Why Simplicity Scales And Complexity Fails In Your Coaching Business By Samantha Riley

Scaling a business requires more than just hard work and grit. You need to shift your identity from an operator to a scalable business owner by building the right foundations. Samantha Riley, a business growth strategist and creator of the Aligned Scale Method™, joins us to discuss how to stop being the bottleneck in your own company. She shares how she built her seven-figure business by prioritizing lifestyle design and creating sustainable systems. We explore why clarity in your messaging, marketing, and sales systems is the key to sustainable growth. Learn how to identify your unique growth stage and move past the plateau that traps many service providers.

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Why Simplicity Scales And Complexity Fails In Your Coaching Business By Samantha Riley

We have a great guest that I hope will convince you that maybe this isn’t the right time for a book. I know you’re probably thinking, “You’re a publisher. You’re supposed to be pushing me to do this,” but we all want you to do it at the right time in your business process. Samantha Riley is a business growth strategist with 30 years plus experience helping establish service providers scale to seven figures on their own terms.

As the creator of the Aligned Scale Method™ and the host of the Business Growth Lab podcast. She helps founders stop being the bottleneck and start being their building for freedom. Building that business around your lifestyle, around being able to manage it in a way that gives a little balance to it. If there are those of you out there who build a business and you realize you’re working a lot. It’s because that’s what we do before we start scaling. Stay tuned for our interview with Samantha.

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Welcome back, Samantha. It’s so great to have you.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

I’m very excited to have you because you and I talked for an hour. It was only supposed to be a ten-minute guide but we ended up like an hour. I want you to share so much because I shared a story about someone who didn’t even have a business set up and I was just devastated. Let’s jump right in. You’ve been building and growing businesses for decades now. How did you first get into the world of coaching and scaling?

The Trap Of Overworking

It’s not something that I found. It found me and that this is a story of so many business owners. I think you’ve got a similar experience. I’ve been in business since the very early ‘90s. I had two little toddlers at home. I was working at a corporation at the time and it wasn’t doing it for me, so I opened up my first business. That first business was in the dance industry. I had a dance studio. Within twelve months, I opened dancewear retail stores. I was in the industry for twenty years. At which point, I did a little pivot. I went into personal training, health, and wellness.

One of the parts of my business was running retreats. They were retreats on wellness, which included mindset and creating a life that you wanted. Let’s face it. If we’re in a life that we hate, it’s very hard to be healthy. Our life is an ecosystem. One of the questions that comes up time and time again is, I hate my job. How do you start a business? I started mentoring people and it got to the point where I almost had more business clients than I did health and wellness clients. I said to my coach at the time, “What should I do with this?” He looked at me like I had three heads and went, “Isn’t it obvious?”

It’s so bizarre because it wasn’t obvious to me. As soon as he said that, I thought a little bit silly and went, “Okay. Let’s do that.” That’s how I started coaching people. I’m so glad that it found me and it’s the way the universe works because I love business. I love the business behind the business. I love building businesses. I love starting a business. I love talking about business. I could talk about business for three weeks without taking a breath with marbles in my mouth. I love everything about it. I started coaching back in 2011 and have been doing it ever since.

You said something cool there. By the way, fitness is a very hard industry to get ahead in because it’s very competitive. I can imagine you’re good at it if you were that good in a competitive industry like that. You said about loving your job. I find that is the best part of coaching because I can choose my own hours. I like to play golf every Friday. It’s one of those things where you do have to think about, how do I want that? That has to be one of the first things. What is that lifestyle you want to create? When I first started, I worked 12 hours a day and  7 days a week. By the fourth month, you’re just burned out.

Totally. This is such an interesting conversation because that is one of the very first pieces that I get people to do. It’s like, what’s your life look like? Why do I do that? It’s because I’ve lived the opposite. I was the twelve-hour-a-day girl that works seven days a week. I was just creating some content. I remembered back to the moment my very first coach said to me, “I’m looking at your calendar here. I’m a little bit confused. Where’s the you time? Where’s the hobbies?” I went, “What me time? What hobbies?” They’re not there because I don’t have either of them.

That’s when he said to me, “Unless you do something different, you’re not going to be able to do it.” I’ve been doing it like this for 20 years or like 15 years at that time. I had three children. I was pretty burned out but I was blind to it. I’m such an ambitious person that I hadn’t realized how rundown I’d got because it felt normal. People talk about, “You know burnout.” I hadn’t realized that I was that exhausted because, to me, it was just normal. My story is a little bit different to the way people normally talk about that.

Once I realized how different your business is when you look after yourself first, then everything changed. That’s how I grew my business quickly. That’s why the very first thing I asked my clients is, “What do you want your life to look like?” Create around that. Does that mean that you don’t ever have times that you hustle in your business? I don’t think so. There’s something like a launch or a funnel that you’re trying to get set up in a hurry or an event.

There are times where you have to work a little bit harder. Generally, in the day-to-day, everything can be created around how you want it. To your Friday golf, we look after our grandson every Friday. When I say we, it’s me and my husband. Do I work Friday? Grandson, number one priority. I would rather watch school play and sing nursery rhymes with him than anything else in the business because that’s everything for me. If we had to look after him on a different day, we would move things around. If we didn’t have a business set up correctly from the beginning, if we didn’t have the foundations there, we wouldn’t be able to do that.

That’s okay. That’s my every Wednesday afternoon, my grandson.

Isn’t it the best?

You can give them back when you’re done.

I know. You can spoil them without thinking, “He’s going to be naughty later on.”

I just got in trouble for spoiling. My daughter was literally like, “No more toys, mom. None.” She’s mad at me.

This evil man has toys every week.

I know. Sorry, not sorry.

Exactly.

Growing Versus Scaling

People often distinguish between growing and scaling a business. How do you define the difference, especially with coaches? I have some coaches that have been in business for maybe six months and they’re like, “I’m ready to scale.” It’s like, you barely have a business.

Funny you should say that because I was at a dinner a couple of years ago. There was someone that was telling me that she was just starting her business, and I was like, “This is great. Congratulations. I’m so excited.” She went, “I was looking at a whole heap of coaches, but they were not right for me. I was looking for a scale coach.” I’m like, “You’re in a startup.” It’s very different. There are five stages of business. One is startup.

In the startup, this is to get everything going. This is the, “I need leads. I need sales,” and pretty much that’s all you need to focus on at that point. Obviously, messaging comes into it and all of the other pieces but that’s what I would consider like part of that marketing piece. Your messaging, marketing and sales. That should be 80% of the time when you’re in the startup phase. You move into the operator phase. The operator phase is where you’ve got your first clients. You’ve got your proof of concept of your offer. You know that works but you’re still doing everything yourself.

You’re still in the build phase or growth phase because it’s still about getting more clients. You can’t move into the scale phase until you’ve got yourself to a point where you’re financially stable. Scale is about creating the systems, replicating them and bringing the team in. It’s about making more sales without putting in more time. That’s what scale essentially is. You can’t do that at the startup phase. You can start at the operator phase.

At the startup phase, don’t start getting your systems into place until you’ve done the thing. You’re spending your time on the wrong activities because until you’ve done something, you don’t know if it’s going to work. I’ve seen plenty of people trying to get these systems set up before they’ve done them manually and it’s just such a way of time. How many times in our life, not just at business, but our entire life. Do we think something’s going to go one way then you do it and go another? That’s business. That’s how it always is. You have to get it done before you can scale. Scales are about making more money without adding in more time. It’s the third stage.

What are some of the signs that approaches growing but not scaling? You might have answered part of that, but a little deeper into that.

You’re talking about the actual phase?

They think they’re scaling but they’re just growing.

Maybe you haven’t landed on that one offer. That’s your main offer. Maybe you’re still trialing things. It’s like, “I’ll try this and see if it works.” Maybe it’s that you haven’t got your simple systems in place. Simplicity scales and complexity fail, but there’s this trial-and-error phase. At scale, it’s about almost like clearing the deck and going, “We’ve tried all these things. What is just the one thing that we’re going to keep in this that brings someone through the pipeline or the funnel or a workflow?”

The Roller Coaster Revenue Cycle

If you are not in a position where your revenue feels stable, if it’s like a roller coaster, then that’s a growth phase issue. That’s not a scale issue. The roller coaster income generally happens because someone goes all in on marketing. They get some leads. They sign some clients and then they go into delivery and let the marketing and the sales drop off. All of a sudden, they’re like, “No money coming in. I need to do more marketing and sales.” We start seeing the leads come in, sign some clients, and go into delivery.

I see it happen all the time. People can be in that process for years. You need to be aware. If that’s what you’re doing, then you need to get a marketing system in place. Marketing is the foundation of everything in your business. People say it’s the sales of the life blood of your business. If you don’t have marketing, you can’t make sales. That marketing needs to be built like a conveyor belt in your business. You’ve got repeatable revenue coming in like little people and a little conveyor belt. We know when they’re coming. We know how much they’re going to spend. We know what their lifetime value is. We know what our income or our revenue is going to be next month. That is when you start to get that into place, we’re heading into scale.

When I was in real estate, that’s the number one thing I saw with people over and over. They were like, “I had four clients,” and then they do nothing because they’re working on getting them through the deal. When someone comes to you and says, “Sam, I hit seven figures,” what’s the first question you asked to clarify, whether they’re truly ready to scale?

Identifying Your Bottleneck

They’re all far out. I usually ask what their business looks like. It’s within that one question. There’s lots of little pieces. Generally, I’m asking what their offer is. I’m asking where their last three months of clients came from and what systems they’ve got in place. What I’m looking at because they don’t normally know is where they’re the bottleneck in their business. That’s the general, big piece. Where are you the bottleneck in your business?

Wherever those bottlenecks are, you can’t scale there, and they’re the first places you need to go. Are you the bottleneck in marketing? Are you the bottleneck in sales? Are you the bottleneck in delivery? You can’t scale past the million dollars if you’re doing all the delivery. It’s just too hard. You’ll burn out. Are you the bottleneck with your team? I see this a lot where people are exceptionally exhausted. It happens usually around the $300,000 mark a year. It happens way before a million. I’m talking specifically about service-based businesses here because with product-based businesses, the numbers are different.

They get to about this point and they hire someone. Usually, a VA or one person to help. They then get frustrated because they’re like, “That person is sitting there waiting to be told what to do or they keep coming back because they’re saying, ‘How do I do this? I need your approval on this. Where do I go to find this.’” What the founder or the business owner finds is that, all of a sudden, not only are they dealing with their own work. They’re dealing with the pressure of this other person and having to keep them going. I can talk about that deeper if you’d like me to because that’s a very specific problem, but that’s a big problem that is you need to start scaling. It’s probably the biggest spotlight that there’s a scale issue.

When I had a scaling coach, that was exactly where we got stuck and how hard it is to let it go. I swear, the coach. I thought I would tear up on Broadway in the new Frozen, because every meeting was like, “Let it go.”

There’s a big mindset shift. That’s probably what it is.

It was, but it is because that’s where you find out why you’re the bottleneck and you don’t want to be. I remember saying to him over and over. I was complaining about the new VA and they don’t do it the way I do it. He was like, “Is it getting done?” I said, “Yes.” He goes, “Why do they have to do it your way?”

What if their way is better? There’s so many pieces to this. I was working with one client who had come out of one business and she was starting the next business. It was only a small pivot, so it was still the same industry. The reason she’d let one of her businesses go is because she had a team member that made a lot of mistakes. She just wanted to close the door on that because there was stuff that was following her because of that. She wanted to shut the door and start again.

Already, I could see like three months in. It was an industry she was already in. She was growing quickly and I said, “You need help.” She’s like, “There is no way I’ll hire staff again.” We just had one session on reframing. I said, “Let’s talk about a team.” It’s not staff. It’s a team. It’s someone that’s on the team with you. Think of yourself like an elite, a basketball team or football team. You can’t do it on your own. There needs to be other people but let’s talk about how it can be reframed and dealt with differently. How can you be on board that person? Even going back. How do you find the right person so that you don’t have that problem again?

How are you on board? What systems are in place? What expectations, accountability, KPIs are in place right from the beginning so that team members understand this is what we’re doing here? How can you start to understand that you’re not handing off tasks and just saying, “Do this do this?” They’re always coming back to you saying, “What’s next?” How can you say, “This is the big picture? This is the project that we’re working on? This is how we know at the end of the project, whether we’ve hit our KPIs. This is how we know if we haven’t and getting clear on that.

It empowers the team member to not come back to you, to research it, to know what the KPIs are. Also, for you as a business owner to check in like, “What’s been done this week? Where are we at?” So that they are accountable for that project. Let them understand, “Don’t come to me and ask a question.” Where are you able to go and find the answers? Where do you not want me to go to find the answers? It’s about being exceptionally transparent, but also understanding that the way that you’ve been doing things in the operator stage, which is just doing the things, doing the tasks, is not going to take you through to the scale stage. It just doesn’t work.

I learned that when I was working on it. You established a service for founders to install something you call the Aligned Scale Method™. What is it in simple terms?

The Aligned Scale Method™

In super simple terms, it’s very simple, do this, then that.” What a lot of people do is they have an issue in their business. They see a symptom and they might not necessarily go to the right core problem to solve that symptom. It’s very simple. It’s getting clear on your messaging and positioning. Getting your marketing system in place. Having a sales system that converts. Having systems and processes and workflows so that everyone knows what they’re doing and bringing in the right team. It’s that simple.

The reason it’s in that order is as I said, you might think, “I don’t have enough people coming through the door,” and you might hire a sales coach to get better at sales. In actual fact, maybe your messaging is not that great. It does not matter how much you spend on that sales coach or how much time. It’s still not going to fix the problem. You need to go in order and do with each constraint in order to be able to scale as quickly as possible.

I dealt with someone a while back. You have to be intentional about it, too, because when she came in, she didn’t have a calendar. She kept saying, “I need more leads.” I was like, “You don’t have a calendar where people can book.” She goes, “I want to just work when I want to work.” I was like, “Do you have a job?  Put that in the calendar.” It’s a very odd conversation. You have to be very intentional about what you’re doing when you build those systems, too. We mentioned that balanced lifestyle. That does not mean that you need to do anything you want whenever you want on it.

To that point, you can’t read the label from inside the jar. If you need more sales and you can’t figure out why. You probably can’t see it because you’re in it or you may not have been there before. Find someone outside the jar that can see the label, that knows where you’re trying to go to help you, to say, “You need a calendar, and that’s okay. The way you build your calendar is only put the hours that you’re available and put the other hours.” It’s not that hard but to that person, it probably didn’t make sense because she didn’t know it was even available, so get help.

Last question. What do you do when you run across a business where the business is running them? They’re not running the business because that would be a big bottleneck too.

Taking A Step Back

That’s the second stage. That’s the operator phase. They feel like the business is running them. They’re being pulled from pillar to post. They’re unable to take a vacation because they can’t let it all go. At that point, you need to take a step back. I had a coach that helped me do this because, again, you can’t read the label from inside the jar, but it is about taking a step back. The very first question to ask yourself is where are we heading? What is it that I’m trying to build? What is it that I want my life to look like? At that point, where the business is running you, you’re so deep in it that you can’t see the forest and the trees.

It’s important to stop and take a step back and say, “What am I trying to build?” If you’re trying to create something or you’ve started to create something that doesn’t feel great, you will subconsciously sabotage yourself because you don’t grow into pain. You may not even be aware that this is happening to you. That’s where you start. From there, it’s just about one at a time going through and ticking the boxes. How’s our messaging? Are we going to the right client for what we’re trying to create? Do we have the right business model? Are we positioned or are we positioning ourselves in the right place in the marketplace and then going through?

Once we’ve got all those things in place, what’s our marketing look like? It is about being very logical, very systematic, and paying attention to your KPIs. When you’re looking at your KPIs, it will show you where the gaps are. It is about taking a step back and getting exceptionally logical and exceptionally truthful with yourself about where you want to be and where you are heading.

That is so true. I was part of the Mastermind where the same woman would show up once a month for our call. It was the same thing, “I need to let go.” What are the signs? If you’re someone who is in that operator phase, what are some of the signs that people would be able to identify that would be like, “I need to do something here?”

They may have roller coaster income. We talked about the roller coaster. You know you’re the bottleneck. You can feel it because if you take your hands off the wheel, you stop moving. You might not be able to take a vacation. You might be canceling dinner with your family. You might be canceling plans because you just can’t step away. That would be another thing. Number three, you’re probably noticing things fall through the gaps. You feel like you’ve got all the plates on the sticks and you’re trying to keep them all spinning and they’re coming off.

You might not be following up on leads. You might be forgetting to onboard a client properly like they’re missing what they need. There’s all sorts of things that you could be missing. Maybe you do have a team member, and you feel like you’re managing them, and it’s making your life harder and not easier. Maybe you feel like you need a team member but you can’t stop for long enough to hire someone or you don’t know exactly what it is that they would take off your plate.

That’s some of the things that you would notice but generally, the symptom that you’re experiencing is that your revenue has plateaued no matter how hard you work. If you’re at that point, something needs to change because if your revenue isn’t going up no matter what you’re doing, then you’re stuck. It doesn’t matter how many more hours you work. Nothing’s going to change except, you’re going to burn out, so that’s a change.

I’m telling you. The reason you need to coach during this time period is because you’re training. You’re going to go through some significant growing pains when you’re doing this. My poor coach was so receptive because I was like, “I don’t have time for that.” I was just whining all the time, but I whine and then I do it. It’s not like I just wine and give up. That’s why you need that coach. Venting helps. How can I do this? I’m not seeing the way? Helped me let go. You’re going to go through all of those phases, but you come out the other side better. How long would you say those growing pains last when you work with people?

It’s like how long a piece of string is. It depends on the person. The client that I was talking about before that we talked her into getting a team member rather than having staff. She came out the other side within three months. When I came out the other side for those three months, it was a lot of frustration. Exactly like you’re talking about, but she got it quickly. There’s other people that they grip on so tightly to their old identity that it takes longer.

The Identity Shift

To that point, this is what I wanted to say because you were saying it but I wanted to give it a label. The biggest shift moving from the operator stage like through the scale stage is the identity shift. That is the biggest thing that needs to move. It’s your identity. All of the other things, such as tactics, strategies, processes and workflows, are easy once you’ve taken on the identity of the million-dollar business owner, the scale stage business owner.

It is difficult. I don’t like it that coaches come on and say, “It’s easy.” It’s not easy. You’re growing and anytime you grow, it’s going to be tough, and the identity of it all. You have a free gift for somebody who’s interested in looking into this. Can you tell us where to find it?

I have a quiz because I talked about the aligned scale stage and getting things in the right order and people make the mistake of going to the wrong thing. That slows you down and it costs you money. If you want to hit that seven-figure mark or you want to scale past that seven-figure mark, the fastest way to do it is to figure out where you are now and what the next three things are. It’s very action-oriented. It’s a free two-minute quiz that will identify what that constraint is and give you the next three moves so you can move through a lot quicker. Go to SamanthaRiley.global/Quiz.

Samantha, thank you so much for being on the show. You guys, I hope this helped tremendously because we do have so many coaches that read.

Thank you so much.

Important Links

• Samantha Riley
• Samantha Riley on LinkedIn
• Business Growth Lab
• SamanthaRiley.global/Quiz
• Free 7 Figure Roadmap

About Samantha Riley

Samantha Riley is a business growth strategist with 30+ years experience helping established service providers scale to seven figures on their own terms. As creator of The Aligned Scale Method™ and host of the Business Growth Lab podcast, she helps founders stop being the bottleneck and start building for freedom.

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