It took a little over a year and a half to grow from $1 million in revenue to $10 million. A lot of work happened during that time frame to grow rapidly, but the work done 1-2 years before that set everything up for success.
Quick back story: My first company LIFT Enrichment teaches healthy culinary workshops to students at Title-1 schools, mostly in California, and is now an 8-figure business. I’ve been running it for 14 years. Clinic Assist is a dental consulting company I started 2 years ago to help dentists in Dubai grow and scale their practice. Lots of lessons and principles I created from growing LIFT Enrichment are the foundations of Clinic Assist’s consulting services.
Here are my 8 tips I used to scale to 8 figures. The last one is quite unusual.
1) Create A Fully Built Operations Department (without me)
Selling a client is very important, but once a contract is signed, I don’t get involved with any of the “servicing.”
We have an Operations team that tracks all of the key metrics and will do things with our clients like:
- Schedule workshops
- Communicate with key staff
- Problem solve anything that comes up
- Hire and train the instructors
- Purchase all of the equipment
- Reimburse instructors for groceries
There is an Operations Manager and a full team below that person. This manager reports to me in our weekly Leadership meeting.
The school clients would not
- Call me, because I would direct them to our “Account Coordinator” (aka AC)
- Text me, because they don’t have my cell phone number 😉
- Email me, because…I’d just direct them to the AC
They might cc’ me on emails, but I’d just let the AC respond. In some very rare occasions I might step in and reply.
I took my hands off of the Operations department in early 2023…but I still did all of the sales and that leads us into…
2) Create A Fully Built Sales Department (without me)
In April of 2023, I made a decision to get myself out of the sales department. I was taking dozens and dozens of “First Time Appointments” with potential clients and closing most of them. It was easy, but it was also time-consuming and sometimes boring. Sometimes they would flake or reschedule at the very last minute (similar to what it’s like planning first dates 😉
A buddy ran a similar after-school company and had a really good sales representative. I met her in-person at a conference and was impressed. She was upbeat, passionate and hard-working…and I decided I would get one as well.
I already had a sales assistant in the Philippines who did a significant amount of the sales process for me including:
- Scheduling first time meetings
- Reminding prospects about the meeting
- Sending proposals
- Following up on proposals
- Updating our CRM (we use Pipedrive)
But I still had to do the FTA meetings and make follow-up calls.
We hired our first sales rep based in El Salvador in May of 2023 and within about 2 months he was leading all of the meetings on his own by using the sales script and powerpoint presentation (aka pitch deck)
A few months later he was managing the sales department, including the weekly 75-minute sales meeting composed of sales representatives (they did the full sales cycle) and sale development representatives (aka appointment setters)
It wasn’t even that costly on my end because the sales team paid for itself. I started with 1 sales rep, and now we have 3. I started with 1 sales assistant / aka SDR and now we have 3. The sales manager runs the department and reports to me during our weekly Leadership meetings…which leads me to the next thing to outsource.
3) Delegate the CEO Job
For over a year I told my team at every quarterly meeting that I wanted to have someone else be “President” that wasn’t me. A “President” runs the day-to-day operations and leads all of the higher-level management. You could call this person “CEO” or “COO” or “Integrator,” and it doesn’t matter the title, because the key part was that this person would do everything so I could free-up my time to start my consulting company Clinic Assist to help entrepreneurs in the healthcare space grow their dental practices.
My former Operations Manager wanted this position and after a few months of training, she became the official President in September 2023.
Instead of me running the weekly 90-minute leadership meeting, she did.
Instead of me dealing with lawyers and book keepers and key clients and staff, she did.
Now, we meet once a month for a 1-on-1 meeting, which is 60 minutes.
I attend the leadership meeting once a month, which is 90 minutes.
And I check in and reply on Slack here and there.
That’s it.
I can stay away from everything because I…
4) Check the key numbers OFTEN
These days, I review the 10 Key Metrics to run my business and check the bank account, then go back to work at Clinic Assist.
I have a google sheet and try to see if these numbers are on track (which will be green) or off track (which will be red)
The numbers tell the story, and they tell the truth.
I can ask “Are we having a good month or not?” And most people will say, “Yes!”
But a number says what’s ACTUALLY happening.
This post goes over the 10 key metrics
If anything is off, I can dive in and fix the problem, which usually involves a quick meeting and some to-do items.
Now that everything was delegated, we still needed to ensure our service could grow and scale, while still being exceptionally high-quality.
5) For service companies, recruiting and hiring is its own department
The challenge with a service company is how the “service” requires an entire department to hire and train people.
It’s not going to be my job.
We now have 3 full-time people hiring Chef Teachers, and 3 full-time people onboarding them (which takes about 2-3 weeks per teacher). We also have an HR manager as well.
In March of 2023 we had about 40 instructors. Now we have over 200!
I don’t interview or onboard anyone (but I used to, years ago).
I like to meet them during our Chef Teacher quarterly meetings and share the progress we’ve made.
We could grow to 300 plus, but all of the challenges of managing that team are delegated…which I like 🙂
Honestly, I only like having a handful of direct reports. If it’s any more, I get a bit overwhelmed, but fortunately I can delegate that to…
6) Get A Personal Assistant
Dan Martell, wrote a great book “Buy Back Your Time” His interview with “Chris Williamson” is an easy-to-digest deep dive into his philosophy to delegate a lot of “administrative” stuff off your plate.
In October of 2023, I got a full-time assistant. This person, based in Namibia, Africa, helps do all of the things I shouldn’t be doing like
- Posting to social media
- Replying to emails
- Project research
- Paying bills
- Hiring a full-time maid
- Travel arrangements
By freeing up these tasks, I can now focus even more on the key things at Clinic Assist like writing this lengthy article to help people learn to grow their companies.
And a key part of a PA is to:
7) Protect My Calendar
I like this phrase, “I’m not my boss, my calendar is my boss.” Everything goes in my calendar including: workouts with my trainer, trips to downtown Dubai to run errands, key reminders of to-do items, internal meetings, hangouts with friends, meetings for Entrepreneurs’ Organization Accelerator program of Dubai and so much more.
My assistant and I meet a few times a week to go over the calendar for the next two weeks.
The question I ask myself is “What can I remove?” and “How can I compress all of these meetings?”
I used to schedule meetings on Mondays and Wednesday, preferably between 1pm-5pm my time.
Now, I try to squeeze them all in one day.
Then we went a step farther and we said if anyone wants to “have lunch” or a “quick coffee” I push them back to the END of my work day (which is typically 4:00pm, so I can walk around outside and catch a nice sunset over the Dubai sea).
Also, I aim for zoom meetings so I don’t have to drive anywhere, because driving eats up 90-120 minutes of my time when you factor in driving, parking and arriving early…plus traffic on the way home.
If it’s an in-person meeting, I can meet in the cafe lobby of my building, which is a 10 minute walk and elevator ride from the desk I’m writing this from in my home office.
I came to this choice, I wasn’t getting a lot of value from “quick meetings.” People wanted to meet and talk and get my perspective about some business issue, but very rarely would they take action. I just got tired of it.
If I’m going to spend 60 minutes of my time prescribing you the solution to your issue like “I need a remote sales rep like you!” or “How can I hire an Operations Manager that’s remote like you?” and you’re NOT taking action…I’ve basically wasted my time.
To solve this, I prefer to have people ideally pay for my consulting time, so they have some skin in the game.
Or I can solve most issues in 30 minutes, while walking around the beach.
Life is too short to spend in meetings.
My last point is quite odd.
8) The goal to scale up to 8-figures was not mine, it was from my team.
True story: I told my team back in early 2023 that my biggest goal in business was to have a company that did about $2 million at the top and $1 million in my pocket.
I didn’t see the point of needing more income after that. Doesn’t $80,000 a month sound like enough for ANYONE (single or with a family) to live the highest quality life imaginable?
I would then focus on building other assets, like Clinic Assist, while investing my money and growing myself personally. I could fly my family and friends out and take them on vacation. I could donate to my favorite charities. I could fly business class. I could do (almost) anything.
However, the team, even though it wasn’t that big back in 2023, wanted to GROW LIFT Enrichment. They all received a cut of the profits and their income scaled with higher revenues.
Within a year, the company was growing rapidly. Our goal in 2024 was $5.5 million in revenue, which we hit halfway through the year.
Again, I WASN’T focused on an 8-figure business. To be honest, a small part of me didn’t think it was possible, but once we saw the growth in real time, we knew it was.
We had incredible moments where in one month we did as much revenue as we had in a full year not too long ago.
The team wanted to grow the company and some amazing things happened
A few favorite examples include:
- That sales assistant from the Philippines texted me a picture of how he loved working at LIFT Enrichment and was able to buy his SECOND house.
- Several key members of my time made over 5-figures in a single month! These were people living in South America and Eastern Europe where it’s worth 2-3x the amount it would be in the US.
The future of LIFT Enrichment is bright and we want to scale in a different way next year, by diversifying our clients outside of California. We have about 95% of our revenue from CA, and in the future we’d like that to be about 70% o so we have more security long-term across the US.
Until then, I’ll check the numbers, and focus on Clinic Assist and share tips to help your company.
If you are a clinic and want to get a Free “1 Million AED Clinic Assist Consultation” where I will show you a path to add more revenue to your clinic, book a 10-minute consultation with our team to see how we can help your practice grow.