segment."

This quote explains the initial advantages of targeting a niche market for new businesses.

• Al Shimozi outlines five methods for expanding a business from a niche.
• These methods are part of a long-term strategy for building a large business.
• Each method targets a different aspect of market expansion.

"And over a very long time horizon, if you build an enormous business, you'll do all five of these expansion scaling methods."

This quote indicates that the five methods of expansion are part of a comprehensive strategy for significant business growth over time.

• The first expansion method involves targeting more sophisticated segments of the market.
• Examples include Salesforce moving from small businesses to enterprise clients and Neil Patel and Gary Vee focusing on Fortune 500 companies.
• Going upmarket can lead to larger deals and less churn, but it requires more effort and time to close deals.

"Bottom line, if you increase the quality of your customer, you increase the quality of your company."

This quote encapsulates the idea that targeting higher-end market segments can enhance the overall quality and value of a business.

• Discusses the strategy of targeting a broader, less established customer base.
• Selling to individuals within a market segment, such as hairstylists within hair salons or personal trainers within gyms.
• Advantages include a vast, continuously replenished customer pool with high emotional buying tendencies.
• Challenges involve inconsistent revenue, payment issues, and managing customers' unrealistic expectations due to financial constraints.
• Success in this market relies heavily on strong marketing and sales over product quality.
• High churn rates are common due to structural reasons such as businesses closing or changing direction.
• Suitable for businesses better at marketing and sales, providing opportunities to iterate and improve before moving to other strategies.

"That's what going down market is. The advantages of going down market is that you never run out of customers. They're always making new ones every day. People float in and out of the market because they're not established. There are more emotional buyers, there's an ocean of them."

This quote explains the perpetual influx of new customers in the down market, highlighting the market's dynamic nature and the emotional buying tendencies of this customer segment.

"The downside is it's hard to build a recurring revenue business from them. They are not consistent, they don't follow through. You have constant payment issues. They change their minds."

The quote outlines the difficulties in establishing a stable revenue stream due to the customers' lack of consistency and the frequent financial challenges they face.

"And have, in general, unrealistic expectations because they're poor. And they believe, because $50 matters to them, that it should also entitle them to you flying out to walk them through whatever it is in person, every step of the way."

This quote illustrates the unrealistic expectations that customers in the down market may have due to their limited financial resources, expecting high levels of personal service for relatively small financial commitments.

"So a friend of mine has a CRM that targets super small entrepreneurs, small business owners, and they have 4% monthly churn, which is insanely high for a CRM."

The quote provides an example of the high churn rates experienced by businesses targeting the down market, emphasizing the volatility and challenges in customer retention.

"And he said, 100% of my churn comes from people going out of business or starting new things. And I was like, oh, wow, that's structural churn. It's something he can't do anything about."

Here, the speaker reveals the root cause of churn in the down market: structural issues like business closures, which are beyond the control of the company providing the service or product.

• Explores the concept of expanding into markets closely related to the current market.
• Adjacent markets share similar characteristics, customer profiles, and needs with the initial market.
• The strategy involves minimal product iteration, focusing instead on tailored marketing to fit the new market's language and culture.
• Requires bringing in an industry insider to bridge the knowledge gap and facilitate market entry.
• Offers a methodical expansion approach and the potential to significantly increase market size.
• While slower, this growth strategy can yield high returns on effort by replicating success in multiple similar verticals.

"Which brings me to the third move that you can make to scale your business, which is that you can go to an adjacent market."

This introduces the concept of scaling into markets closely related to the business's current operations, setting the stage for the discussion on adjacent market expansion.

"So the same solutions work for them most of the time. So you just need to market it a little bit differently using their language."

The quote emphasizes the ease of transitioning solutions to adjacent markets with the primary adjustment being in marketing communication to resonate with the new audience.

"And so if you decide to do this, you need to get an ally in your company. So you need to find someone from that new world, that adjacent market, and bring them in."

This quote highlights the importance of insider knowledge when entering an adjacent market and the strategy of recruiting someone from within that market to ensure a successful expansion.

"And then all you have to do is find a way to pay that person, and then they'll help you unlock this entire new category of revenue."

The speaker suggests that compensating the insider ally is the key to unlocking the potential revenue from the new market, emphasizing the value of their contribution.

"And that allows you to get the most amount of money per unit of effort, but it takes a little bit longer, but it can also build an incredibly valuable co"

This incomplete quote suggests that while the adjacent market strategy may take longer, it can result in a highly valuable company due to the efficient use of effort and the replication of successful strategies across various markets.

• Discusses the concept of scaling a business by going broader.
• Explains that going broader involves generalizing the core product or service across multiple related verticals.
• Provides the example of expanding from hair salons to the broader beauty industry, which includes hair, nails, aesthetics, med spa, massage, etc.
• Suggests that the language used in marketing and product descriptions should be generalized to appeal to the entire range of verticals.
• Emphasizes the pivot in the core promise and the necessity to expand the language to apply to all verticals.

"All right, so this means that you general your core product or core promise across all verticals that solve the same problem."

This quote outlines the essence of going broader, which is to apply the core product or service to a wider range of verticals that address the same underlying problem.

• Speaker A emphasizes that the podcast does not run ads or sell products.
• The only request from the audience is to help spread the word to assist more entrepreneurs.
• Encourages listeners to rate, review, and share the podcast as a way to potentially change the world for someone else.

"And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the word so we can help more entrepreneurs make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers."

Speaker A conveys the importance of audience support in growing the podcast's reach and impact, emphasizing the potential positive outcomes for entrepreneurs.

• Discusses the potential for rapid scaling by going broader.
• Notes the possibility of increasing the total adjustable market significantly.
• Acknowledges the challenge of providing the same value due to the need to generalize.
• Points out that competition increases as more industries are targeted.
• Suggests that going broader is appropriate after achieving scale and expertise in other verticals.
• Advises using case studies to demonstrate effectiveness across multiple verticals.

"And so the other downside is that you also now compete against every other person in all of those industries."

This quote highlights one of the main challenges of going broader, which is the increased competition from specialized players within each vertical.

• Introduces the idea of scaling by narrowing the focus.
• Differentiates between simply niching down and a more specific strategy to increase the quality of prospects.
• Mentions a chapter from Speaker A's book, "100 Million Dollar Offers," which was cut but is available for free on their site.
• Describes the process of becoming more specific in targeting prospects, using the example of small businesses with certain revenue and employee thresholds.

"So the basic idea is that you'd go from a small business owner to, let's say small businesses with $30,000 a month in revenue and at least two employees or hair salons with at least x clients, y staff and z revenue, right?"

This quote explains how narrowing down involves adding specific qualifications to the target market to improve prospect quality without necessarily going upmarket.

• Vista focuses on customer analysis to identify the most profitable 20% of customers.
• They aim to replicate the traits of the top 20% across the entire customer base.
• By doing so, they can increase a company's value without significantly increasing infrastructure costs.

"They would do a huge customer analysis of every customer of a company that they want to acquire, and then they would do a fractal basically analysis."

This quote explains Vista's initial approach to understanding the customer base of a target company through detailed analysis.

"They look at the 20% of customers that brought them the most money and look at the 80% that didn't."

Here, the quote refers to the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) that Vista applies to focus on the most profitable customers.

"They're able to five X a company without even having to incur a significant infrastructure cost because the actual total number of customers didn't change dramatically."

The quote summarizes the result of Vista's strategy, emphasizing the efficiency of focusing on the most valuable customers to increase a company's worth.

• Survey customers to understand their preferences and what they value most about the services offered.
• Identify best customers who spend the most and stay the longest.
• Conduct a common factor analysis to determine the shared traits of the best customers.
• Change marketing language to attract customers with the identified traits.
• Reverse engineer the buying process of the best customers to guide prospects through the same journey.

"Number one is you survey all your customers to find out what their stats are and what they liked most about your services."

Al Shimozi advises businesses to start by gathering detailed information from their customers to understand their behavior and preferences.

"You do a common factor analysis, which is just a fancy way of saying you see what they all have in common."

This quote explains the process of identifying shared characteristics among the best customers to refine marketing strategies.

"You reverse engineer the buying process to force every customer to go through that process."

Al Shimozi suggests that businesses should replicate the buying journey of their most valuable customers to improve the quality of prospects and increase profitability.

• Allows businesses to increase prices and profit by providing more value to a specific subsegment.
• Reduces time and resources spent on less profitable customers.
• Creates less competition by focusing on a narrow market.
• Costs less to service a smaller, more targeted customer base.

"The advantages of going narrower are that you can increase your prices and your profit significantly."

The quote highlights the financial benefits of targeting a specific customer group that sees the most value in the business's offerings.

"It also costs you less to service fewer people."

Here, Al Shimozi points out the cost-efficiency of serving a narrower customer base, which can be especially beneficial for smaller businesses.

• Limits the number of potential customers.
• May not be suitable for businesses already making $10 million a year or more.

"You have fewer people to sell to, which is significant."

The quote acknowledges the challenge of a smaller customer pool when narrowing the focus of a business.

"You just want to figure out who you provide the most value to and then focus ruthlessly on serving that avatar."

Al Shimozi emphasizes the importance of identifying and exclusively serving the most valuable customer segment for businesses not yet at the $10 million mark.

• Start by targeting a narrow market to build a reputation.
• Once established, consider expanding through broader, upmarket, downmarket, or adjacent market strategies.
• Continuous improvement in what the business does can also lead to increased profitability.

"You can scale up your tim in any of the five ways that I just outlined."

Al Shimozi outlines multiple strategies for scaling a business, suggesting that starting narrow is just the beginning.

"My personal favorite, door number six, which is just keep getting better at what you do and you'll ultimately make more money."

The final quote from Al Shimozi emphasizes the importance of mastering one's business craft as a path to greater success and profitability.