Building to Scale - Eric Crews - Leadership in Action- Episode #018

To many, running a successful business is scaling their business, but these two ideas are not the same. Eric Crews, the president and founder of Crews Consulting Group, has a lifetime of experience with not only running successful companies but also scaling those companies. Eric shares the three keys to building a successful company and a checklist of five things to make your business scalable.    Takeaways: To actually scale a business, there is much more than just having good operations. Running a successful, profitable business is different than making a business that can scale. While it’s good to make sure the business runs well, it’s not the key to scaling. There are three keys to scaling a company: 1) Your customers must love what you offer and they must love doing business with you; 2) Your employees must absolutely love working with you; 3) You have to make money while doing it. Customers love business regardless of how well they are run, they really just need to love the product. Eg: Apple makes good products but interacting with the company is dreadful for most customers. There is a checklist of five things to make a company that can scale: 1) Get your business operationally strong; 2) Have an extremely strong senior team; 3) Figure out your place in the market; 4) Get sales, marketing, and operations functions all lined up with your uniques; 5) Adopt a red light customer service culture. A “Red Light Customer Service Culture” means that if the customer has a problem and the company can control it then the company has a problem. Clients must feel as though nothing else matters more to the company than them. If you really want to scale, you need to hire people who are smarter than you. You need people in your business who are going to take it to the next level. Even more so than commodity-type businesses, unique strategy businesses must have a firm grasp on both their target market and their TAM (total addressable market).   Links:  Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-crews-ccg/ Website: https://crewsconsultinggroup.com/   Quote of the Show “If you're going to truly scale a business, you're going to need to have much more than good operations to be able to make that happen.” - Eric Crews   Shout Outs: Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great   Ways to Tune In: Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leadership-in-action/id1585042233 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/2t4Ksk4TwmZ6MSfAHXGkJI Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/leadership-in-action Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubGVhZGVyc2hpcGluYWN0aW9uLmxpdmUvZmVlZC54bWw Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/4263fd02-8c9b-495e-bd31-2e5aef21ff6b/leadership-in-action YouTube - https://youtu.be/DWgYjCZz6Kk