Almost every cold email or LinkedIn spam that I receive assumes I want to “scale my business.” There’s a notion that every entrepreneur’s dream and duty should be to “grow at scale.”
What the heck is scale?
Blind Ambition
You hear about growth rates of triple, 5x, 10x, “add a zero” and the like. Sounds exciting but what’s the end game with scaling versus growing? Do you want “scale”, or do you want growth?
When I think “scale,” I think that everything must radically change to serve a rapid multiplication of new business with duplication – ideally, automated duplication of product and service delivery. Sure, technology can do that but who are your best customers and how will they respond to your scaling?
When a business discovers a way to scale and implements it, customizing deliverables to meet unique and sometimes nuanced client needs is replaced with finite product options or service levels. Dies (cookie cutters) are cast and production multiplies while administrative concerns grow.
Customization versus Duplication
If you’re in a professional services business, how can you maintain customization when duplication is required for scaling growth? Yet I’m constantly promised that I can scale my business if I will just install this AI tool or that marketing automation platform.
First, I don’t want rapid growth nor a radical change in my business approach. Second, my clients rely on our ability to focus solely on their unique market positions and customize plans that work for them, and only for them! Any choice within a 3-tier service level package I could devise and automate would not deliver the value that our exclusive focus gives our clients.
Do I want to scale my business? No. So why assume that I do? Because the scaled, AI-enabled, automated message bots fail to understand me. Sales cadence tools generate emails ranging from silly and irrelevant to creepy and presumptuous.
Know Your Niche
My point is that growing at scale through automation and duplication doesn’t work in our niche. Yet I’m bombarded with messages that 
promise we can scale our business. Ironically, most of them are from startups trying desperately to scale. Perhaps they need to learn an old concept like understanding your target audience.
If marketing tech folks want to sell to Chuck Sink Link, maybe they could first learn what business we are really in and lead with that.
If your prospective clients require a unique communication style to engage them and help grow your business, give us a call and we will have a real, 2-way conversation. We’ll both be smarter for it.
