Why You're Not Scaling & Getting Robbed Instead

I was robbed at the gas station but not at gun point..

In some states in the US it’s classified as a Level 5 felony, punishable by 5-15 years in prison. Embezzlement, same deal, up to a certain amount it’s punishable by prison. That’s one of the reasons we all choose not to take that ‘career’ path, besides the fact that it’s just wrong. 

But robbery and embezzlement happens everyday, right in front of your face.. You just don’t notice it.

I was on my way to an important meeting and behind on my protein, so I ran in a small gas station and grabbed a fourty gram shake and some gum. I eat clean, real, organic food as much as possible, but a shake helps when I’m behind. I chew sugar free gum sometimes if I just decide to not eat for really long periods.

The nice lady at the cash register wanted to save me a few bucks by using a rewards card. I never use one of those things because it takes 2-3 extra minutes to pay and get outa there when I use it. Sometimes the machine screws up and it takes even longer.

but as soon as I told her I’m not using one and initiated my payment, she scanned one of her loaners to ‘save’ me a few bucks.

Well, even though my total went down by around three dollars and some change, I lost money. I make 2-5x that 1 dollar a minute I saved, sometimes more. So I lost money. Times that by every time something like this happens.

As an entrepreneur, you will encounter thousands of people operating this way every single year who work in your company in some way, shape, or form. So factor in the compound effect of all these people and events robbing you blind for your time and money.

It’s not because they’re terrible people.

They just think differently. They have different biases and beliefs at the wheel, taking them to different destinations. They have a different operating system, software, and programming running their lives and dictating their actions than I do.

When you least expect it, this same programming will dictate some of your own decision making.

I’ve worked with hundreds of companies, helping them scale their marketing to seven and eight figures, and usually, when they call me, there’s a whole lot of this going on.

Ideas are constantly born out of circumventing a constraint, an undesirable solution to one, an imaginary constraint, and/or putting out fires. Because most of them are digital with marketing, advertising, and selling these days, we can’t see the tangible cost, nevermind it more than likely being the wrong move.

Right after this, I joined my next meeting. My client and their media buyer shared issues with their traffic costs. CAC was high, calendars weren’t being filled, CPMs were through the roof, and a handful of other issues. We went down a rabbit hole of my questions. I discovered that they got rid of their third-party tracking and changed their CRM. 

So it makes sense why cost has gone up and it’s been harder to fill their calendar. Facebook ad tracking (and others) are about as accurate as TV news. This means the AI can’t do its job if it doesn’t know who is converting, who is not, who is most likely to convert, and which ad they came from.

They also shared that they switched CRM’s and that email delivery went off of a cliff. This is also something that will impact conversions. Less bookings and sales due to lack of presence and information = less data going back to the ad platform.

(As a rule of thumb, if CPMs are really high and ad performance takes a sharp decline, I always have the team in place to check the events manager and all of the tech involved with sending data back to the ad platform. Add this to your checklist.)

See where I’m going with this?

Add in all the time my client and his team lost solving these issues, and it’s quite a chunk of change.

Maybe his old ad agency told him to take these actions, or maybe he decided because he wasn’t getting good answers. 

Either way, when the dust settles on paper, it looks no different than if someone robbed you or embezzled money from the company. 

Every digital idea costs money. You can’t see the money because, in the digital world of client acquisition and remote workers, everything is invisible. You don’t get the “bill” you didn’t know you were paying until later.

So, when scaling, you must be careful about every little move you make as well as who and what you listen to. Every move has many layers of good and bad consequences, and there are nuances to every single success or failure you hear about.

It’s chess. The idea of taking a piece off the board is rewarding. If you act on that excitement, anger, or anxiousness, then you don’t pause to see the 10 other ways you lose all of your other pieces and get cornered into a checkmate.

If you’re already close to 1M a year, make your rule to change as little as possible. Limit your variables.

If you do change something, there needs to be a damn good reason.

When you hear about some of the big results my clients get, just know that I usually spend more time telling people no and shooting down their ideas than anything else. 

The question to ask is, “What problem are we solving?”

And

“Is this problem keeping us from scaling?”

Most of the time, it’s not even a real constraint, but if it happens to be, then ask:

“What is the lowest risk, stupid, simple way to solve this right now?”

The people and ideas we think are great, that we think are helping us are usually the ones that set us back.

Scaling is way simpler than you think.

–Lance C. Greenberg