Sales first, then deliver the goods

Somebody wrote in and asked: what are the top three tips you would use to scale a team? I love the question, even though the honest answer is that I do not know how you stop at three. But there is an order to it, and the order is most of the answer.

First, you have to have someone in charge of each area. Someone over the administrative side, handling recruiting, training, and the finances. Someone over sales. Someone over production, the part of the company that delivers the goods. You are not going to have a real company until it is broken down that way and each piece has a name attached to it.

It is a sales world

Then you get the sales going, and I do not know of any industry that is exempt from this. If you sell stocks and bonds, that is selling. Doctors with elective practices have salespeople in the office; the dentists and the surgeons who are super successful all do. A nice restaurant sells you through its advertising to get you in the door, and then the waiter with the beautiful wine list sells you again at the table, and then he sells you dessert.

It is a sales world. Selling is what gets people to want your product or service. Job number one: if you do not have somebody who wants what you have enough to give you money for it, you do not have a business. Everything else in the building is waiting on that.

Quantity from sales, quality from you

Now here is the balance that scaling actually depends on. The sales area gives you the quantity. Your advertising, your promotion, your reps reaching out: that produces volume. Then you have to deliver the quality, and you have to work so hard on this part. When you hand something to your customer it has to be smoking hot.

Go back to that restaurant. When the food comes out, how does the plate look? How did the chef present it? How does it taste? Is the wait staff prompt? Those are the elements of a business, and they decide whether the customer you paid so much to acquire ever comes back.

Because the most important customer you will ever have is the person who shows up often, buys a lot of your product at a profit, and pays for it on time. There is nothing more valuable on the face of this earth than that customer. You need lots of them, and the way you get them is you keep taking care of people. Give them what they want, give them what they need, and go over and above.

Keep the records or lose the game

The third leg is administration, and it is the one everybody wants to skip. Your corporate records, your human resources files, your accounting, your tax records: all of the paper that makes a business a business. If you do not keep that side tight, the government will eat you alive, and it will happen at the exact moment you can least afford the distraction.

So that is how you scale. Identify your team and put someone over every area. Get sales going first, and keep creating the want, because in a grocery store with fifteen brands on the shelf, somebody has to give the customer a reason to reach for yours. Deliver instantly and beautifully so the quantity turns into loyalty. And keep good records underneath it all.

The three balance each other out. Sales without delivery collapses. Delivery without sales starves. Both without administration get eaten. Keep all three moving, in that order of urgency, and the company scales almost on its own.