Happy Tuesday folks, before you start yelling at me for missing the Monday update, please note that it was Canada Day weekend up north, so we had Monday off…
Let’s jump in:
Growing pains of the week
It was an interesting week on our end at Visto, as we continue to try and scale our immigration tech platform.
As we get busier and onboard more clients, an interesting difficulty slowly creeps in: more clients means more customer success work on the backend. And for a smaller team, or really any growing company, you have that chicken and egg problem.
Which is needing more people/help, but maybe not having the funds (yet) to hire.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good problem to have, but I’m sure most of you have experienced something similar – it’s hard to explain, but the best way I can try, is to think about having “the perfect amount of staff for the business”.
Maybe you have 3 clients, and 1 person (you) are enough to service that amount of clients.
If you get 1-2 more clients, you may be in that “zone” where you have a bit too much work for 1 staff, but it’s a big risk to hire someone else. Or you simply can’t afford to. So you tough it out for a few months, get 3-4 more clients, and hire someone. Now you have 7 clients and 2 staff, and everything is perfect in the world.
But then you get another 1-2 more clients, and your 2 staff are over-loaded… but you’re not quite ready to hire your 3rd staff. You’re back in that difficult “zone”.
But hey – that’s just business. It’s one of the difficult parts of growth, but also good that you are, in fact, growing (as opposed to doing the opposite).
So that’s been our focus of late; how to keep growing, efficiently, while we’re in that “zone of imperfection” from a personnel side – did I just coin a new term?
Consider it patented and trademarked!
Key takeaway: you have to take the good with the bad
Building businesses is awesome and terrible at the same time. Awesome as you grow and succeed, but that growth also causes new pain points that you didn’t have at that earlier stage.
And that’s okay, and is one of the reasons why building businesses is super fun – they evolve over time, always keep you guessing and you have to learn to overcome new challenges as things progress.
Just make sure you’re taking care of yourself so you can navigate the ups and downs…
Book of the week
I’m still reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It’s a big frickin’ book, and taking me longer than normal.
It’s right around 500 pages, but the problem is the pages are huge and there are notes in the margins too – a ton of text! That being said, I’m really enjoying it and hope to be done in a few weeks for a full review.
Oh and don’t miss episode 11 of the Grind Mastermind podcast that just dropped yesterday, on Youtube here (the audio podcast will be up next weekend).
That’s it for me – have a great week, sign up here to get these updates right to your inbox each week, and keep grinding,
– Josh
