Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: What in the world does grow without hiring even mean? Is that a thing? Oh, well I want to go build a venture scale business and I wanna make it a thing that I can sell one day. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's get into it, because here is the deal. Very few people ever build a sellable business. I know, 'cause I've been part of that before and I've mentioned this in other episodes as well.
[00:00:25] Ken: And if you aspire to do that, I am not suggesting not to pursue that path. But if you even want to get to that spot, you have to do a bunch of things in order to be able to get to the spot of having an asset that you can sell or having a business you could sell. And depending on the business, you're also gonna get different multiples.
[00:00:43] Ken: So let's put that aside for a minute and just talk about what in the world grow without hiring even means. And a lot of people come to work with me because that resonates with them. Even people who have employees are inspired and [00:01:00] intrigued by what it means to grow without hiring. And often cases, I talk to those people because I have been you before, and they will say, I am living to feed the machine.
[00:01:10] Ken: I have a team of whatever number of people, but I feel like alls I'm doing today is managing people and trying to keep up with payroll and dealing with clients. And I actually am not doing the thing that I started out with in this business.
[00:01:24] Ken: So I think it is helpful for you to understand how I even got to this spot myself in my business. Today I talk about this phrase or concept that I created called the Remote Solopreneur, but I don't really care if you have team members or hires.
[00:01:40] Ken: I believe that it is about a way to grow, not a label, not an identification. You've probably heard me say in the past that I had a team, had a large team, and I could argue that I still was a solopreneur, a remote solopreneur because I was the sole owner of the business. Again, we use the [00:02:00] word sole proprietor.
[00:02:01] Ken: And I was the rainmaker and a lot of the systems that were in place, I created those systems. Again, loved the team members, but I was able to, in that business, grow to seven figures a year before I actually even had any employees,
[00:02:16] Ken: zero employees.
[00:02:17] Ken: I did have some contractors. I did have some full-time contractors at some point in that business, and this goes back.
[00:02:23] Ken: Into the late two thousands. I've been part of agencies though my entire career, and it really came down to finding the lane where people said, Ken, we want to work with you and your business because we believe that you are the expert, the go-to resource when it comes to building. At first it was iPhone applications, then extended to Android.
[00:02:46] Ken: Then extended to the best user experience and so on and so forth.
[00:02:50] Ken: Not because you had a big team, Ken, or because you had the best website.
[00:02:55] Ken: And over time, I did invest into those things, maybe actually almost [00:03:00] over invested in them. I was very concerned for a while that I was too much of the brand and I was too in the limelight because I did write a book. By O'Reilly about applications and people did come to the business because of me, and I was concerned that I couldn't scale it because I couldn't scale myself enough, even with the systems that I had in place.
[00:03:20] Ken: But I did grow that business remotely when everyone said you couldn't do agency life, you couldn't do agencies remotely. And I did get it to seven figures with. Myself and really just a handful of contractors. Then I had more contractors. Then it did start to make sense for me at some point to convert some of those people to employees.
[00:03:40] Ken: And then I moved mostly to more of a employee model with some contract help as needed. But I did over invest into stepping back away from being the guy to over-investing probably in the brand. And over investing into people where I have shared a lot about how my payroll, you know, [00:04:00] balloon to multiple hundreds of thousand dollars a month.
[00:04:03] Ken: So part of why I do what I do today, and part of why I have these conversations with you is precisely because I have been to the other side of it, to the extreme, either personally and or having advised others. But it becomes this big, massive vehicle that is hard to undo. And again, I still talk to some of my employees from that time.
[00:04:24] Ken: I love them, miss them, value those times together, but we're just living in a very different world. Talked about this again in the past. We're living in a world now where having an agency. Where even having any number of people, if you don't reach a certain critical size or mass, it's actually almost working against you.
[00:04:45] Ken: I tell people this, when you're gonna go bring that first person on, don't just bring on one person. Be prepared to build out something that might have 15, 20, 30 people even more than that at some point, and I, I'm digressing a little bit, but I'll just finish this point and we'll really get further into what [00:05:00] Growing without hiring means.
[00:05:01] Ken: But the minute that you have someone that actually is an employee, you have to start thinking about culture. You have to start thinking about policies. You have to have hr. Obviously, some of these things are easier today, like payroll. There's tons of different options out there. There are PS and so forth, but the game changes dramatically the minute you have one person on payroll.
[00:05:22] Ken: So I would argue that. You should be able to get to seven figures for sure and remember that this was 15 years ago, right, that I was doing that. The world today just is completely different. Remote wasn't even accepted then before 2020. You know, it was pushed upon people, a lot of the awesome platforms that are out there for hiring for payroll, the simple ones.
[00:05:44] Ken: I had to work with some very legacy ones. None of that existed. We definitely didn't have ai. Obviously, we didn't even have some of the automation tools and platforms that exist like Zapier and a whole bunch of other options. There were no AI agents, period, right. [00:06:00] Even some tools like scheduling tools like Calendly and Savvy Cal and so forth didn't exist
[00:06:06] Ken: and I was able to do it then. So I am confident that people who are listening to this today. You can get to seven figures without employees or contractors.
[00:06:15] Ken: And it also really depends on the kind of business that you wanna run.
[00:06:18] Ken: So let's just talk about that for a minute too.
[00:06:20] Ken: Certain businesses will require some amount of head count.
[00:06:25] Ken: And I actually challenge people on this on a regular basis. Do you want to pursue that business again, depends on some of your larger goals. Having gone through a process and I did find and got a little bit of money out of an exit, but it wasn't necessarily life changing based on my particular life circumstances, having a larger family where I am in life and so forth, but it definitely helped.
[00:06:46] Ken: But I'm not looking to go do that now. I'm much more interested in controlling more of my time, not managing people, 'cause I've done that for a long time. And so it does also depend on your goals, but there's a lot that could be done independent [00:07:00] of who you are and what you do that doesn't require you to have hands on keyboard work.
[00:07:05] Ken: This can range from SEO content marketers. Ghost writers. I just start with that example because it's really easy to say, oh, well, I have to go write the content or produce the content, or write the posts or do the things, but do you actually need to write all the things? I am not an AI expert.
[00:07:26] Ken: I'm increasingly becoming more fluent in ai. But I've also spent, let's say, a half a day working on something that could take all of my own content and basically create a newsletter or a LinkedIn post that sounds exactly like me, with some very basic modifications. And the people that are coming to you, this isn't a cheat for them.
[00:07:46] Ken: If you build something like that and get them. 70, 80% of the way there and then have yourself, or if you did have some help, even some contract help to edit something to get it to the [00:08:00] feed or to a website or whatever it might be.
[00:08:02] Ken: Let's also look at things like, let's say you were a engineer or a developer. Well obviously in this case I have to go write all the code. I have lots of data on this, but there's better data even than what I have access to that things like co-pilot are really doing a lot of the heavy lifting and it's actually a very similar role to the content person we just talked about where you're actually becoming the co-pilot.
[00:08:28] Ken: The AI is not the co-pilot. Okay, cool. Ky, this is great for those kinds of. Positions, those kinds of roles, those kinds of opportunities. But I am someone who works in financial accounting. I'm a fractional person. I am something obscure, right? That doesn't seem overly generalized. Like those things. I don't care if someone contracts you.
[00:08:51] Ken: Or works with you because of some kind of output element. What I care about is that that is not the sole reason they're [00:09:00] going with you.
[00:09:00] Ken: Please absorb and marinate on that for a second.
[00:09:03] Ken: Hit the back button if you need to.
[00:09:06] Ken: It's okay for someone to hire you for out outputs, but you need to ensure. That they ultimately want to go with you because of the outcomes.
[00:09:15] Ken: So if I have someone who works in something, let's go something obscure, and I actually have a client that does something like this where they help get things through an application process. I won't be overly specific here with a government agency, and they might actually need that person to get more tactically involved and say like.
[00:09:34] Ken: Help us fix these things. But that person also might be able to just advise them and say, Hey, do you wanna work with me and get me super deep involved on these things That just is gonna cost you a lot more money and here's why. You just might wanna work with me more on an advisor level. And they'll say, that sounds good.
[00:09:52] Ken: And you can literally review a document. And again, maybe you build some tooling internally and you are. Personal. You know, let's [00:10:00] talk about it this way. Like the Jarvis, your personal Jarvis, your personal chat, GBT, Claude, whatever thing looks at it and says, okay, like I found the 70% of the problems with this based on everything you've told me, and now you're spending a, you know, a little bit of time getting it to the finish line.
[00:10:17] Ken: Why wouldn't you do that?
[00:10:18] Ken: Your knowledge plus what's available there today goes really far. But again, I'm not the guy that's telling you you need to insert AI across the business. I have plenty of clients right now that don't even get to that level of using ai. They're just doing it because they've set up their offers, and this is a key part of growing without hiring in a way that has people selecting them for the outcomes versus the outputs.
[00:10:44] Ken: Even if in certain cases they do need some level of output.
[00:10:46] Ken: If you're hired because you create videos, they like your style. You can't just suddenly start saying, okay, we're not gonna create any videos, period.
[00:10:54] Ken: But you can develop systems, you can develop processes and also at least make them [00:11:00] aware that they don't have to have you do all of the hands-on work. Maybe they even had someone internally, and this is actually an unlock. That is the video person and you're just providing guidance to that person.
[00:11:10] Ken: So here's what it looks like to really get to growing without hiring. What are some of the foundations? And I'll definitely cover these foundations in greater depth in other conversations moving forward. But the key to growing without hiring is fundamentally based on having a singular type of client that is your best client of all time.
[00:11:30] Ken: You can replicate that client at scale and do similar things for them. They want similar transformations. They want similar outcomes. They are struggling with the same thing. I call this a lighthouse client, and it does have differences from what? It's a standard ICP. If you don't know what that is, we don't have to spend a lot of time on it.
[00:11:48] Ken: If you do know what it is, a lot of people look at that and they say title, headcount and revenue, and they kind of stop there, but you have to spend more than a minute. Struggling through what a lighthouse client looks like, because I [00:12:00] legitimately have, I don't know, five to six times more clients than when I had an entire team and I have a different revenue model.
[00:12:07] Ken: Now clearly I'm not charging, or maybe you don't know. I'm not charging $389,000, to go do work for someone. Which would be the kinds of deals that I could sell in my agency as a app focused UX creative design agency.
[00:12:22] Ken: But I never would've been able to scale up to the number of clients I had if I didn't hone in on this singular lighthouse client.
[00:12:30] Ken: And I don't wanna go super deep on this today because it does require and merit its own conversation. But when you do this in a certain way. All of them can get served with a similar kind of offer and have a similar kind of scale on the backend, which is the client delivery side. So if I have a week like I'm having right now, as of this recording, I think I've brought on something around 12, 13 new clients this week, which maybe I would've done that in a year in my agency.
[00:12:57] Ken: And the amount of revenue that that pushes for me is pretty [00:13:00] significant. I'll get more transparent with you over time on some of the numbers, but if you follow me on social, you probably already have seen some of the numbers, but that's a lot of revenue and back to back days and on the back end, I'm not scared about being able to deliver for them because I have all of the systems and the protocols in place that make it really great for them to onboard.
[00:13:19] Ken: Help them with the exact problem that they told me about and I have set up a very scalable model where my limitation in my three systems, if you think about marketing, sales, and client delivery, is only one of how many leads that are sales qualified, marketing qualified. I put into my repeatable closing system, as I call it.
[00:13:39] Ken: That's my sole limitation, and that's what I want you to have in your business. The optionality decide, do you want to go get more clients? That is what a lighthouse client unlocks. And then having the differentiation in your positioning. I call it Blue Ocean Services, and it definitely plays off of the Blue Ocean framework and strategy.
[00:13:56] Ken: Recommend the book, but I just sort of synthesize it at a high level [00:14:00] for people who are more in the professional services, the agency space. Because it's not really based around that, but finding how you fit in to the blue ocean, or finding that blue ocean that separates you from every other person, that looks exactly like you and does what you do.
[00:14:18] Ken: And then you get into bidding proposals, people shopping on price and so forth. And then the ability to have what I call a scalable service offer. And again, we'll talk a lot more about offers. I'm well known for offers .
[00:14:31] Ken: I stopped counting a while ago, but it was something like 551 plus people have used my offer system, including a lot of top people on social platforms like LinkedIn. Who now also are teaching about offers. So if my stuff is so good, they also could teach about offers that shows you that the proof is in the pudding, so to speak.
[00:14:49] Ken: And the scalable service offer is very different than just saying, I have an offer, or I have services. It's not about, I write content, I write code, I produce videos. [00:15:00] I help clients navigate this thing. I produce financial accounting reports. I'm a fractional COO that helps with systems.
[00:15:08] Ken: No.
[00:15:09] Ken: Those are just the things that you do.
[00:15:11] Ken: The scalable offer comprises of making sure that we fit into the market with that Blue Ocean Service attracts those lighthouse clients and then gives us a way on the back end to ensure that we're not gonna close a bunch of work and then drown in what I call delivery hell. Because here's what happens to pretty much all of my clients.
[00:15:30] Ken: You go, close a bunch of work, you close a little bit more. All of a sudden you just say, wow, I just closed a bunch of clients and now I have to go deliver all this work. And you stop doing anything on the BD and the marketing front.
[00:15:43] Ken: Oh, I don't have time to do my newsletter. Oh, I don't have time to create this social post. Oh, I don't have time to follow up with this person in the dms.
[00:15:51] Ken: And the referrals are great. I actually have a system to generate referrals, but those are not the way to scale up and down unless you actually do what I do. [00:16:00] And honestly, it's based on the type of business you have too. Because when I was an agency with less than 20 clients,
[00:16:05] Ken: referrals we're not really gonna change the world for me in a business that had a small number of clients and also for clients that had to pay me, you know, minimally 200 k. To do the work.
[00:16:16] Ken: Not something super referable. You're not gonna go talk to your neighbor and say, oh yeah, you're starting a business. Go talk to Ken, and he'll build you at half a million dollar app. So it's also based on that business type. So for most of you who are listening to this,
[00:16:30] Ken: You don't have the wages to rely on referrals, which is what you're doing. You're just kind of letting things fall into your lap and you're not even necessarily doing bad, but you don't know when that next thing is coming. And you also don't necessarily know when a client's gonna roll off. Sometimes that happens unexpectedly for things that are even outside your control.
[00:16:46] Ken: So that is the key for allowing you to grow without hiring. Challenging you as well to say, are you going after the right client? A client that's easy to sell and close. Just working with a client recently [00:17:00] and had given them some advice probably about a year ago that said, Hey, maybe you don't want to go after these super enterprise clients all the time because they have slow cycles to buy.
[00:17:10] Ken: You get stuck in the red tape, you get stuck in the renewal cycle. I know. 'cause I had those clients. Why not look at another segment of the market and this person puts in the work. They've tried lots of things and they finally more recently made that change, especially with some of the macro changes and the uncertainty in the market, and they went from struggling to get deals to the finish line, to closing something like 50,000, I think it was pounds.
[00:17:34] Ken: Have a global client base by the way. In a very short period of time in getting a close, almost instantly because of the method in the system that I showed them. So I call Pitch to Win. They even called them on their cell phone and let them know very, very quickly. So if you're having a struggle in your business and you're like, no, I'm actually pretty good at some of this stuff, and you're like, I can't get more leads, or It's taking me forever to close things, then take a look at your Lighthouse client.
[00:17:59] Ken: [00:18:00] Realize that your leads are a lagging indicator of your business based on positioning that you may or may not have defined for yourself and revisit what that offer looks like or actually even build an offer to start. Right. Offers are not just about gurus and influencers. My offers have come from closing over $50 million in revenue for real business like yours.
[00:18:22] Ken: Not because I talked about how to make money on the internet for people that make money, talking about making money, they do talk about low ticket offers, high ticket offers, and a bunch of things that aren't for the kind of business that you're trying to build. Clients don't even care about offers. They really don't.
[00:18:40] Ken: You care about them because they help you get more leads close, more deals more quickly. And scale on the backend, and that is part of what that growing Without Hiring is all about. But I want to kind of end on this point, just so you understand again, where I was, where I am today, and where you are having a [00:19:00] recognition of where some of you are that are listening to this.
[00:19:02] Ken: Because I have all sorts of clients. I have clients who are happy to stay, consultants, solopreneurs, and advisors, and I have other people that have teams. And I have other people that might aspire to have teams, so I have the full spectrum. If you're really just someone who's focused on providing expert based work as a coach, a consultant, a founder, I get it.
[00:19:22] Ken: I deal with it every single day.
[00:19:23] Ken: I am not opposed to hiring.
[00:19:25] Ken: I'm not opposed for you to ever get help.
[00:19:28] Ken: My preference for you is what I said, try to grow to. Seven figures without having to have anyone on payroll. I believe it's possible even more so than ever before. It's what I've done in this business
[00:19:39] Ken: and it's what I've done in the past, obviously.
[00:19:42] Ken: But then at some point if you do have aspirations, 'cause you just said like it was my dream to be a CEO and have a team at some point. I can't wait to build culture and all those things.
[00:19:50] Ken: I'm all for it. I did it. I enjoyed it.
[00:19:53] Ken: You just have to decide the way that you want to grow cannot be with more people, more clients, more people, [00:20:00] more clients, more people, more clients,
[00:20:01] Ken: which again I call the hungry dragon. And the Dragon. I promise you, if you go into that cycle, which is what a lot of people do, it'll start out as the little pet,
[00:20:10] Ken: but it will rain down fire. On your kingdom and your kingdom will be scorched. So just make sure that you hire, you have the right metrics in place.
[00:20:18] Ken: You have a system to get more leads. You have a system to close more deals. You have a system to grow without hiring, and then you can use hiring as a way to possibly accelerate or working with people who can give you insights and DNA. You can't otherwise get from yourself. And here's what I will tell you, especially if you do go into the path of trying to scale in any capacity,
[00:20:45] Ken: whether it was with or without a team, you will not be able to afford another you in the business until you were at, I don't know. Hm, $5 million plus a year in revenue, $10 million plus a year in revenue. You're just never gonna make that justification to bring on someone [00:21:00] who is over 200 K, over 300 KA year, all in on comp.
[00:21:04] Ken: You'd rather have that money yourself, and you're just gonna try to figure out how to do too many things. You're gonna try to become an expert on a lot of things that you should not become an expert on. I tried to fill in some of those gaps along the way. I tried to find people that could help me in my business and what I personally found and is transparently the inspiration for what I do today.
[00:21:23] Ken: Those people had never built a business like mine, especially back then. Almost no one was building a remote agency. Everyone told me it was not possible.
[00:21:30] Ken: Covered that already,
[00:21:31] Ken: where I try to go work with this person who is like, here's how you do this particular style of marketing, but they never had done it successfully for.
[00:21:38] Ken: My kind of business for my kind of industry. So you can also grow and accelerate the business dramatically by filling in gaps
[00:21:46] Ken: for someone who has been there, done that, and someone who can just drop in. Obviously today, there's a lot of fractionals. I was fractional before. A lot of people were fractional, but there are people, not business coaches typically by the way. There are people that could be [00:22:00] mentors officially, unofficially.
[00:22:01] Ken: There are peers. I've built a very large community of peers where I'm a part of that peer group, but there are people that want to grow together in that way, and they fill in gaps for each other. They refer work to each other. There are any number of things out there today that can help you to grow without hiring.
[00:22:17] Ken: But again, I don't want you to think that I believe hiring is evil or hiring is bad. It's just about how you hire and the things that you are putting into the business that should drive ROI.
[00:22:28] Ken: I truly believe this is a unique moment in what is gonna become a inflection point in the history of humanity.
[00:22:36] Ken: Hopefully we don't wind up in Terminator, Terminator two especially, right? That's the better one.
[00:22:41] Ken: I think they went all downhill after that.
[00:22:43] Ken: But we don't wanna wind up in that environment. But right now in our businesses, you have the ability to truly grow without hiring like you never had before.
[00:22:51] Ken: And it's not just about ai, it's about your lighthouse client, your scalable service offers. It's about your systems that you have on the [00:23:00] backend, what kind of client you're pursuing, being realistic that you may not sell your business for. $500 million, especially by the way agencies. They don't sell for large multiples.
[00:23:10] Ken: We had a better multiple than a lot of people, and that was due to some of the macro factors at that time. But it's not the business that's going to typically make you rich on an exit. It's not gonna have a high multiple valuation, so that's not really the business you're in.
[00:23:24] Ken: So why not just build a cash flowing business that gives you ultimate discretion of your time?
[00:23:30] Ken: That doesn't require a massive audience,
[00:23:32] Ken: and if you have to throw in some help here or there, or have an employer or two, just remember what I talked about here. But that is what growing without hiring looks like in your business.
[00:23:42] Ken: So thanks as always for hanging out value the conversations, value your attention. If this is useful for you, please do leave a rating or review. Really helps me know that I'm hitting for you. And as always, if you have a question, comment, feel free to reach out. Happy to provide [00:24:00] perspective. Thanks for another discussion.
[00:24:01] Ken: Look forward to next time to talk more about how to grow without hiring.