EP # 182 - The Orchestra Effect: Scaling Your Service Business Beyond Solo-preneurship

In this first episode of 2025, Maggie discusses how to scale your service business beyond solopreneurship, comparing the process to conducting an orchestra rather than being a solo player.

⭐ Key Benefits of Scaling:

• Create a sellable business asset
• Build a lasting legacy
• Expand your mission and impact
• Create positive ripple effects beyond direct clients

🎼 The Orchestra Effect Framework:

Understanding Your Business Foundation

• Know your business inside out
• Master your numbers (financial & operational)
• Track key metrics and conversion rates
• Be able to teach others your processes

CEO Role Evolution

• Shift from solo player to conductor
• Develop trust in team members
• Remove barriers to team success
• Work ON the business vs IN the business

🛠️ Essential CEO Toolkit:

• Leadership skills
• Systems and processes
• Training frameworks
• Communication channels
• Performance metrics
• Strategic decision-making abilities

⚠️ Common Scaling Pitfalls:

• Stepping back too far from operations
• Micromanaging instead of overseeing
• Resistance to delegation
• Communication breakdown as the team grows

🚀 Getting Started with Scaling:

1. Create a long-term vision (2-3 years)
2. Assess current business state
3. Identify first delegation opportunities
4. Develop necessary systems and processes
5. Build leadership skills

💡 Maggie's Moment: "You can't repeat something you cannot understand. You can't fix something where you don't know the problem's root cause."

🎯 Action Step: Book a discovery call with Maggie to explore the Top CEO Formula for scaling your business into a sellable asset. Book it here - https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call

#DiamondEffect #BusinessScaling #Leadership #Entrepreneurship #BusinessGrowth

Transcript

Hello, dear Diamond Effect podcast listeners. Welcome to the first episode of 2025, 182. But before we get into it, I wanted to wish you a happy, happy new year. all the prosperity. May all your goals and dreams come true in 2025. And not by sheer luck or miracles, but because you can create them.

I'm rooting for you and I'll be here all year long. Every week, supporting you and teaching you things that might help you achieve your goals in your businesses. Let's get into episode 182. We'll talk today about scaling your business beyond solopreneurship and becoming like a conductor of an orchestra.

rather than individual player in that orchestra. And why is this important? Why scaling a business could have a significant impact on you beyond just growth of the business, beyond expanding the sales and growing [00:01:00] your revenue. First of all, when you scale your business, you have an opportunity here to set it up in a way that it will become an asset You can sell down the line.

I think of your time and work and resources as an investment. So why not, while you're doing the work of scaling, invest those resources in a way that will pay off not only in the moment by gross revenue growth, but also down the line when the value of your business increases, when you set it up properly, and then you have an asset, You can sell, which could be part of your retirement money, or pass on to your family.

Maybe your kids or other family members can continue something you've built when you don't want to be in it anymore. The second thing is with that you're building a legacy. You're building something that lives [00:02:00] beyond you. You're leaving your mark on this earth in a way that you help people help your clients that can continue to grow.

Even if you're not in it and then the third thing that grows from it is you truly expanding on your mission and helping more and more people and when you help more people your impact is greater and always remember that no matter what services you offer to your clients. When you help those individuals or the companies and individuals within them, you usually impact them beyond just that person.

There's a ripple effect that happens and of course it's different for everybody, but that ripple effect, impacts other people. So sometimes it's actually very hard for us to imagine the extent of the positive impact we can have. And of course, the bigger your business, the [00:03:00] more you scale it, the more of that positive impact you can create.

Are you interested to know how to scale your business beyond your solopreneurship? And if it is your goal in 2025, that's definitely an episode you don't want to miss. So tune in, continue listening, and let's get into it. Now, you might be thinking, who is Maggie and what's her experience in scaling businesses?

Maybe you're the first time you're listening to this podcast. So let me just tell you a little bit. Not only do I have my clients do it, but also I have extensive corporate experience when I've been part in scaling departments that were like, Businesses within the businesses. For the past eight years, before I moved full time into my coaching and consulting business, I worked in a department that was like a line of business, we were a mini entrepreneurship startup within the company, and we're selling our [00:04:00] services to external clients of the company and also delivering services to the clients that the company had.

And within my tenure there, I was the first middle manager and then more of a senior leader. We've scaled that business from, I believe, seven to nine figures from 80 people to 450, and I was an integral part of it. And as we scaled it, we also improved the quality of our services. We improved the delivery and also made better and better decisions.

How to deliver the services and that included changes in the technology, of course, expanding the teams, building the right strategy to do it. So I've seen and been critical part of large scale growth outside of also being in sales in the past for smaller businesses and helping my clients [00:05:00] right now to do that. I've learned so many lessons through that, that's how I can help clients. And the thing about scaling is not just growing the revenue, not just having more clients, but the critical thinking, is how can I deliver to those clients even better services that I'm doing now? And how can I keep increasing their satisfaction? 

I know how to do it. And that's why I'm creating this podcast. 

The first thing that you need to do as the CEO of your business to start scaling is to really understand the foundation inside out. And what I see often when my clients starts coaching with me is that they don't really understand their business. They know how to sign clients. And of course they know the service delivery because they're.

The ones delivering the service, but they don't understand why certain things happens and why certain things [00:06:00] work and why others doesn't don't, they don't necessarily always understand their finances. They know how to take the client from when they become a client to, happy service delivery and happy client at the end.

But if they had to pull that out of their mind and teach somebody to do it, they don't know how to do it. Without that depth of understanding of your business to the point where you can teach others, it's hard to scale. Without understanding your finances and numbers, not only the money numbers, but also some operational numbers, how many clients a month you serve, how many clients in Wires you get every month, what are your conversion rates from inquiries to clients and all those things.

It's hard to scale because you can't repeat something you cannot understand. You can't fix something where you don't know what the root cause of the problem is. Just think about it [00:07:00] this way. If you were to be a conductor of the orchestra, a conductor. understands the vision, right? It understands the music, what the orchestra is supposed to play and piece to achieve.

And that's why it's so important for you as a CEO to have the vision. What is my business all about? What's the mission? What do I want to achieve in the next two, three, five years? Then conductor also understands Each player's role, so it knows what the violinist is supposed to do, as opposed to the tuba player, as opposed to triangle player, and other pieces of the puzzle.

So for you, you need to understand each part of your business, because if that part of your business down the line needs to be outsourced to either a contractor or delegated to the employee, I need to know what to delegate and how, and I need [00:08:00] to direct them after, right? The conductor of the orchestra also has the vision to each individual part.

They know what a violinist is supposed to do and how they're supposed to play. It doesn't mean that the CEO and the conductor needs to know how to play each instrument, right?

The conductor is not an expert in how to play the instrument, but it has the individual vision for each player. And the total vision, the entire vision for the entire piece and the entire orchestra. And that's how you as the CEOs need to think. I need to understand the individual visions for each part of my business.

That right now I might be the only one that's doing it. Creating it and working at it. But down the line, I'll have people helping me. And I also need to understand how each part together will play this beautiful [00:09:00] piece that then will achieve the vision that I have for my business. And how they're going to be able to use this in the next two, three years, and I'll give you my one example.

I have this client who didn't really understand their sales numbers, right? They knew more or less how much general revenue they would have each year, but very often they had that information once a year at the end of the fiscal year, and usually like months after, so couldn't really understand what are their clients going ordering and who were their best clients?

What type of services were their best sellers? They didn't see the sales numbers month, each month or each quarter. They saw them very late. So just imagine trying to make a decision in your business when you're not seeing the key information. Until a year and a few months later. So even if you see [00:10:00] something in a year and a few months later, and you understand that then it might be too late to fix it, or it might be too late to expand on certain things and improve on certain things, right?

You want to understand your business right now in the moment. You want to have the data that supports it, the financial data, the operational data. So then you can make better decisions. You can improve on things. In real life, you can fix things before they become big things and you can drive your mission and you drive your vision forward, not only once a year, but each day, each week, each month. And I'll just go back to that client because without the data, they weren't able to set informed sales goals for their team. They already had a sales team. They couldn't also identify what was working in sales and what wasn't working. And, of course, as I [00:11:00] mentioned, they had some obsolete conclusions because their data was coming so quickly.

late and they missed opportunities for improvement. So we worked together, we fixed that now, and now we have numbers coming in on a regular basis. Therefore, I know that for this client, 2025 will be such a better year in terms of scaling their business growth, but also how it is happening for them and for their employees. Do another key important thing that you want to understand as you prepare and start scaling your business is that your role will shift, right? It will shift from solo person doing everything to first being like a manager where you do some of the work but also have Helpers, and you will need to oversee that, right?

Those helpers could be contractors who are doing maybe your bookkeeping, or maybe you have a virtual [00:12:00] assistant who is a contractor that will help you. And then as your business scales and grows, you need to delegate and then you'll become like a conductor like a director who oversees More and more and does less and less of work in their business less and less of day to day work So you will have the strategy you'll have the vision you'll be setting Direction for each individual player in your business to achieve those vision.

You're be breaking it down to okay What is the role of a virtual assistant? and In my business for us to achieve the vision and what is the role of a salesperson in my business for us to achieve the vision, you'll have to break it down and roll it out to your team members in order for them to know what is their part in that big vision, right?

You will also be the key decision maker. It doesn't mean you'll be making all the decisions. You want to [00:13:00] empower your team to make decisions within the roles, but the key strategic decisions, the most important decisions you will be taking, making, with your team members input. 

Now you have people seeing things that you are not seeing, because you're not doing it all. you need their input. So that's why it's so important in a meeting with your team and involving your team members in discussions. However, you're the one making the key decisions because you will bear the responsibility of those key decisions and what, now what I want to say, that's why it's so important to understand each part of your business.

As the cEO, you always have ultimate responsibility for the success of your business. The shifts in the skill set that you need to develop was Developing trust for others. Now, trust isn't gained in [00:14:00] five minutes. Trust comes with time, and it always starts with hiring the right people. Of course, in this episode, we don't have a lot of time to be talking about how to hire the best people possible.

We'll cover it later this year, but it is important. Trust starts with hiring the right people who are qualified and aligned with your values, mission, and just the right fit for the company. And then as you work with them, you develop that trust, right? Gradually delegating things. For every business owners, it could look differently.

It depends on what type of services you deliver and what your business needs. Let's say you're a home organizer. The first type of help you will get is actually other staff who can deliver services. So other staff who can go on home organizing projects with you or take on some smaller projects on their own.

Or if you're in the spa, maybe [00:15:00] somebody who will deliver services you cannot deliver. So maybe you do facials and they will do massages or something else, right? If you are more of a consultant or you're more of a contractor and for now you want to keep the delivery of the service within. your kind of realm of work, then maybe your first help will be bookkeepers and assistants who will do customer service, setting appointments, dealing with subcontractors, things like that. So it's up to you to decide how you want to delegate. Gradually just make it strategic. I always create strategy with my clients together just based on where their business is at. What makes sense for what they do, their strengths and kind of the goals that they have, right? But then remember that when you have team members, when you have people helping you, no [00:16:00] matter whether you're full time employees, contract, part time, Your role is to remove the barriers and challenges that they encounter to do their job 

some of it, of course, they can do, but as a leader, you never will be completely removed from that. You will have to stay on top of the things that they're doing, understand what they're doing, and help them with any challenges. So more and more as you scale, you'll be working on the business rather than in the business.

And that's how you get the greatest return on investment of your time, energy, and focus. You will need to keep pulling yourself out and thinking as, if I have X amount of time in, of the business of this side, What should I be focusing on that will move the business forward the most that will overcome the biggest challenges, that will help me get to my vision the fastest possible. [00:17:00] So now let's talk about what the conductor of the orchestra needs in their tool set, so the toolkit to lead the orchestra to success. What does a CEO need to lead the business to success? First of all, leadership skills. The moment you start scaling and having help in your business, you've got to know how to lead people.

You need to be able to not only set that the vision for your business, strategic vision for growth, but also communicate that vision in a way that is inspiring and motivating for people who are helping you in your business. And simple enough for them to know how to implement it. You need to learn how to grow and develop teams.

Because at first, of course, if you have one or two people helping you, it's more like individual work and you're like a [00:18:00] mini team. It's relatively easy to lead a couple people. The moment your team grows from 5 to 10 to 15 to 20, then it's more challenging to communicate. You need to have systems and processes, that's the second toolkit, you need to master developing systems and processes that will.

Keep the team, the orchestra playing harmoniously and together and not having some awkward sounds here and there, right? And then another thing is how you scale the business. You need to at least maintain, if not grow, the quality of your service. So then the clients maintain happy. All of that requires systems and processes.

They will have to be documented. You will need to have some training frameworks. If new people or if people leave and you need to [00:19:00] replace them, they will need to be trained. In a same consistent way, that's how you ensure the quality of your service remains the same, right? When I was mentioning in my corporate career when we had 450 people Towards the end, delivering the service.

Of course, we had some attrition. Even though it wasn't high, there was some attrition. As you scale and you expand, you might not be losing people, but you're constantly hiring to keep up with the growth. Those people have to be onboarded in a way that ensures their success, in a way that doesn't.

Demotivate them and question their decision to be working with you. They're like, okay, my employer is organized. They helped me succeed in my role. They trained me properly and so on. And that ensures happy clients at the end. So you gotta develop training frameworks as you go. The way you communicate with your team, the communication channel.

Will the communication channels [00:20:00] will evolve when you have only two people working with you. The communication channels can be quite informal and it will be effective. Doesn't need a lot of structure. But as your team grows, you will need more structure to ensure everybody's on the same page in terms of delivery and growing the business.

You also have the other. way of communication where your employees can come to you and offer, suggestions and talk about challenges that they're seeing when you're actually benefiting from them becoming experts in what they do and seeing things that you're not seeing as the CEO and you need performance metrics.

Performance for the business, performance for the employees. You need to develop all that as you scale. Another thing in your toolkit that I want to mention is how to make strategic decisions. [00:21:00] There's a few things that go into it. First of all, have a data driven approach. Going back to understanding your business, measure whatever makes sense for you to measure. Definitely your financials, your sales, 

metrics like conversion rates, how many leads are you having, how many clients stay, the complaints, things like that. Data related to your clients, data related to service delivery. As I mentioned before, have a way for your team to have an input, to include them. in you gathering the information about how the business is doing.

Make sure that everybody's strategically aligned and that the decisions you're making are aligned with your vision, are aligned with your strategy. Sometimes when we are day to day in our business and busy, maybe dealing with some emergencies or dealing with escalations, we [00:22:00] forget about the long term visions and it's easy to forget.

easy to make decisions that don't really align with them. So have systems and structures that allow you to check in before you make especially big decisions to make sure those are aligned with your vision, your mission, and especially your values. One last thing, when making big decisions, always pause and think about the risks and potential challenges that may come with it.

There aren't perfect decisions in business. Every decision you will make, will have some benefits. And some challenges with it. Of course, we want to make decisions that are mostly beneficial to our business, but they will affect things that could potentially have some challenges. We want to think through those challenges ahead of time, prepare for them as much as possible, so then we're going into the change, into the decision prepared. [00:23:00] And before we conclude this episode, I want to talk about common mistakes and pitfalls that business owners fall into when scaling the business. The first of all is stepping back too far, removing themselves too far from their business. And I will give you an example. I actually observed a eight figure CEO as they grew from seven to eight figure CEO in their business making that mistake.

They removed themselves too much from the operations of their business. And why? Because they didn't understand operations. They were big visionary. They were really good in marketing and sales. sales and operation wasn't their strong suit, so they decided to delegate that completely but without learning and understanding it.

And what happened was, at an eight figure level, that mistake caught up to them. They realized they don't [00:24:00] understand. enough about their business. The employees of the operations did the best they could without the CEO to deliver the services, to communicate with clients and so on, but it wasn't aligned with the vision.

It wasn't aligned with what the CEO wanted. And by the time they realized that there was damage done. There were challenges that had to be fixed. So you had a lot to fix that could have been avoided if they stayed involved and had the pulse on the finger on the operations. And what it really required of them is get uncomfortable and learn something they were strong before.

Which is okay. Of course, as your business scales, there will be parts of that scaling that you won't have skill set in because you've never done this before. Not a problem. Just be willing to learn those skills. Imagine an [00:25:00] orchestra conductor trying to conduct from a different room.

Where they're removing themselves so far from the orchestra, where they're in a different room, and then the orchestra, the players are in a different room. The conductor can't see what the player's doing, and the players can't really see what the conductor is doing when they're guiding it, so everybody's guessing.

From guessing, there might be something that will be working, but are they gonna deliver the best piece ever? Probably not. It's impossible to create harmony like that, to create like amazing, amazing service, amazing, amazing product. Can't do that. Not to mention that everybody is out of sync. You'll lose synchronization, which is like a flow in business, the state of flow in business.

Everybody's synced, when the teams are working together and the CEO and the business, everybody's just moving in the same direction and you can't do it if you're removing yourself too far from each [00:26:00] important key part of the business. Other pitifuls are When you're on the opposite side of the extreme, you're not removed too far, you're actually micromanaging versus just properly overseeing.

If you're trying to micromanage everything your employees do, first of all, You won't have time to scale, you will be the biggest barrier for further scaling. Second of all, you will be overwhelmed and stressed. And third of all, your team will be overwhelmed and stressed because micromanaging shows lack of trust.

And when, as a leader, you show lack of trust, you're demotivating your people. Your people want you to trust them. They want to do a great job, but it's hard to do when you're hoovering behind their shoulders. You're doing the work for them. You're fixing stuff. You're teaching them that there's no point for them to even make any [00:27:00] effort because the boss is going to come and do the work for them. When you're actually overseeing your teams, you're empowering them to take decisions within their guidelines you give them you're empowering them to be creative and innovative to come up with the ideas and that's very motivating and fulfilling therefore they will stay with you as long as possible and they will help you achieve the goals you want to achieve.

Other couple pitfalls that I see business owners fall into are Resistance to delegation that of course happens usually in the beginning when you're trying to hire maybe the first couple of employees or expand beyond the one or two employees that you have where you're scared you're treating your business as a baby but when you're like an [00:28:00] overprotective parent whose baby is already 18 years old or 20 years old.

Oh, then they should go on their own and live their life. And you're like no, no. I have to do everything for them still. That's not really healthy and that's not great for the business. Definitely stops the scaling. 

And one last thing is communication breakdown. Just understand that as your business scales and grows from one person to three people to 15 people to 20 people and so on. The way you communicate will have to evolve with it. What has worked for two people is not going to work for 10. What has worked for 10 people is not going to work for 100. 

But I see business owners carry the same processes or the same ways of doing things from one level of scaling to another. That breaks down communication. 

And from my experience, majority of business issues that ever happen are because of miscommunication and [00:29:00] communication breakdown. You want to make sure that communication is smooth. Everybody stays on the same page. Everybody has the ability to, raise challenges, to talk about things, and the systems and processes that will support that will change depending on the size of the team. So your job as the CEO is to find that right balance for oversight and letting people do their jobs for communicating with them effectively at the each stage of the growth. So for example, for us, it was easy to bring Everybody in for training in person. When there was 50 people, we could find rooms and hotels and so on.

Once there was 450 spread. From Atlantic to Pacific, between two countries, the bringing in together everybody for training, let's say, became [00:30:00] impossible. So we had to split that into different groups at different times. And then we had to ensure that the trainers, if they were different, were delivering the same message.

We also had to figure out how to run meetings. So we split it up. Had different meetings for different things, meetings for feedback and, discussing certain things were different from meetings to deliver updates on what was company doing and the new clients or the transition updates 

because the scale of what we were doing were different. Always think is how can I maintain connection with my team and empower them to do the best while also understanding what's happening in the business. How do I keep building trust with everybody from people that I already know because they've been with me for 10 years to brand new people where the [00:31:00] trust is not yet built.

Creating those feedback loops It's all important things and solutions for avoiding the pitfalls that I just talked about. So now you might be thinking, okay, Maggie, you covered a lot of ground here, but where do I start? And of course, where do you start will also depend where your business is. But assuming you're at the solopreneur level and you're thinking to scale at 2025, or at least you're like, you have maybe a couple of contractors and you're thinking to expand.

What you want to do the first thing is create a longer term vision. Yes, of course, you want to build a plan for 2025, but that should come from your two, three year vision. Where do you want your business to be three years from now? And if you know that, now you can determine, okay, what do I need to do this year?

To get that one year, one big [00:32:00] step closer, and then break that down into smaller steps and goals. Then, once you have that, also understand where you are in your business right now, okay? What are the roles of people who are already in it? And if you're the only one, what are you doing? What would be the first thing you would delegate?

What would be the first thing you would outsource? What just makes sense? If you already have a team, review their capabilities. See what they're doing, where they're strong, where they need support, what type of support. I just did that with one of my clients before the new year when they were thinking about Changing and shifting, restructuring their team, and I walked them through in a coaching session of how would that be, and the initial thought that they had was a little bit different to what we came through as a conclusion at the end, [00:33:00] based on the process that I'm just walking you through.

Doing the vision where you want the business to be, then assessing your current capabilities, your current business, and then thinking, okay, what do I need to get closer to my vision? Decide what kind of actions need to happen together. You might need to develop some processes and systems.

You might need to develop training materials. You might need to, restructure how you communicate with your team and implement some meetings in there or, change the way you deliver things. You might need to build some leadership skills because now you have a larger team and you're finding yourself.

You don't know how to make them all work in harmony and synchronicity, right? [00:34:00] And hey, if you need. Any help with that? I can help you in my private one on one coaching with my top CEO formula. This is exactly what we will work on. This is exactly what I, how I help my clients scale their businesses into sellable assets. All you need to do is to book a discovery call with me. I always leave links to my calendar in the show notes so you can go there.

Set up an appointment and let's talk about how you can scale your business in 2025. Have a fantastic week. Bye.