When starting a business, how much time would you spare for you to know that this business is scalable, or will it just be a waste of time, effort, and resources?

For me, scalability is something that you don't really think about at the starting line. You don't think about that because you don't even know if you're going to succeed. You don't even know if you can stabilize it. So scaling it up is an afterthought. So yeah, I didn't think about how I could scale SEO Hacker up when I was starting out.

In fact, I thought about just having like 10 or 13 people and that’s it. But now we're 50 people. I really didn't think about scaling up. I thought about how I can stabilize it once it's so stable, well, not so stable now because there's a pandemic. But once it is a lot more stable, you think about scaling up. That's the time you think about scaling up. You don't usually think about it when you're starting a business.

When you're starting a business, all you think about is how you can make it stable, secure, how you can pay my people, how you can make sure cash flow is good, revenue is greater than expenses. So when you're five years in the industry, I'd say. So you're no longer a startup because you're five years in, you're in that awkward stage of the business where you think, should you make it grow? Should you stay as is? Is it stable? Is it secure? So I think that's a scale-up stage. That's the stage where you think about scaling up.

And SEO Hacker, I wouldn’t say it's a very scalable business because one manpower is like one client. One is to one, so we need to keep on hiring and we need to keep on getting new clients and it's almost on a one-to-one ratio. A scalable business is a software business where you only have one server, for example, it’s a cloud server and you're serving a hundred thousand people at the same time. That is a very scalable business.

All businesses are scalable. That's a fact. All businesses are scalable. The question is, how fast can you scale it? How fast can you scale it? And how efficiently, in terms of money, in terms of capital and operating expense, how efficiently can you scale it? For a software business or a software as a service business, one server, a hundred thousand people, you can very, very efficiently scale it up.

I mean, your costs could be Php 1.00 and your profit could be Php 100.00. So you could give a 30% discount, it doesn't matter, because you're still making a lot more money. But in a services business like SEO, the ratio is not the same. It's a one is to one ratio if you're a white hat SEO company like we are. So it's not that scalable compared to a software company. But if you're going to compare it to a real estate company for example, then SEO is a lot more scalable than if you're renting out hotel rooms, or if you're renting out condo units, because you can't just keep on buying hotels, keep on buying land and building hotels at a fast rate, I mean, if you're starting out or if you're just five years in the industry. So it's not as scalable.

So it depends on what industry you're in. It depends on what business you have, but all businesses are scalable. It's just a matter of how fast you can scale it and how efficiently you can scale it in terms of OPEX and CAPEX.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack

Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack