EP # 227 - Build a Sellable Business: The Scale Infrastructure to Hit 7 Figures

One of the top reasons businesses fail? Growing too fast without the right infrastructure.

In this final episode of our three-part scaling series, I'm breaking down Pillar 3: Systems & Scale Infrastructure—the operational systems, financial clarity, time management strategies, and team building approach you need to scale sustainably.

You'll learn about:

• Building operational systems that deliver consistent quality
• Understanding your finances
• Design your CEO schedule and know when to hire
• Create a high-performing team culture
• Build a business that runs without you

I also share my personal burnout story and the "Swiss clock team" I built that operated seamlessly—giving me the freedom to leave corporate and go full-time in my business eventually.

The result? A sellable business that scales without burning you out.

Book a complimentary consultation at stairwaytoleadership.com

Key Takeaways

1. Sustainable growth beats fast growth - Scaling too quickly without infrastructure can destroy your business
2. Three components of scale infrastructure - Operations, financials, and team/time management
3. Revenue ≠ Profit - Track your profit margins, cash flow, and break-even point
4. Document everything - SOPs, client journey maps, and continuous improvement processes
5. Hire strategically - Know when you're too busy, optimize first, then hire
6. Build team culture - Mission, values, and vision should be felt daily, not just written
7. Design your CEO time - Reduce client-facing hours, focus on high-impact activities
8. The compound effect - Small, strategic weekly steps create massive transformation
9. Business that runs without you - The ultimate goal for freedom and sellability
10. Peace of mind matters - Financial clarity + capable team = less stress and anxiety

Timestamps (Optional - Add if Desired)

• 00:00 - Introduction & Series Recap
• 01:00 - Why Fast Growth Can Kill Your Business
• 03:00 - Pillar 3: Systems & Scale Infrastructure Overview
• 06:00 - My Personal Burnout Story
• 07:00 - Operational Systems: Client Journey & SOPs
• 10:00 - KPIs That Matter
• 12:00 - Financial Systems: Beyond Revenue to Profit
• 16:00 - Time Management & When to Hire
• 20:00 - Team Building, Delegation & Leadership
• 24:00 - Energy Management & Work-Life Boundaries
• 28:00 - The Swiss Clock Team Story
• 31:00 - What High Performance Looks Like
• 34:00 - Final Thoughts & Next Week's Preview

Resources Mentioned

• Episode 225: The Three Pillars Every Service Business Needs to Scale to Six Figures and Beyond
• Episode 226: From Feast or Famine to Predictable Revenue: The Client Acquisition Engine
• Book a Complimentary Consultation: htts://stairwaytoleadership.com

Connect with Maggie

Website: https://stairwaytoleadership.com

Transcript

Hello everybody. Welcome to Diamond Effect Podcast, episode 227. Today is our last and third part of a series talking about three pillars of scaling your business. If you are just discovering this episode, I highly recommend you. Listen to the first two parts of the series first, and that's episode 225.

The three pillars, every service business needs to scale to six figures and beyond. Where I talk about the three pillars very quickly and dive deeper into pillar one and episode 226, from Feast Famine to Predictable Revenue, the Client acquisition engine, which is pillar number two. Today we'll talk about pillar number three, and that's when [00:01:00] you start scaling.

You have more and more clients, and then. What happens next? Because at first when we're scaling, we're focusing a lot on lead generations and sales and getting clear on our messaging and positioning and getting even sometimes some of the people in place so that we can generate more and more leads, more and more interest and sign more clients.

But with those clients then comes the responsibility of delivery of your services. And if you don't prepare for that, then that can create a lot of trouble for your business. One of the top reasons why some businesses fail is actually growing and scaling too fast, to the point within the business cannot deliver what it promised to the new customers, and that creates customer dissatisfaction [00:02:00] complaints.

It breaks down, the team behind it, the brand image. Suffers dearly, and some businesses actually can't come out of this victorious. And collapse. You do not wanna do it. You want to also prepare the backend of your business to not only serve all those new clients that are coming, but keep the lighting them and keep so you can keep scaling as a business.

So pillar three is all about systems and scale infrastructure, and you build it a little bit as you go, and that's why you might not want to get too many clients all at once, just because it's very hard then to build that. That's why I am a big proponent of sustainable growth and scaling in a way that you can actually [00:03:00] handle the growth and you can prepare for influx of clients.

This pillar combines operational systems, so the customer journey and the service delivery systems that allow you to serve more and more clients in a way that doesn't strain you. Or your team doesn't burn them out, that automates certain things that keeps your service at the highest quality with a lean infrastructure where you keep your operational cost, reasonable, right?

It also includes financial systems, so optimizing your profit, right? Because sometimes, again, businesses scale too fast, so they start throwing money. To just deliver what they promised to the clients without really thinking about the cost management and they become non-profitable. So even though the revenue is growing, their profits start [00:04:00] declining and they start losing money.

And that's definitely what you don't wanna be doing because that is very shortsighted and that could bankrupt your business. The second part of that pillar is. The time management and schedule design for you as the CEO and as you hire and train people for that, it's very shortsighted, again, to be working like crazy yourself or your team.

It will burn out. You will burn out or they will burn out. And in the long term it's gonna hurt you. And then the last part of it is, of course, team growth. So hiring, training, delegation, and leadership development. First, your skillset as you're hiring and growing your team. And then as the team grows, maybe developing inner leaders that can become supervisors, operations, management managers, [00:05:00] and others.

And I wanna share with you my own personal story of burnout because ultimately it did come from the company that I worked with growing. Pushing for growth to the point where it neglected getting ready for that growth. And even if in their sales process, they neglected preparing the resources for that growth.

And when the clients came and the contract came, we weren't ready. But we also didn't have funds to expand the delivery system, to cater to the clients and to deliver what was promised. And what that led to is not only my personal burnout and I wasn't the only employee I burned out at that time.

There were multiple, but it led to almost a collapse of a line of business. [00:06:00] To the company I worked with, they did save it because they realized if they don't do something. It's gonna be much more costly. But it also led to unhappy, dissatisfied client loss of one of the bigger contracts that was gained at that time and really losing a lot of.

Good faith and, good employees in the process, the best employees who actually cared and gave their best, even though they felt like they were set up to fail, and because of not having the foresight and not preparing for it.

What are, let's say, the operational systems that you need to set up as a scale? So we talked about a client journey. You want to map out your client experience and from when they meet you. So marketing and sales, and we talked about it during pillar two, but then when they pay and start, you start onboarding them.

Whatever [00:07:00] industry you're in, whether it's your financial industry, health and wellness, you wanna map out every touch point that your client has with you and think about what do they need for them to understand that you're doing the best work, you're delivering the service, what kind of results you need to deliver at each touch point, and even think about how can you.

Over deliver, right? And they create that service excellence when the client is delighted and very happy. On those touch points, you also want to document. All the standard operating procedures. So as you map out that journey, you wanna document that and also add that every touch points, every time, you know you're delivering service to the clients.

And so on each step you want to have a process for that because of course, as your business skills, you're not gonna be the only one delivering that service. You'll be hiring [00:08:00] people to do that with you or for you, and you want them to. Understand how things are done in your company to understand the culture, the mission behind it, the value behind it, and you igra that into those standard operating procedures.

You also want in your operations. Create a continuous improvement mindset and culture, and that comes from couple of different things. Having team members and yourself looking at every project, every client complaint, or every client prays, and learning from that and thinking. What went well, what didn't?

How could we have done it better so we could have avoided the complaint or minimized the challenges or how did we , delight at that client? What are the things that we've done that are not yet documented that we can include in [00:09:00] keep doing for all the clients? And so that's like an ad hoc learning and just improving the processes as you go.

And also having, discipline of reviewing some key processes at least once a year. And looking what has changed, what needs to be improved, what you've learned, because you are not gonna pick up everything just learning on the go. Sometimes we're busy, we forget, and so on. So having that discipline of a once a year review will also allow you to continuously improve, not only on things you can actually get better and fix certain challenges, but also.

Keep doing the things that are working even better and better. And last part of the operational systems, it's also having KPIs. So key performance indicators that tell you that the clients are happy or that [00:10:00] are allowing you to know when potentially challenges might come the clients.

Satisfaction, and therefore loyalty isn't the levels that you want. They always tie, those are always KPIs that end up tying to your financials and even your KPIs for marketing and sales because for example, if your client's satisfaction or loyalty rate is dropping, you know that it will negatively affect your.

Financials, right? So if you have systems in place, when you're checking that and you know your goal is to be at 98, 90 5%, 98, 90 9%, and you're seeing it dropping in your 92, it'll negatively affect your financials. For example, in my corporate world, we also knew that. If we had technicians who were going into the buildings on a regular basis [00:11:00] doing maintenance and doing certain work.

And part of their process was always before they started a new work to. Greet the customer and meet with the person who submitted the request or meet with the manager of the building, if that was a preventative maintenance or something that the client didn't have to proactively, log in or call in.

And we knew that when we were tracking that and that wasn't happening. That would decrease customer satisfaction, that would create an element of surprise in the building saying, oh, what is this guy? What are they doing? And that would increase the complaint, percentage. And we were, for example, monitored on the complaints.

And if we had certain, if we surpassed certain allowable. Complaint number, let's say per month or per year, the company can be financially even penalized for those, [00:12:00] right? So there are KPIs in your operations that will tie to financials and that will also affect your client return rate or loyalty, the referral rate, and so on.

So you want to figure out what that is for your business and your clients and track the most important ones that will tell you and indicate whether you're going in the right direction or in the wrong direction. Then let's move on to financial systems. So at this point, as you're growing and scaling, and if you don't have a bookkeeper yet, you should hire one.

Bookkeeping is one of the things that you wanna delegate as soon as possible, so you have properly set up your p and l. So profit and loss statements, you can track your cash flow, you can start doing some predictive analysis, what kind of income you're predicting. To receive based on the orders, [00:13:00] based on the quotes that are there or whatever.

So that as a CEO, you start looking at the financial numbers and be able to make certain decisions. You can set financial goals and see how you're tracking and be creative in achieving those goals, right? Because if you know how you're tracking, let's say you have a financial goal for half a year and three months in, or four months in, you're below that, you can always make certain proactive decisions to bringing new clients or create certain bonus.

Create something, be creative, right? To bring in the money that you think you will be lacking if you just continue doing the same thing which you've been doing. So this will also allow you to understand your profit margins, right? Understand that. Only growing revenue does not always translate in growing profit.

I always say, [00:14:00] what's the point of working hard and growth and scaling if you are not benefiting from it? If you're just, working and hiring people and so on, but that doesn't translate into profit of your business, is that really worth the effort there? The hours that you put in, right?

So you need to understand your profit margins, your break even start setting some targets. Also, what, as your business scales and your revenue scales and your profit scales, you can start also thinking even more into creating cash reserves for your business, right? Because you will have. Still fluctuations in revenue.

Every business has certain fluctuations in revenue or unexpected expenses, or maybe you want to invest and you decide that you wanna hire. An employee that you didn't plan in the [00:15:00] beginning of the year, if you have cash reserves that can help you either bridge the cashflow problems or cover the unexpected expenses and so on.

So you wanna start building that up, and you wanna make sure that you pay yourself consistently. So in the beginning, some business owners choose not to pay themselves in their businesses, especially if you have other sources of income, but you are not growing your business to just.

Reinvest everything, right? Unless you really have other sources of income and everything you make in your business is just to reinvest and you're okay with it. But from my experience, that's not the case for majority of business owners, right? You grow your business so that also you have a source of income for your personal expenses, for your family, and so on.

So you want to start being more strategic and more consistent in how you pay yourself. And that's what we [00:16:00] also work on in that third pillar. And then time management, delegation, and team building. So let's start. Then the next thing is team building and delegation, right? Figuring out your hiring roadmap, when to hire, who to hire, contractor versus employee, full-time, part-time.

How do I create job descriptions for each of those? Who do I need first? Creating onboarding and training materials, documenting the processes for that, creating, whether it's videos or checklists or whatever, your new employees need to be successful in the roles to help you grow your business, to take work away from your plate, not add to it, because definitely if you have wrong.

Team members in place, they will add to your workload, not take away [00:17:00] from it, a high performing team member, and then team will take away from your workload and will free your time. For you to focus on things that only CEO should focus on. And that of course, doesn't happen from day one. When you hire somebody, you need to train them, you need to mentor them.

But within three to six months, depending on the role, depending on what they're responsible for and the company, if you have the right person and you train them properly. They will take away work from you and actually with their ideas and their skill sets will help you keep growing and scaling your business.

Building team culture, it's so important and so often neglected and forgotten, and small businesses, right? So bringing your mission, values, and vision and connection. To your clients and your competitive advantage [00:18:00] as something that you feel, and you talk about almost on a daily basis, that your team buys into it.

That they're just not just slogans or some document you wrote two years ago and even forgotten that it exists. That builds into your competitive advantage. Clients can feel when businesses hit teams that are tight that row in the same direction that are on the same page where there's no mixing signals being sent by the owner versus the employees that can be felt at this subconscious level.

So building your team culture once you start hiring and having a team is critical. And then of course as your team grows, then developing some team leads or operations managers. So mentoring your people within. I always found that to be a great strategy whenever you can, [00:19:00] rather than hiring from the outside because it shows your team members that they have some career progressions, so would boost their.

Loyalty. It boosts longevity. And for you, you have that opportunity to have employees who are super skilled and they know your business inside out, right? Because they learn from the beginning, from the entry-level positions, two managerial positions, those who are the best employees. I find from my experience, whenever possible, that's not always possible, but whenever possible.

And then of course, building up your leadership skills and how you lead your team in terms of building that trust and building the effective communication and having systems and processes that are not. [00:20:00] Prescriptive enough where people don't have ability to be creative and innovative, but that provide proper guidance and boundaries, that your people operate within better are flexible enough for them to bring in that creativity, to bring in that innovation.

And that takes leadership skills to create. Of course, having also a performance management.

Process that allows you to recognize your best employees and recognize all the employees for things that they're doing great and coach them on things that they need to improve on, right? And that really also ties into quality control with the service delivery systems. All of that is needed as you're scaling, so it might. Even if right now it might sound overwhelming, it's like a lot of things to do. Just know that all of that happens gradually, or at least [00:21:00] when I coach my clients and I, have them early enough where we can do it gradually, then it's not overwhelming because you do it as you go.

And of course, as you, hire employees, they help you develop all of that as well, right? Some part of the delegation is also involving them in building all those processes and systems, unless you've never done it and now you have a team on your hands and, you are in that chaos of scaling and everything is falling apart, then you might have to do a lot of work.

I've been there in my own career. It's not impossible, but it's definitely harder and it requires more focus then when you can, when you're proactive about it and you build it sustainably as your business skills, and that's why. How you manage your time, how you manage your energy, and within this, by the same token, how you help your team do that is [00:22:00] so important.

Because you could be spending hours and hours in front of your computer, doing busy work. And not being effective, and not getting things that are the most important things that make the most impact in your business done when you don't have right habits and systems and energy management tools.

When I work with my clients, it's important for me to, for them to have designed their ideal, their weak structure, and not even ideal weak structure, but weeks, that structure that works for them, that helps them be most effective in real life, right? So whatever is,

whatever priorities they have as CEOs. That they do that work every week and they move forward, right? So I teach my clients how to plan, how to [00:23:00] develop those priorities, how to prioritize even within the priorities, right? And the actions that they need to take. How do we work on reducing their.

Personal, let's say onsite client work hours gradually so you can move into more of a CEO role, right? So like for example, right now you might be onsite with the client on every project all the time, but it becomes impossible to do when you have more and more clients and those projects overlap and so on.

You need to trust your team. To deliver services to the clients without you being physically on site or physically doing this service. So learning how to reduce that, how to trust your team, how to set up your team and delegate things so everything goes well, so you can focus more and more on being the CEO and leading the business is very important, and that's part of that [00:24:00] time and management and energy management portion of this pillar.

You want to have established boundaries in terms of when it's time to play right, when it's time to work. We work hard all in, but there is also time for play. And by play I mean rest and recharge and spending time with family, things that fill you up and building your business that way and not letting your business seep into the playtime, the family time.

And I always say to my clients that once you realize that you're too busy and that too busy, meaning either your work time overtakes, your play personal time, or. You actually don't have time to work on your business and be CO. This is the time when you start thinking or maybe even ahead when you're [00:25:00] seeing this is starting to happen, not when it happened and you're already burnt out, right?

But when it starts to happen, this is the time when a first, you need to re-look at your schedule and your calendar and be very.

Discerning in, am I really utilizing my time the best? Do I need to cut certain things and delegate things? If I already have team members? Do I need to be more effective in how I plan my weekend? So on. So getting tighter there and once you do get tighter there and you are still running out of time.

This is now, a sign that you need to hire, that you need to start delegating, right? That maybe it's time to hire that bookkeeper or maybe it's time to hire that va, or maybe it's time to hire the next therapist that is gonna help you serve your clients or the next developer or the next professional organizer, right?

Because if you allow yourself to believe that only you can [00:26:00] do those things you're gonna burn out. You're not gonna scale because you will be that roadblock onto the path of scaling.

So yeah, in pillar three, when I work with my clients, we're really building the operational foundation and financial foundation that allows you to scale your revenue without working more hours. And with clients who are actually satisfied and happy. That also means you're building more profit and therefore more freedom.

You are starting to be able to detach yourself more and more from your business and by detaching yourself, meaning not detaching yourself and not caring and not knowing what's going on in your business, but detaching from the day to day, in and out operations of the business and being more of that visionary and guiding.

Mentor for your team [00:27:00] members, right? And not adding more stress or burning out.

And that comes from really have that financial clarity, understanding, not only your gross revenue or your sales, but also you know your profits margin, understanding if you have any leaks in your money. Having proper bookkeeping, knowing how to read your profit and loss statements, understanding your cash flow, knowing your breakeven point, and then starting to, creating some cash reserves and so you are not stressed over during maybe some slower months.

Getting tied on how you manage your time and energy and how you create that framework for your team members so they also don't overwork and burnout, right? Building that team, strategically and creating culture and atmosphere for them when they can thrive. When you are rewarding the behaviors [00:28:00] that you wanna see and coaching on behaviors you don't wanna see.

And I know from my experience that when you actually have a great tight team running a business, it's so easy. When I was my, director in my last position before I left my business, my team was over 30 people, but. I didn't manage them directly. I had a couple of key players, manager slash supervisors that were very good.

They were so good. They always blew my mind. And with their help and some, analytical team and so on. That team run like a Swiss clock. I really did not have to be involved too much in day to day. I would just, support them, make sure that they had everything, and especially the managers, they had everything that they needed to lead the [00:29:00] team and coach them and help them succeed.

If there was a roadblock that they couldn't deal with, I would help them. I made sure that, everybody felt recognized that we also had fun. And it doesn't mean that I did everything for every single person. It also meant delegation, but just overseeing that, make sure that everybody saw the purpose, how valued they were valued, and yes, challenges occurred, right?

Whether it's was with team members and people, having their personal issues or certain, people leaving and us having replaced some employees and so on. But ultimately, that team made my work easy and that allowed me to focus on higher level activities as an executive. Whether it's helping companies with other projects, whether it's thinking about my, if I wanted to stay, that would allow me to move.

Into another position, but it'll allowed me to quit my [00:30:00] role and start and go full time in my business without having a guild. That team was going to fall apart because I had left, right. The best leaders are those people. When you create team members and when you establish their environments where.

Team can function on a day to day without you, and they're not gonna fall apart because you left. And when you have a business operating like that's when you're able to take prolonged vacation without worrying that something will happen to your business. That's when you can take time off and you can relax and you don't have to check your emails every three seconds on the weekend because things are working the way are supposed to, and the peace of mind it gives you, and the satisfaction is just, I cannot even describe it in words, how powerful that is.

That's how you really feel like high performing CEO, right? Because you know how much money is coming in and going out and how much profit you have. If you [00:31:00] can identify where money is leaking and know how to plug those holes, your true profit margin. So you know when. Clients is coming in, what to expect from the financial perspective of every project, right?

You can pay yourself consistently every month as a CEO if that's what you're doing, right? You have cash reserves so you have a peace of mind for slower months. You make better decisions about hiring, reinvesting in the business marketing like the growth investment. You also feel amazing in terms of your team members.

You know exactly when to hire, who to hire, how to hire the right people. You stop doing everything yourself, which is really good, right? And you can see how building a capable team is powerful and how your business grows so much faster. You trust your team to deliver [00:32:00] quality work without you having to micromanage and redo everything.

You can take vacation, you can get sick, you can focus on growth activities and take on projects right within your business without the core of the business falling apart. And that's how you actually, you are building, you're building a sellable asset. So down the line you have something that you can actually sell, right?

And that's one of the exit strategies you can think of for yourself. And then when you're super high performing in terms of like how you manage your time and your energy.

This is when you experience power of being able to work on your business instead of just in it without the guilt, without the stress that maybe you're missing something while you're working on the business and you see the power of that in the long term growth. And you get to have evenings and weekends and vacation right with that, and you definitely feel [00:33:00] less stress and anxiety over day to day and week.

I remember when I started implementing high performing habits and how I operated every day and every week, the amount of stress that. Was lifted of my shoulders from my stomach. I couldn't believe it. How much better I felt just by being able to manage my focus and be very effective within the hours that I decided I was going to work and with the boundaries that I established for myself.

So that's a lot to take in, but this is pillar three. Yes, it doesn't happen in one day overnight, but when I work with my clients for six months at a time or a year get to implement that in such small chunks week over week that they don't even feel like they're doing much. [00:34:00] But then when they look back, the compound effect of that is astounding.

And that's the power of taking small and strategic steps each day, each week where you don't feel overwhelmed, but you are moving forward in the right direction. And every time you look back, you are surprised and

amazed at how far you've come. In short period of time. So I highly recommend you focus on those things. You implement them as your business skills, as you grow your business. And hey, if you do need help and it's always easier and better and faster with help, then I can help. All you need to do is book a complimentary consultation with me through my website, story to leadership.com, and we can talk about.

How [00:35:00] this three pillar framework could work for your business and map out the journey. And regardless of what you decide, you'll come out of this conversation with so much more clarity because it's gonna be, of course, more tailored to your business. Than even this podcast. So happy week and come back next week.

I have a very interesting and fun conversation with one of my mentees and, serial entrepreneur, so you'll learn a little bit about his journey. And we recorded that podcast in his beautiful studio in a city right next to where I live in Oshawa. So I will post it on my YouTube channel so you can actually watch this episode because it's in such a beautiful setting.

And it's more dynamic than just me talking to the microphone because it's an interview. So come back next week. Thanks for listening. Have a great week. Bye.