There’s Business Amanda, sitting outside a fancy building somewhere, thinking about scalability, probably.
In the business world there’s this obsession with the word “scalable.” If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the idea that whatever you’re building or making, whether it’s an app, an online course, or a physical product, your creation (and by extension, your business) should be built with the future in mind.
Ideally — a future in which you’re making millions and the crowds are going wild.
If you can’t inexpensively and efficiently scale it up, the belief is that it’s not worth building.
I can’t tell you how many thousands of words I wrote about scalability as a selling point for X software or Y service.
I can’t tell you how many times I heard it from my own business coaches, the books I read, and the podcasts I listened to.
It’s an enticing concept, this idea that it’s not only possible but extremely profitable to automate every aspect of your business. It’s VERY promising for the solo entrepreneur: if you’re alone in an office working 60 hours a week to build your business, of-fucking-course you’re going to want to automate as much as you can. You can only do so much on your own.
Before I get into how the hell I went from this tech-focused, scalability mindset to poking holes in paper and sewing my own books in bed at night, I’ll tell you a quick story about how scalability got its hooks in me.
When I ran my writing agency, I was always looking for new ways to do more with less. One of the systems I was most proud of was my content submission tool — a client would fill out a tidy form, then on the internal side the proper people on my team (editors, freelance writers, project managers) would get notified when it was their turn to do a task. Projects would churn through this system and my project manager would oversee it in case it broke, but it worked well on its own most of the time. I was bringing in about $20k per month in revenue with this model, which wasn’t bad for a small business.
Where was I during all of this?
Mexico!
(Just kidding. I’ve still never been out of the U.S.)
I was off making more sales calls, of course! Because if things were set up to scale, it was my job to scale it up. More time means more potential to make more money. And isn’t that what life is all about?
I jest, obviously, but I’ll be real. Who doesn’t want to be a millionaire? Who doesn’t want to be the success story? And as someone who suffers from extreme imposter syndrome, especially as a lady in tech and business, I was especially proud to feel like I was on track to win at this thing.
What happened was I lost touch with my business. I lost touch with my people. I felt like I was pulling a lever every day in exchange for money. Which was exciting at first, then it wasn’t, then I suffered a huge identity crisis and also happened to go through a divorce. A lot of changes at once.
Actual footage from when I used to live inside a computer.
Scalability is important in the sense that you don’t want to run yourself ragged. If you can make something more efficient without doing an equal and opposite amount of harm to yourself or your team, great, maybe try it.
But for me, focusing on scalability was warping my sense of time and damaging my relationships with clients and others. I found myself getting extremely irritated with clients who wanted to get on the phone, or who wanted to get to know me better. I didn’t have time for that. I turned down clients who needed any kind of customization because they would slow down my business model. I probably missed out on some cool projects because I needed to go fast.
Like many business owners, I was living by the mantra that more is better. Growth is good.
But people, I suspect, lean toward wanting “more” because they have no idea how much they actually need.
Do you know how much you actually need? How many clients to sustain your business? How much food in your pantry or calories in your system to make it through the day? It’s my belief that we’re terrible judges of what we actually need, and most of us, even on the small scale of our individual lives, harbor these unrealistic notions that cause us extreme anxiety, create problems that don’t need to exist, and ultimately drive society and the planet toward destruction.
In part two I’ll tell you about the moment I decided to write a very personal story and print and bind the thing by hand, and I promise it ties back to all of this.