Should You Grow Or Stay Small

The Design Startup Show

Hey design starters today, we're going to talk about either staying small or growing big, so she she'd stay small. You start growing or other, should you grow or should you just stay small? Right? I'm sure there are many people who are thinking that when you grow, you got to hire more people. More employees and going to manage more people.

Sometimes managing people is not just hot. It can be so sucking. It can be difficult, right? Because you don't want to control people, but yet you need to control them to know that they are doing their work. You need to be over their shoulder. And, but yet you feel bad doing that cause you want them to. Be creative in what they do without being micromanaged.

Right? Because you, yourself, when you're, when you are a designer or you are now a designer, you don't want people to just look over your shoulder and control you yet. You know, this is sometimes some people may think this is the way to get things done. So back to growing, you know, you need to hire so.

What's going to happen when you have this number of employees and, and there will be times when you don't have enough work for them. How are you going to get enough work to, to keep y'all business sustainable? How they're going to have enough work to carry on hiring these people, because you don't want to also hire them and then realize you don't have enough work for them and you have to let them go.

So you don't want to hire train that, go hire, train that go right. What I would say is these are things that may happen. Yes. And it doesn't just happen well, or it doesn't just work well, right at the start for sure. For some people you may see, like, Hey, you know, there are people who are doing well, right at a start they're hiring and they're growing fast.

It may not just happen right at that moment. They may have prior or previous experiences before this, before they finally succeeded. So if you're just starting out to kind of decide growing or not to grow, then you have to see beyond people whom you know, are growing successfully well and getting reached from there.

Or, or, or really growing wealthy from growing, right. It's not everybody will succeed in that way and not everybody, you know, consider this as succeeding. So the first thing that you need to iron out for yourself is what does success look like for you when it comes to growing your business? Would it, would it mean.

Does it mean growing a big team and what fall? You know, there are different reasons, different people are growing a team for, I know of people who want to grow a team because they want to see how scaling is like for a service business. And that is their passion. So if that happens to be your passion, I feel that that is other legitimate kind of reason.

Right. And that is possible because I have friends who have done that and they are very happy with that. They see, Oh, this is how you grow. This is how you scale the service business. And it works in this way. Well, these are, this is the passion that they want to, that they have, and they want to do this ongoing and that's fine with them.

Right. So for you, what is it? You have to figure that out. For myself, I would like to grow my business to a point when firstly I would like to be financially independent after a certain number of years. So let's say I give myself five years, 10 years to build this company where I have that stuff, efficient revenue or income to provide me with that residual income enough every year to survive.

Without being in the work itself. I don't want myself to be in the day-to-day tasks of designing for clients. My company will do that and I will hire designers who are willing to do that, to do the work. So this is, this is my, my basic success goal. And for that I'm willing to grow as big as I can. So I gave myself.

Uh, kind of a benchmark or, or kind of a goal where I can hit say $250,000 a year of residual profit. So you can actually set that goal or set that income benchmark for yourself per year. And, and what I told myself is I have to grow up to 50 designers where I managed this, this company. To be able to give me this residual income.

So you need to kind off, uh, work with the pricing of your offer. How much are you offering? Uh, how much is your service per customer or per client? All right for that. So you have that goal, you have that pricing. How many customers must you have to have a certain revenue so that you will have that passive income per year.

If, if this is part of your goal, right? If this is yoga, because you may have another, uh, another income generating source, and this can be another passion that you have, that you are, you are, you are doing so, so growing, they have a different reason, but this is my main reason. And it would be good for you to have this reason as well, because you want to be a wealthy designer.

I mean, you want to grow a company, so to make you wealthy, right? You don't necessarily need to be a designer yourself. And I am not as well. You know, so, so I want to be able to, to grow, to get to that point. That's it. When should you start growing? Right. And I ended up as well because yes, growing is growing.

You want to grow based on your reasons, but when is a good time, do you, you know, you see people growing like in one month time, two months, th th those are really fast and. And they start to be, you know, in the media and they have a lot of publicity that is part of marketing and, and they beat their competition because of that, that helps.

Yes. But the next thing that they need to sustain will be the processes and processes in the, uh, operations, can, their operations, the slew and rush of customers coming in. You know, one thing they said is, so their marketing is so good because of all these PR uh, maybe so good because they're able to grow so good because your marketing is top-notch.

Yes. But if their operations can't handle the onslaught of clients and customers, they may lose them pretty quickly as well. So this is the balance that for me, I would like to take an. I have been working on my operations and processes for the past five years and not growing as fast as I have wanted to or hope to, because I would like my processes to be able to manage the increasing number of clients.

I don't want my operations to feel when I have more clients than I could have managed. So my recruitment, my training of my staff and the delivery of the results must all be balanced up based, based on the processes that I've created and tweaked and improved along the way. So that was what I was doing for the five years.

So there isn't any kind of fixed timing where you should follow. There is no, like, you know, I have to grow in one month's time. If not, I won't grow or, or I have to grow in 10 years time. It's all based on your circumstances. Yes. Uh, do you have kids, do you, do you, do you want to, uh, do you have a full-time job or do you, do you want to have another side hustle?

Is this your side hustle? So all these other reasons that you have to put together plus your long-term goal, right? So your long-term goal is always the first one. To be anchored down. You're aware of that, you know, and you are sure that is what you want. Then you look back what's on whether you should start growing now or a year's time or years time or, or some at a time.

So it all depends on these factors. So. She you stay small and start growing. Then, you know, you should just ask yourself based on where you are going and where you want to go. And that will give you the answer. All right. So that's all for today and, uh, I will see you tomorrow. Bye.