Build And Scale Your Business From Scratch

Our view at Stack - ClickFunnels was founded by an online marketing legend Russell Brunson and it offers several benefits for online businesses and marketers:

• Time and Cost Savings: Efficiently create sales funnels without extensive development efforts.
• Maximized Conversions: Test offers, copy, and images to enhance conversions.
• Specific Landing Pages: Generate highly targeted landing pages.
• Predictable Pipeline: Create consistent, predictable sales paths.
• Increased Sales: On average, it boosts sales of lesser products by 15%

The post Build And Scale Your Business From Scratch appeared first on ClickFunnels.

If you know right from the get-go that you want to “scale to the moon” so to speak, you need to do everything with that in mind, ideally from day one.

Think about it: if you lay a foundation for a garden shed, you won’t be able to build a skyscraper on top of it.

In fact, if you attempt to do that, the building will end up collapsing and you will need to start from scratch.

We would argue that the same is true for businesses. You need to have a solid foundation in order to scale your company successfully.

That’s why today we are going to discuss how to build a business from the ground up with scalability in mind!

Caution: Scaling Too Early Can Ruin Your Business!

Entrepreneurs tend to see scaling as an unequivocally good thing. However, it’s important to understand that it can also be a terrible thing and ruin your business. Simply put, scaling is going to amplify everything – the good and the bad!

10X More Sales Means 10x More Unhappy Customers

If your refund rate is above the industry average, your customer retention metrics are abysmal and the feedback that you are getting from your customers is overwhelmingly negative, scaling is only going to make the situation worse.

Of course, you will always have some unhappy customers – that’s just part and parcel of running a business.

However, if the overall customer sentiment is negative, remember that scaling is going to amplify it. You might end up having to deal with tons of negative customer reviews, complaints on social media, and negative press coverage. This can lead to irreparable brand damage.

That’s why it’s better to wait until the overall customer sentiment is positive!

Scaling Reveals Systemic Weaknesses

You can get away with a lot when you’re just getting started, which can blind you to systemic weaknesses in your company’s infrastructure, workflow, and culture.

However, the more pressure you put on a system, the more obvious its weaknesses are going to become. And if you put too much pressure too fast, the system might break down entirely.

Think about it: a drastic increase in traffic, leads, and sales can cause all kinds of problems, from supply chain issues to poor quality service to a massive customer support backlog.

Keep in mind that even if the overall customer sentiment is positive, it can quickly turn negative if you start scaling before making sure that your business can handle it!

When is the Right Time to Scale?

We would argue that you should wait until you are reasonably sure that your business has positive word-of-mouth.

Obviously, it’s not possible to observe word-of-mouth directly, but here are the three things that you want to keep an eye on:

1. Customer retention metrics – If your customers continue doing business with you, it’s likely that they are happy with your product or service. However, you also need to account for the fact that people are lazy. Sometimes, customers stick around not because they love your product or service but because they simply can’t be bothered to look for an alternative!
2. Customer feedback – If your customers are giving you unsolicited positive feedback in the form of reviews, emails, and social media shout-outs, it’s quite likely that they are also recommending your product or service to other people.
3. “Unexplained” sales – If you can observe consistent, month-over-month sales growth that cannot be attributed to an increase in marketing spend, the most likely explanation for it is positive word-of-mouth.

Once you start seeing all three indicators, you can begin scaling your business!

Start by Targeting a Small Niche

One of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs who want to build large companies make is going wide right from the start.

This approach is doomed to fail because if you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one.

That’s why it makes much more sense to target a small niche, dominate it, and then gradually expand to adjacent niches.

A classic example of this is Facebook. It started out as a social network for Harvard students, then expanded to other Ivy League universities, then to all universities in the United States. Finally, three years after its launch, it opened to the general public.

Dominating a small niche and then expanding from there allowed this social media platform to grow to 3.06 billion monthly active users worldwide, which accounts for more than 38% of the global population. Talk about scaling!

Create an Amazing Product or Service

Another common mistake that ambitious entrepreneurs make is trying to scale their companies when their product or service is mediocre at best.

Frankly, we believe that this comes from a place of laziness: creating an amazing product or service requires a ton of work and most people simply aren’t willing to do it. However, if you put in the effort to make something truly great, you will have a much easier time scaling your business later on.

For example, our friend Alex Hormozi once shared a story about his friend who decided that he wanted to sell premium cookies.

He started by going around the country visiting the top bakeries and asking the bakers if he could learn from them.

Then, once he got the hang of baking cookies, he baked a different batch for 365 days straight and gave those cookies away to potential customers in his local area in exchange for their feedback.

This enabled him to figure out what kind of cookies people liked the best and build a pre-launch lead list. When he finally launched his business, it was a smashing success!

Package Your Product or Service Into an Irresistible Offer

If you want to successfully scale a business, it’s not enough to have an amazing product or service, you also need to package it into an irresistible offer. But how can you do that?

Here are three ways to make your offer more appealing to your dream customers:

1. Increase its value
2. Reduce its price
3. Remove financial risk

Ideally, you want to do all three for the best results. In fact, we recommend following this formula:

High Value + Low Price – Financial Risk = Irresistible Offer

Here’s how our co-founder Russell Brunson explains the power of an irresistible offer:

If you have both a product or service that’s better than what your competitors are selling and an irresistible offer that’s more appealing than their offers, your company will be unstoppable!

Do Things That Don’t Scale to Get Your First Customers

This might seem counterintuitive but if you want to build a scalable company, you need to be willing to do things that don’t scale in order to get it off the ground.

This is the premise of Paul Graham’s famous essay, “Do Things That Don’t Scale”. According to him:

“A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist. Actually, startups take off because the founders make them take off.”

One of the best examples of this is Airbnb, which is valued at $87 billion at the time of writing.

In the early days, instead of worrying about what was scalable and what wasn’t, Airbnb founders focused on getting users by any means necessary. They would go door-to-door to recruit hosts for their platform, take photos of their properties, and then help them make their listings more appealing to potential guests. And it worked!

Also, as Alex Hormozi has pointed out, just because you can’t see how something is going to scale in the beginning, it doesn’t necessarily mean that is impossible to scale it.

Alex used his friend as an example. This friend would send a handwritten thank you card to every customer when he was just starting out. Then, as his business grew he continued sending thank you cards but would only handwrite his signature instead of the entire card. Eventually, when he reached a point where he couldn’t continue doing it himself due to time constraints, he hired other people to do it.

Had this entrepreneur decided that it was not worth bothering with handwritten thank you cards because sending one to every customer wasn’t scalable, he would have missed out on gains in customer retention, customer lifetime value, and positive word-of-mouth. And it turned out to be scalable after all!

Build a Sales Funnel for Your Business

Once you have a great product or service, an irresistible offer, and a growing customer base, it’s time to build a sales funnel for your business.

In other words, you need to create a system for converting visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers.

There are several popular sales funnel models out there but we believe that the Value Ladder is the most effective one.

It was designed by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to grow our company to nine figures.

Here’s how he explains it:

And here’s a quick overview of the Value Ladder sales funnel structure:

If you want to learn how to build a Value Ladder sales funnel for your business, we recommend reading Russell’s best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” in which he explains it in great detail.

This book is available on Amazon but you can also get it for free directly from us. All we ask is that you cover the shipping!

Optimize Your Sales Funnel With A/B Testing

The initial version of your sales funnel is just the first draft.

Once you have it, you need to make sure that it’s working, which you can do by driving traffic to it. Are visitors converting into leads and then into customers?

Then, you want to optimize each page for maximum conversion with A/B testing.

You can do that by creating two versions of the same page that are identical except for the element that you are testing and then splitting the traffic into two and driving half of it to each version.

Once you know which version converted better, keep the winning one and use it to either A/B test a different variation of the same element or a different element altogether.

For example, you can A/B test two landing page headlines, then A/B test the winner against a new headline. Alternatively, you can take the winning variation and test something else entirely, such as your call-to-action button color.

Optimizing your sales funnel will require a lot of work because the vast majority of A/B tests won’t lead to meaningful changes in the conversion rate and out of the ones that do, most will only produce small increases.

However, if you continue running A/B tests, over time it can help you 2x, 5x, or even 10x your sales funnel profits!

Here’s how our co-founder Russell explains it:

You will need some traffic to optimize your sales funnel but don’t put the pedal to the metal until you are sure that it converts well. Otherwise, it’s going to be wasteful, like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Fix the leaks first!

Identify Your Most Effective Marketing Channel

We recommend experimenting with various marketing channels: social media marketing, video marketing, paid advertising, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, etc.

Analyze the data to see how well traffic from each channel converts into leads, customers, and repeat customers. Which channel is the most effective way to promote your product or service?

You want to identify the marketing channel with the highest ROI. That is the channel that you are going to focus on once you are ready to start scaling.

Streamline Your Business Processes

Write down all your business processes: everything from marketing to sales to delivering the product or service to customer support to refunds.

Then, go down that list and automate everything that can be automated, no matter how small the task may seem.

After that, create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the remaining tasks so that you can give the employees responsible for them checklists to follow.

Finally, create a customer support knowledge base and add it to your website so that your customers can find the solutions to their problems themselves. Of course, you’ll still need a customer support team, but this can help you reduce its workload.

Note: don’t use AI chatbots to automate customer support because they are too unreliable and can get you in serious trouble. You can learn more about that in our article about AI marketing automation.

Use Historical Data to Model Scaling So That You Could Prepare for it

It will probably take you a few years to get to the point where you are ready to scale your business, which means that you should have plenty of historical data by then. You can use it to model scaling.

For example, the most straightforward way to 10x your sales is to simply drive 10x more traffic to your sales funnel, assuming that your conversion rates are going to remain the same.

However, you also need to consider what the downstream effects of that are going to be, which you can model based on the historical data.

For example, you can use that data to see whether you will need to hire more people to handle the increased sales volume.

Say, if you know what the relationship between your sales volume and your customer support workload is, you can predict how the increase in the former will affect the latter. Will 10x more sales lead to 10x more customer support tickets?

Remember that hiring is a resource-intensive endeavor: it takes time to find great candidates, interview them, onboard them, etc. You can’t just drop a random person into a job role and expect them to do well with no training.

That’s why it’s so important to anticipate the increased demand for labor and make sure that you have the people you need before you actually need them. Don’t wait until your team is overwhelmed to start hiring!

In addition to that, as you are preparing to scale, you should also make sure that your IT infrastructure can handle the increased traffic, that your supply chain can support the increased order volume, that your payment processor won’t ban you due to increased transaction volume, and so on.

Start Slowly Scaling Your Business by Driving More and More Traffic to Your Sales Funnel

You want to play it safe and scale slowly even if you believe that your company is prepared to scale rapidly. Why?

While you should be able to predict most problems related to scaling, you won’t be able to foresee all of them, which means that you will inevitably run into some challenges regardless of how well-prepared you are.

So, for example, if your most effective marketing channel is Facebook ads, don’t just 10x your ad spend overnight in an attempt to 10x your sales. Start by doubling it, then tripling it, then quadrupling it, and so forth.

Also, if you run into some issue as you are scaling, address it immediately. Remember, something that seems minor at 2x might break the system at 10x, so you can’t afford to let problems pile up. At each stage, make sure that you have everything under control before you move on to the next stage.

Yes, scaling your business that way will take longer, but as the Navy Seal saying goes, “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”!

Want to Learn How to Build Sales Funnels That CONVERT?

Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.

He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?

His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.

This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.

But you can also get it directly from us for free…

All we ask is that you pay for shipping!

So what are you waiting for? 🧐

Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!

P.S. Here’s What Readers Say About “DotCom Secrets”…

What Readers Say About “DotCom Secrets”

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