Are you Ready for Your Big Break? Or Would Your Business Break?
This is an excerpt from my third book, Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business (Ideapress, 2022). Get instant access to the Free Time Toolkit, and subscribe to the W3 award-winning podcast Free Time to set your time free through smarter systems, with episodes published every Tuesday and Friday.
“Overwhelm is the abundance you asked for.”
— Unknown, via Jasmine Star
Are you ready for your big break? Or would your business break? Would you gleefully ride the wave you have been preparing for, or would your business systems collapse under the crush of surging interest?
One thought exercise I encourage my team to ask regularly is, “Are we Oprah or Tim (Ferriss) ready?”
This is less about magical thinking, waiting for a lottery ticket success shortcut, but rather encouraging an ongoing systems audit by imagining interviews with hosts I admire. Would my team and I be ready to catch the wave of interest and incoming leads that either of their two podcasts would generate, without our systems crashing?
If you scale with sloppy systems, your problems will only multiply. Hence, the adage from Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard, that “More companies die of indigestion than starvation.”
One of Tim Ferriss’s readers labeled this the “hug of death” resulting from outsize traffic due to products he recommends. If the small companies don’t see it coming, they sometimes run out of inventory, servers crash, or they experience other flubs. These are the last problems a company wants to face when meeting outsize incoming demand.
Make it easy and inviting for big (the biggest!) opportunities to come to you. Be ready before the wave, not scrambling or fumbling after the fact. In systems-thinking terminology, this is known as expanding service capacity and addressing limits to success. Service capacity refers to your team’s abilities to meet demand, the maximum level of service production; the latter can occur when achieving market saturation due to your success.
This “big break” thought exercise precipitates at least five categories of questions:
Do you have scalable streams of income that can capture the incoming interest heading your way, without you or anyone involved being the bottleneck?
Can customers purchase courses and services without being limited by your time-for-money capacity? What if 1,000 people were eager to purchase something from you — could you handle that? In terms of revenue streams, are you selling products to support that? What if it were 10,000 or 100,000 people clamoring for your offerings?
Tattoo artist Scott Campbell started minting his designs as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on blockchain technology. With his online marketplace, All Our Best, he experiments with transcending the typical time-for-money exchange, as many tattoo artists are paid by the hour for sittings. In contrast to artists who produce physical assets like paintings, tattoos are more ephemeral; they fade, and can’t be passed on from one recipient to the next.
“Musicians don’t get paid by how long it takes them to create a song,” Scott said in a New York Times interview. “You’d never go to a gallery and think, How long did it take the artist to paint it? I’ll pay him for his time.”
NFTs allow Scott and other artists to receive royalties each time their digital tattoo design changes hands, giving the work life beyond its application onto a human canvas. When someone purchases one of his NFTs, they also get scheduling priority for a tattoo sitting.Are your team and systems prepared to handle this inflow of traffic and interest?
Could your systems for customer service and fulfillment handle ten or one hundred times the load? How can you simplify so that team members with less skill and experience can complete related tasks?
My brother, Tom Blake, is the co-founder of Flexible, a real estate investment company that makes it easy for property owners to sell, partner, or lease on their terms. His vision is to create a successful company that runs on its own, through sophisticated repeatable systems. A question he asks himself when upgrading his operations with scale in mind: “How can we design roles and responsibilities so a virtual assistant can have the same output as a rockstar?”
Prior to documenting his marketing systems for handling leads, it seemed necessary to have experts handle these tasks, ones he paid nearly $150 per hour. With detailed systems and documentation in place, he is now able to work with virtual assistants to fulfill many steps in the process at $15 per hour, ten times less than his initial expenditure. This has a dramatic impact on his bottom line for a central business area, while ensuring Flexible is ready for interest surges.Would you be proud of what people are seeing on your website landing page?
Is there a clear call-to-action to sign-up for your newsletter or one next step to engage further, and is it relevant to the audience coming over? Are your welcome auto-responders fresh and current? Are your about page and bio updated?Is there something special you would like to create for this audience in particular?
One common technique is to say, “Welcome {publication} readers (or listeners),” briefly re-introducing yourself, and offering follow-up content related to what you were featured for on the larger site or show. Perhaps you would like to offer a special discount or opportunity to engage with you further, maybe even setting up a free workshop a few weeks out that this new audience can enroll in to get to know you better. In other words, how can you roll out the red carpet for this group?Are you ready to filter out the scrutiny that an influx of strangers might spark?
Going mainstream requires a thick skin. You will be exposed to new people who do not already know and trust you, who might be having a tough day, or who might decide for no good reason that they don’t like you. Create a plan for moving past, or ignoring, unhelpful criticism from the peanut gallery, people who would rather poke holes in your business than provide constructive feedback, while still making room for your inner circle to point out what you might be missing.
The point of this thought exercise — reviewing these five “big break” considerations — is not to pin all your hopes on one magical savior, but rather to foster an ongoing state of readiness that energetically invites — even courts — opportunities to come your way.
Are you the bottleneck limiting your income potential? Are there areas hiding in your operations where things could break at the worst possible moment?
Think through surges in advance, step by micro-step. Imagine you are running an emergency preparedness drill with your team: Does every person know what to do if and when a big interest wave hits?