Blake Erickson on Why Most Founders Set Goals That Are Too Realistic

Blake Erickson has a theory about why successful companies stop growing, and it has very little to do with ambition running out. In his reading, founders hit a wall precisely because they respond to growth the way that got them there in the first place: more people, more products, more meetings, more systems. Eventually the company becomes so complicated that the complexity itself is what slows everything down.

Scaling.com, the company he co-founded with Ben Hardy, was built to argue the opposite case. It went from zero to 10 million dollars in annual recurring revenue in roughly eight months, which gave the pair an unusually direct test of their own ideas. It now works with more than 2,000 business owners whose companies represent billions of dollars in combined revenue. Erickson is also, with Hardy, the co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Science of Scaling.

He spoke to StartupFortune about complexity, why he thinks most founders set goals that are far too sensible, and the difference between being busy and actually moving.

Can you walk us through how Scaling.com came about?

Before Scaling.com, I spent years building and operating businesses, working closely with entrepreneurs. One pattern kept showing up: talented founders would build a successful company, then hit a wall. Growth got harder. They were working more, hiring more, adding more complexity, but the business wasn't actually getting better.

Ben Hardy and I shared a belief that scaling isn't about doing more of what got you here. At some point you have to rethink the business itself. That idea became Scaling.com. We built it to help established entrepreneurs make that leap, and it took off fast, zero to 10 million dollars in annual recurring revenue in about eight months. That gave us a chance to test these principles on our own company in real time.

What problem does it set out to solve, and who is it built for?

It's built for entrepreneurs who've already proven they can build a business, but have hit the point where what got them here won't get them where they want to go.

Most founders respond to growth by piling on: more people, more products, more meetings, more systems. Eventually the company gets so complicated that growth itself becomes the obstacle. We push in the opposite direction. Get clear on the outcome you want, figure out what actually drives it, cut what doesn't, and build around the few things that can truly scale.

That matters most for owners who aren't wondering whether they have a viable business. They know they do. Their question is how to make it significantly bigger without multiplying the complexity along the way.

How does the book connect to what you are building now?

The Science of Scaling grew out of the work we were doing with entrepreneurs, combined with research Ben had been doing on psychology, goals and performance. We kept circling one counterintuitive question: could setting a much bigger goal actually simplify a business rather than complicate it?

An incremental goal, you can usually hit by optimizing what you're already doing. But a goal that seems almost impossible makes most of your current playbook useless. You're forced to figure out what actually matters, cut the rest, and find entirely different paths forward.

The book lays out the framework. Scaling.com is where we get to apply it with real entrepreneurs. One is the philosophy, the other is the practice.

What was the hardest stretch in building the company?

Probably the stretch where growth started exposing every weakness in the business. Things that worked fine with a small team stopped working. Communication got harder. Decisions slowed down. Hiring mistakes got more expensive. And as a founder, it's easy to end up stretched across too many things at once.

Working harder wasn't going to fix any of that. We had to build better systems, get the right leaders into the right roles, create real accountability, and get disciplined about where our time actually went. In a lot of ways, we ended up applying our own principles to ourselves. Living through that made the work we do with clients far more practical. We'd already felt the same growing pains firsthand.

What do you believe about scaling that most founders would disagree with?

Most founders set goals that are too realistic.

That sounds irresponsible at first. But attainable goals invite incremental thinking. Want to grow 10 or 20 percent? Just keep doing roughly the same things, a little better.

A seemingly impossible goal changes the question entirely. Instead of asking how do we improve what we're already doing, you start asking what would actually have to be true for us to pull this off. Suddenly a lot of what you're spending time and money on looks obviously irrelevant. You need different people, different partnerships, different paths.

So we don't treat a big goal as motivation. We treat it as a strategic filter. The right goal changes what you're even able to see.

What are you most focused on over the next year?

We're in an exciting stretch. Scaling.com has scaled fast, and the community around it keeps growing with it. We now work with more than 2,000 business owners, and the businesses in that community represent billions of dollars in combined revenue.

Our focus isn't just making Scaling.com bigger. It's making the results we help entrepreneurs produce better and more repeatable. That means sharpening the frameworks, the community and the resources we offer, while getting the ideas from The Science of Scaling in front of more people. There's a much bigger group of entrepreneurs out there who've built good businesses but haven't yet realized how much of what they're doing right now is actually holding them back from building great ones.

What would you tell a founder at the start of the road you have already walked?

Get clear on what you actually want to build before you get obsessed with how you're going to build it.

Founders usually work backward. They look at their current resources, team and capabilities, then set a goal that seems reasonable given those constraints. I'd flip it. Decide what you really want the company to become. Make the goal big enough that you genuinely don't know how you'll get there yet. Then let that goal show you what needs to change.

And don't confuse activity with progress. You can be incredibly busy while barely moving. Some of the most important calls you'll make as an entrepreneur are decisions about what to stop doing.

Where would you like Scaling.com to be in five years?

I want Scaling.com to change how entrepreneurs think about growth, period.

The real opportunity isn't building a large company ourselves. It's building a body of ideas, tools and a community that help thousands of entrepreneurs build companies they wouldn't have thought possible before. Do that well, and Scaling.com becomes something bigger than a coaching or education company. It becomes the place serious entrepreneurs go when they're ready to rethink what their company, and they themselves, are capable of building.

Five years out, I want to point to thousands of businesses that didn't just grow because of this work, but became simpler, stronger and more ambitious in the process.

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