WTF is scalability? We recently ran a bunch of user interviews for our core business offering GrowGetters Club and had in-depth conversations with our members and also women who represented our ideal customers. One of the questions we asked each of them was what scalability means to them. And the really interesting thing about it was there were slight nuances to each of their responses but there were two common themes: 

1. It’s a bit of a buzzword that’s been bandied about as a miracle solution in business.

2. When you put aside the negative connotations there’s no doubt that it’s essentially about reaching more people with what you offer, and that’s in essence a pretty good thing.

In today’s episode we will talk about scalability and why does it matter? We are going to unpack what exactly this “buzzword” is and what it means when we talk about what your business offers.

The textbook definition of scalability 

If you want the ChatGPT definition, we got this: A scalable business is designed to handle growth and expansion while maintaining or improving its efficiency and profitability. It is a business that can quickly and easily adapt to changing market conditions, customer demands, and technological advancements without requiring significant increases in resources, costs, or efforts. 

In other words, expanding your customer base without overstretching your resources.

Scalability is not such an unsexy term

Our research told us that many women in the business see scalability as a pretty unsexy term. However, it is a model where you can serve more people without sacrificing your time.

For instance, you ask any venture capitalist or business investor what they want to see from a fledgling startup and it is two things:

1. Growth potential

2. Scalability

This is because if your business model isn’t scalable there’s only so far it can go to obtaining the growth investors love to see. Overall, a scalable business is designed to grow rapidly and efficiently with minimal barriers to expansion.

Scalability in action

The fact is there are only so many hours available in your week. If you are in the business of trading your time for money, it’s pretty clear you’ll be hitting a revenue ceiling at some point. This is because there are only so many clients you can serve in the time you have. 

But when you design your business to be intentionally scalable, you have the opportunity to serve unlimited amounts of clients and reach more people than you could have imagined.

Here is a GrowGetters example of this in action. We mentioned we ran a lot of user research for our Club, our digital membership for women in business. We’ve been in the process of evolving and improving GrowGetters Club, and one of our key goals is to make it scalable as a business. 

Our core mission with GrowGetters is to see one million women create micro ventures and we knew that meant we needed to redesign our Club in a way that could reach more women and serve as many women as possible. 

In startup speak, this means tapping into our TAM, our total addressable market. To date, the Club has been running as a mastermind with a lot of one-on-one sessions and regular hands-on workshops. This has been great for our members but as a business meant that we would have a choice to either:

A) Raise our membership prices by an insane amount to justify the time spent, 

B) Clone ourselves so we can do all the work (which is clearly not possible) or, 

C) Adjust the design of the Club so that we could help more women get the results they need. 

It is no easy feat but it is definitely possible! We experimented with a bunch of different ways to adjust the features of the Club to retain the value and outcomes but ensure we can serve more women than ever. With this in mind, we settled on a hybrid model that fits that balance. We’ll be testing it with our current members and intend to release it over the next weeks.

Diversifying through scalability

Similar to what we covered in last week’s episode, Why a ‘portfolio’ career or business is the new normal, having a scalable digital product in your product suite is a great way to diversify your revenue too. 

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing when it comes to scalability in your business. But we do highly recommend that if you do want to break through your potential capacity for earning, then considering arming yourself with a scalable digital product is the way to go. That goes for whether you are a career gal earning a salary, a freelancer, or a business babe. 

Here’s an experiment to get you started: We want you to think about what you currently offer and where there could be potential to reach more people. What might that look like?

Come up with a few ideas and chat about them with three of your current customers or colleagues to gain their initial reactions and feedback. Their responses may surprise you, and even inspire you!
If you are at a point where you have an idea of what you want to do, but you’re not sure how to make it happen, then check out GrowGetters Club. Here we guide our members to bring their digital product idea to market the smart way.

Please join our free GrowGetters Lab community on Discord where we share and help you track your experiments to help grow your biz. Don’t forget to sign up for our weekly GrowGetters Growth Hacks Newsletter which is jam-packed with tools, hacks, methods, and models to help you grow and scale your business or product.