September 8, 2025 • 9 mins
Most businesses get stuck under $3M because they don’t follow the right strategies. In this episode of Building Billions, I break down the 8 exact principles I’ve used to help scale hundreds of companies—from $1M to $50M and beyond. From raising your leadership lid, to building world-class talent, to prioritizing systems and data over drama—these are the frameworks that separate struggling founders from successful entrepreneurs. If you’re ready to stop being “busy” and start scaling with clarity, accountability, and freedom, this episode is your roadmap.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of Building Billions, where we're
going to be talking about the eight strategies to scaling
your business. Most businesses can't break the 3 million mark
because they don't follow these strategies. I've helped scale hundreds
of companies from 1 million to 50 million and 50
million to 100 million and beyond. And the difference is
(00:23):
never what people think. These are the eight real strategies
that separate struggling founders from successful entrepreneurs. The first strategy
it's a harsh one. If your business isn't growing, it's
because you're the reason your business will only grow to
the extent you do. Look, most business owners tap out
(00:44):
at a certain level of success. It's because of what
John Maxwell talks about in law of the lid. You
can only raise your team to the level of lid
you have, and there's three lids in business belief, operational effectiveness,
and leadership. Low lid equals low success. Fear, stress and
(01:05):
resistance create a struggle mindset and that pushes great people
away from you and keeps your business stuck in chaos.
Don't be busy being busy and not focusing on your
own personal leadership development. This is a simple premise. If
you have a straw and you squeeze the middle of
the straw, that's as far as air can get to.
(01:27):
If you release that and you open it, you have
the whole length of the straw. Trust me when I
tell you, if you maintain a low leadership level, you're
not intentionally growing your leadership. Say you're at a 4
or 5. You have to grow it to a 7
or 9 or a ten in order for your team
to grow to a five, 6 or 7. And worse,
if you're at a five and your team, somebody on
(01:48):
your team wants to grow to a seven, they have
to leave you. And that's why most business owners lose
their best people. Strategy number two, you need to have
a clear vision and most importantly, share it. Where there's
confusion and chaos, there's always failure without a clear and
compelling picture of success. Specifically what you're trying to do
(02:09):
through your business. Everyone in the business gets confused. People
need to understand that when they win, the business wins.
And when the business wins, they win. Make sure everyone
understands exactly where the business is going. This will allow
everyone to feel aligned with the goals of the business
and succeed. Number three, the faster you get systems and
(02:33):
processes in place, the faster you'll grow successfully. What got
you to 1 million won't get you to ten. Novice
business owners throw people at problems they don't understand. It's
the lack of systems that leads to the broken processes,
which is why most people fail. So what you want
is repeatable systems that people can duplicate. So then you
(02:55):
can throw your people out. The problems with the system
that's guaranteed to work its systems and process that allows
your business to breathe, grow faster, and reduce dependency on
you or individual high performance contributors. Remember that the earlier
you do this, the better, and this will even help
free up your time within the business to solve real
(03:18):
problems and create more revenue. Number four, which is a
really hard one to do in business. You need to
create world class talent hire for attitude, train for results.
My last business I sold six of my eight executives,
never had a job before I hired them. I trained
them through a process that included cultural, operational and financial
(03:39):
success and results. If you hire for attitude and train
for results, you will have a successful business. Look, if
you want long term employees that stay with you and
succeed with you, you need to have a world class
organization that develops talent instead of trying to throw people
at problems. How about you develop people to solve problems
(04:00):
as a team? And when you do that, and you
align them with the success of the business, you'll maintain
your top talent and you won't lose your team. You
have to understand that it's going to be in your
ability to develop talent, not just acquire it. That will
allow you to be successful in developing talent is a
non-negotiable skill in scaling your business. Number five and this
(04:21):
is the one I see people fail at all the time.
You have to prioritize data over drama. High emotion equals
low intelligence. If you're going to rely on gut instinct,
you're going to have fear, stress, resistance, anxiety, and you're
going to make a lot of bad decisions. While data
reveals bottleneck patterns of failure and opportunity of success, it's true.
(04:47):
Emotions and assumptions are business killers. Remember that data driven
businesses scale faster, stay leaner, and eliminate unnecessary drama. Use
data and key metrics for your team to ensure that
the people around you understand, on an objective level, what
is expected of them and their contributions while they're working
(05:09):
with you. Number six don't rely on personality. Learn how
to create rock stars. If you hire rock stars, they
most likely won't stay with you very long. If you
want to take your business from 2 million to 20 million.
You can't do it around a couple big personalities. You're
gonna have to do it around the talent of your
group of salespeople working as a team. Once your business
(05:32):
moves beyond 2 or 3 million. It's not individual performers
that will make your business succeed. It's a group of
performers working together as a team. I created the Rule
of three so that you can understand this. If you
can get three people to repeat the success, the best
success you've had in the business, you've now built a system.
(05:53):
Let's say you had three salespeople. One was doing a
million a year. One was doing 300,000 a year and
one was doing 100,000 a year. You studied your million
dollar a year producer. You created a system to duplicate
exactly what they did. You then train two other people
that grew to be $1 million producer. So now you
have three $1 million producers. You now have a proven
(06:15):
system to create million dollar producers. If you don't have
a system and you hire one rockstar, eventually they're going
to leave you. You have to produce consistent rockstars in
your business. Keep in mind, true sales scalability is not
in personality. It comes from systems and an intentional culture
that replicates and duplicates the most successful actions to get
(06:38):
a predictable result. This will help you not have a
dependence on individuals that are just specific personalities. Number seven,
you need a real organizational structure. Most small businesses, they
have a lack of accountability because people don't know their roles.
They don't understand their contribution. They don't know their reporting lines.
There's chaos in the business. And then as soon as
(07:01):
you try to inject some controls, people say it feels
too corporate. Well, here's the truth two corporate is really
just code for actually scalable. Most business owners spend a
lot of money in marketing, and then they say the
marketing doesn't work. But the truth is, the marketing worked.
But the sales team was not trained to convert those messages,
(07:22):
those leads into actual sales. In fact, structure often feels oppressive.
Without leadership, vision and alignment, it can push great people away. Remember,
while most people may start pushing back on the changes
you're incorporating in your business, saying it's going corporate is
not corporate, it's scalable. Lastly, number eight, I see so
(07:45):
many people do this. They confuse being busy with being productive.
Productivity means results. Busy means confusion and potentially wasting a
lot of time. My good friend Stephen, who is doing
20 million in revenue, set targets daily, weekly and monthly
targets to transform his business into a passive income machine.
(08:09):
How did they do this? Well, they threw events for
the company. They documented how successful people did their jobs.
They celebrated the wins, the personal, professional, financial goal, accomplishment.
They brought the teams together to work together as a team.
Then that team took over the day to day responsibilities,
allowing Stephen to extract himself, increase his income and enjoy
(08:31):
a higher quality of life. Everyone talks about work life balance,
but work life balance is really only a problem when
you're doing a lot of work and you're not showing
any results for it. Productivity creates freedom for the owner
and their team, and it transforms your business into a
scalable asset. For me, it's doing things like structuring, block scheduling,
(08:56):
putting so much into my schedule that I can push
things to other people and prioritize in that moment. What's
most important? Why? So that when I go on vacation
or I do things with my family, I was so
efficient during the workday, I don't feel like I'm taking
time away from successful actions. How do I do block scheduling?
I have three different people putting schedules on my calendar,
(09:18):
so I wake up. I might have 20 or 30 things,
and then that day I go through and prioritize the
most important for me, and I hand off the other
people to talk to my team. Why do I do that?
So I can put my attention on the most valuable,
the most important thing today. And I can still hand
those other people off to get help or to talk
(09:38):
to whoever they need to talk to. By having block
scheduling and having lots of things in those blocks of time,
it allows me to be much more productive than waking
up and only having a few calls with a few people,
of which most I don't need to be involved in
during the day.
Welcome back to another episode of Building Billions, where we're
going to be talking about the eight strategies to scaling
your business. Most businesses can't break the 3 million mark
because they don't follow these strategies. I've helped scale hundreds
of companies from 1 million to 50 million and 50
million to 100 million and beyond. And the difference is
(00:23):
never what people think. These are the eight real strategies
that separate struggling founders from successful entrepreneurs. The first strategy
it's a harsh one. If your business isn't growing, it's
because you're the reason your business will only grow to
the extent you do. Look, most business owners tap out
(00:44):
at a certain level of success. It's because of what
John Maxwell talks about in law of the lid. You
can only raise your team to the level of lid
you have, and there's three lids in business belief, operational effectiveness,
and leadership. Low lid equals low success. Fear, stress and
(01:05):
resistance create a struggle mindset and that pushes great people
away from you and keeps your business stuck in chaos.
Don't be busy being busy and not focusing on your
own personal leadership development. This is a simple premise. If
you have a straw and you squeeze the middle of
the straw, that's as far as air can get to.
(01:27):
If you release that and you open it, you have
the whole length of the straw. Trust me when I
tell you, if you maintain a low leadership level, you're
not intentionally growing your leadership. Say you're at a 4
or 5. You have to grow it to a 7
or 9 or a ten in order for your team
to grow to a five, 6 or 7. And worse,
if you're at a five and your team, somebody on
(01:48):
your team wants to grow to a seven, they have
to leave you. And that's why most business owners lose
their best people. Strategy number two, you need to have
a clear vision and most importantly, share it. Where there's
confusion and chaos, there's always failure without a clear and
compelling picture of success. Specifically what you're trying to do
(02:09):
through your business. Everyone in the business gets confused. People
need to understand that when they win, the business wins.
And when the business wins, they win. Make sure everyone
understands exactly where the business is going. This will allow
everyone to feel aligned with the goals of the business
and succeed. Number three, the faster you get systems and
(02:33):
processes in place, the faster you'll grow successfully. What got
you to 1 million won't get you to ten. Novice
business owners throw people at problems they don't understand. It's
the lack of systems that leads to the broken processes,
which is why most people fail. So what you want
is repeatable systems that people can duplicate. So then you
(02:55):
can throw your people out. The problems with the system
that's guaranteed to work its systems and process that allows
your business to breathe, grow faster, and reduce dependency on
you or individual high performance contributors. Remember that the earlier
you do this, the better, and this will even help
free up your time within the business to solve real
(03:18):
problems and create more revenue. Number four, which is a
really hard one to do in business. You need to
create world class talent hire for attitude, train for results.
My last business I sold six of my eight executives,
never had a job before I hired them. I trained
them through a process that included cultural, operational and financial
(03:39):
success and results. If you hire for attitude and train
for results, you will have a successful business. Look, if
you want long term employees that stay with you and
succeed with you, you need to have a world class
organization that develops talent instead of trying to throw people
at problems. How about you develop people to solve problems
(04:00):
as a team? And when you do that, and you
align them with the success of the business, you'll maintain
your top talent and you won't lose your team. You
have to understand that it's going to be in your
ability to develop talent, not just acquire it. That will
allow you to be successful in developing talent is a
non-negotiable skill in scaling your business. Number five and this
(04:21):
is the one I see people fail at all the time.
You have to prioritize data over drama. High emotion equals
low intelligence. If you're going to rely on gut instinct,
you're going to have fear, stress, resistance, anxiety, and you're
going to make a lot of bad decisions. While data
reveals bottleneck patterns of failure and opportunity of success, it's true.
(04:47):
Emotions and assumptions are business killers. Remember that data driven
businesses scale faster, stay leaner, and eliminate unnecessary drama. Use
data and key metrics for your team to ensure that
the people around you understand, on an objective level, what
is expected of them and their contributions while they're working
(05:09):
with you. Number six don't rely on personality. Learn how
to create rock stars. If you hire rock stars, they
most likely won't stay with you very long. If you
want to take your business from 2 million to 20 million.
You can't do it around a couple big personalities. You're
gonna have to do it around the talent of your
group of salespeople working as a team. Once your business
(05:32):
moves beyond 2 or 3 million. It's not individual performers
that will make your business succeed. It's a group of
performers working together as a team. I created the Rule
of three so that you can understand this. If you
can get three people to repeat the success, the best
success you've had in the business, you've now built a system.
(05:53):
Let's say you had three salespeople. One was doing a
million a year. One was doing 300,000 a year and
one was doing 100,000 a year. You studied your million
dollar a year producer. You created a system to duplicate
exactly what they did. You then train two other people
that grew to be $1 million producer. So now you
have three $1 million producers. You now have a proven
(06:15):
system to create million dollar producers. If you don't have
a system and you hire one rockstar, eventually they're going
to leave you. You have to produce consistent rockstars in
your business. Keep in mind, true sales scalability is not
in personality. It comes from systems and an intentional culture
that replicates and duplicates the most successful actions to get
(06:38):
a predictable result. This will help you not have a
dependence on individuals that are just specific personalities. Number seven,
you need a real organizational structure. Most small businesses, they
have a lack of accountability because people don't know their roles.
They don't understand their contribution. They don't know their reporting lines.
There's chaos in the business. And then as soon as
(07:01):
you try to inject some controls, people say it feels
too corporate. Well, here's the truth two corporate is really
just code for actually scalable. Most business owners spend a
lot of money in marketing, and then they say the
marketing doesn't work. But the truth is, the marketing worked.
But the sales team was not trained to convert those messages,
(07:22):
those leads into actual sales. In fact, structure often feels oppressive.
Without leadership, vision and alignment, it can push great people away. Remember,
while most people may start pushing back on the changes
you're incorporating in your business, saying it's going corporate is
not corporate, it's scalable. Lastly, number eight, I see so
(07:45):
many people do this. They confuse being busy with being productive.
Productivity means results. Busy means confusion and potentially wasting a
lot of time. My good friend Stephen, who is doing
20 million in revenue, set targets daily, weekly and monthly
targets to transform his business into a passive income machine.
(08:09):
How did they do this? Well, they threw events for
the company. They documented how successful people did their jobs.
They celebrated the wins, the personal, professional, financial goal, accomplishment.
They brought the teams together to work together as a team.
Then that team took over the day to day responsibilities,
allowing Stephen to extract himself, increase his income and enjoy
(08:31):
a higher quality of life. Everyone talks about work life balance,
but work life balance is really only a problem when
you're doing a lot of work and you're not showing
any results for it. Productivity creates freedom for the owner
and their team, and it transforms your business into a
scalable asset. For me, it's doing things like structuring, block scheduling,
(08:56):
putting so much into my schedule that I can push
things to other people and prioritize in that moment. What's
most important? Why? So that when I go on vacation
or I do things with my family, I was so
efficient during the workday, I don't feel like I'm taking
time away from successful actions. How do I do block scheduling?
I have three different people putting schedules on my calendar,
(09:18):
so I wake up. I might have 20 or 30 things,
and then that day I go through and prioritize the
most important for me, and I hand off the other
people to talk to my team. Why do I do that?
So I can put my attention on the most valuable,
the most important thing today. And I can still hand
those other people off to get help or to talk
(09:38):
to whoever they need to talk to. By having block
scheduling and having lots of things in those blocks of time,
it allows me to be much more productive than waking
up and only having a few calls with a few people,
of which most I don't need to be involved in
during the day.
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