many often forget that the business model must scale as well.

Scaling may be difficult because the potential market size is small or the customers’ purchasing decision times are too long for the business to survive the wait.

Fourth, growth is a dynamic, interactive, interdependent process that generally involves false starts, learning as you go, adaptation, and failed initiatives. Growth is messy; growth is change; and growth has spurts, detours, downturns, and spikes. Growth requires constant learning and improvement. Growth requires people, processes, and culture to

1. Scaling a personal service business depends on having good hiring and training processes and low employee turnover.

iterative, incremental improvement mentality—not the search for or creation of big “wow” innovations.

customer concentration risks

4. Understand that business growth usually requires more people, more processes, more controls, and more administration. Growth changes everything including the business culture.

Financing production growth complicates the scaling decision for most growing, private companies because financing can be as big a concern for an entrepreneur as maintaining quality.

“Leave a fire extinguisher” behind. When you fight a business “fire” remember that your job is much more than solving the problem. It is to leave behind processes to make it unlikely that problem happens again or processes that make it possible for others to fix the problem.