Business Coach in Edmonton: The Business Builder Guide with Bruce Baker Episode 5
Broadcasting from the business capital of the world, this is the podcast Business News Network.
Welcome back to the show. We are so excited to be joined by Bruce Baker once again, and people might say, “Well, who’s Bruce Baker?” Well, if you don’t know already, I’m going to have him introduce himself, because he wears many hats and he’s—he’s an awesome person and guy. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Bruce, and what it is you do.
Awesome, Jill. Morning, thanks again for having me. So, what we do is—we do three things: we help business owners either scale up their businesses, fix up their businesses if they’re in trouble, and starting up businesses as well. We work closely with them to make sure that the results are there.
Beautiful. And tell me what you do specifically.
Business Starts Ups Can Be Scary
So, the primary—as far as I’ll go through those three categories—as far as the startup, just to give you an idea, and any industry, at the end of the day, starting up a business the very first time can be quite freaky, can be quite scary, and we help people transition from their day job into what they want to produce or create in terms of the business that they want to create. We work very closely with folks up until they have traction, and then make sure that they’re good from there.
As far as fix‑up is concerned—well, unfortunately we don’t always have positive results. We—not us personally, but the business—doesn’t have positive results and they’re looking to try and get out of a conundrum that they’re in, be it financial—which is most of the time—or operational constraints, and we make sure that we help them get out of that black hole into something positive. And, just like the startup, we get them that traction that they’re looking for.
Finally, the scale‑up—and it’s something that I want to talk to you folks about this morning—but scaling up, growing, sounds positive, and for the most part it is, but growing a business and scaling a business are two very different things, and growth can actually catch you by surprise if not done correctly. So, in order to mitigate those risks, we work with business owners very, very closely to ensure that they know what’s behind the corner in terms of growing and not doing it in spite of their success. And that’s what we do.
What Does Scaling A Business Mean?
Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, for joining us as always, and I know we have a lot of great material to get to. We’re going to talk a little about—you know, as you mentioned, most business owners say they want to scale, but do they really actually understand what scaling means? So, I want to know from you: what is the difference between scaling up and just growing bigger?
Yeah, this is—this is one of the biggest misconceptions that I see and have experienced as well. Many business owners think that growth and scaling are the same thing, as I’d mentioned, but they’re really not. Growth is about increasing revenue, staff, operations—often at the same rate as your expenses. Scaling, on the other hand, is about increasing revenue and capacity without proportional increase in cost. So, if you add new clients but you need five new employees to serve them, you’re growing; you’re not scaling necessarily. The true scaling happens when your business infrastructure, leadership, and processes allow you to handle more business without breaking and, in many cases, breaking the bank. Or, as a lot of clients in the past have told me, “I’m bursting at the seams and I thought this was going to be positive, but I am—I am just causing problems to the point that I’m going to crumble as a business.” We don’t want that.
So, the problem is that most businesses chase growth and think that they’re scaling—until they hit that proverbial wall, which is a hard wall to hit.
Got it, interesting. All right, well—thank you for teaching me again. I’m not in the business world, but now this is—it’s making sense to me as well. So, let me hear about—what are some of the critical components that every business owner must have in place then, would you say, before even considering scaling? Is there like a clear blueprint?
Follow a Blueprint to Scale Your Business
Well, the good news is absolutely there is. Businesses that scale successfully follow a specific blueprint. Whether they realize it or they don’t realize it, they’re actually following a blueprint. So, there are four foundational components that must be in place.
Now, what’s important—you know, I’ve always maintained that if you could listen to your business talk to you, if you understood the language of business and what message it was teaching you, you’d start to realize that when you look at every business, regardless of industry, regardless of size, there are key components—as I’ll talk a little bit about non‑negotiable rules—but those foundational components have to be in place.
Those components are—pretty much—there are four that I want to talk about.
Leadership Adaptability
- Leadership adaptability. Your leadership team—even if it’s just you that have a group of folks reporting to you—but your leadership team needs to evolve as the business grows. People might say, “Well, Bruce, I’ve got a specific leadership style; I did this assessment and this is what’s helped me over the years.” But that leadership style—the way that you lead—will change as your business goes through these change curves. What worked at five employees, for instance, won’t necessarily work when you have fifty employees.
- Financial resilience. If your cash flow can’t support the weight of scaling, obviously you’re going to burn out. You need strong margins and a clear path to profitability at scale. And, as I discussed in our previous discussion, Jill, in the podcast that we recorded, profitability is not just about money; it’s about the time usage and money usage as the two resources that create efficiency in the use of those resources—and that is profitability at scale.
- Operational systems. If your business and its operations have—already—you’re already dealing with some messy, difficult stuff, scaling will magnify the chaos. People think, “Well, you know, I’ve just secured this brand‑new client and, you know, great amount of additional revenue.” Yeah, that’s great from a money perspective, but are you ready to deal with that growth and that scale? If you’re dealing with chaos right now, that is a clear sign that, if you magnify that growth, you’re just going to magnify the chaos—the craziness—and that’s going to bring you down. Process automation, all of that kind of stuff—delegation, in this case—must be locked in. Operational systems don’t just rely on you; they have to rely on your team, and your team being prepared to do that.
- Cultural alignment. Now, culture is a very nebulous, weird term that many people use but don’t necessarily understand what it means. As you scale, your team and values must scale with you. What are these values? Well, values are the way we do things around here. It’s the guardrails that we put in place in how we actually do business on a day‑to‑day basis. If that’s not clear—and a lot of people underestimate this—but it’s absolutely powerful. If you have a fractured culture, it’s going to lead to your team being disengaged and leadership bottlenecks. A lot of the times what I see is that, you know, we’re tripping over each other’s heels: one leader is saying one thing, the other leader is saying the other thing, and we see that disconnect, and that really causes a massive breakdown.
Create Foundations Before Trying To Scale Your Business
Most businesses fail because they try to scale before these foundations are in place. Really know why you do business and how you do business. Scaling is like adding a weight to a bridge—if the structure isn’t strong enough, well guess what happens to the bridge: it collapses.
Interesting. I never looked at it that way. You’re right.
Well, do you also want to share—I think it’s important for people to know—some of the biggest mistakes when people try to do the scaling a little too soon, and maybe there are some pitfalls you can help them avoid?
Yeah, absolutely. Three big mistakes that I see regularly:
Hiring too fast without strategy. Business owners assume that more revenue means more staff, right? Not necessarily. If you scale payroll before revenue is predictable, what happens? You create a cash‑flow nightmare. On the other hand, what businesses also do is—they wait until, you know, they—they wait until they’ve got enough money to scale. So there’s a fine balance between that, and there’s a trigger point that we have to—we have to really focus on in terms of business volume scaling and also hiring to address that increase in volume.
Scaling a Business Adds Financial Complexity
Losing financial control. Again, when we scale a business, it creates more complexity, and specifically in this case it adds complexity to finances. If you don’t have a clear handle of costs, your profit margins, your projections, your business burns through cash before it can actually stabilize—and another word for stabilize people also use is traction. Once you have that system working, it means that you’ve got traction; it means that it’s producing something of value and returning something. Without that clear handle on that, we tend to burn our cash too quickly, and we all know cash is pretty much the oxygen of business—we can’t burn that too quickly.
Over‑complicating operations. People tend to over‑complicate operations. A lot of businesses scale by adding complexity rather than efficiency—and there is a fine line between, you know, adding complexity and keeping it basic. You want to add not just complexity; you want to add that sophistication but keep it simple. More systems, more meetings, more steps—it’s going to create more problems. Real scaling actually simplifies, streamlines. If your processes aren’t getting easier, well, you’re not scaling properly. Remember, those processes, those systems, have to work with you.
The best way to avoid these pitfalls: grow with intention, not reaction. People react because they feel insecure; people react because they worry. Try to do that with intention, and scaling should be a planned, strategic move, not a panic response to increasing demand.
Oh, got it. Well, thank you for that. And also, can we talk some—maybe negotiable, non‑negotiable rules? Are we ready for that yet, or do we still have more to chat about? Because this is a lot of information, Bruce.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, these are key things that I hope people take to heart, because once—once these things are established and you really take hold of this, it’s crazy how business starts to grow more healthily and more sustainably. But yeah, let’s talk about those non‑negotiable rules.
So—yeah, so within each stage of growth we have key non‑negotiable rules—around about five to six. When each business goes through their—you know, their stage of growth, regardless of which stage that is, they have unique challenges.
Don’t Be The Business Owner Who Does It All
I’ll give you an example: what we call a stage‑one business—this is normally your startup business, anywhere between one to ten employees. The biggest challenge is leadership chaos. If the founder or the CEO is doing everything, well, guess what happens: the business stalls. The rule at this stage is learn to delegate early. I deal with so many business owners that struggle to delegate for various reasons; there’s actually an easy way to learn how to do this if you don’t do it effectively as is.
So that’s a stage one.
A stage‑three business is around about twenty to thirty‑four employees. Communication breaks down; you want to formalize roles and processes before misalignment cripples progress. You don’t want to trip over each other’s heels, and you certainly don’t want to have misalignment between what each person does.
And then I’ll give you one more example, which is a little bigger company. We call it stage five—to about ninety‑five employees. This time, profitability starts to dip, so the rule here is: scale your operations efficiently before adding more people. Adding more people creates more complexity and is the only complexity in business growth.
If you take these rules and you really figure it out, you’re not going to plateau, you’re not going to implode. Scaling isn’t just about adding; it’s about adapting to the new challenge at every stage.
Got it. Well, also let me just ask—you know, if you are tuning in, Bruce Baker joining us. You may not be familiar with who we’re talking to. Bruce, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do again.
Absolutely, Jill. So, we work with business owners—CEOs—in three ways:
Hire A Business Builder to Help You Scale Your Business
Number one, business scaling up. As we’ve just been talking about, a business that wants to grow, that wants to scale—there are naturally going to be significant risks. It’s a positive thing, but those risks can really get you into trouble; we help them navigate those risks.
Number two, businesses that are in trouble—businesses that want to get out of trouble. We’ll help them get out of that trouble as best we can.
And number three, the startup. The startup is really getting people to transition from day job to actually starting up their own business, making sure that they hit that traction as soon as possible and they’re actually seeing results.
Thank you so much. Well, can we talk a little bit about—some of the things that you—personally—that you’ve went through with business owners, and how they’ve done this the right way? Maybe they’ve done it the wrong way, too. We’d love to hear.
Oh yeah, absolutely. So, one key business that I worked with was a cabinet manufacturing business, and we started with—in this case it was a startup. The startup’s first year we hit about $300,000 in revenue, which was great, and about three years later they hit about four to five million, and that was fantastic. We all celebrated.
But unfortunately, in this case, they—they got ahead of themselves, and they made the cardinal rule—cardinal mistake—of growing too quickly. So, in other words, trying to scale up, hiring—huge expenses—but the business process, the business fundamental system, the central system, wasn’t aligned. Nothing was talking to each other, and that caused a lot of friction and a lot of complexity to the point that they almost didn’t have a business any longer. I came back, returned, and in this case the exciting scale‑up that I came to—that I left—started to go down. This became a bit of a fix‑up. We got the fundamentals back on track again, started aligning things like we should have been in the first place in terms of their growth ambitions, and the business was back on track again. So, that was certainly a success story.
Huge Growth Without Infrastructure Is a Problem
There was a tech startup that got early traction but scaled without infrastructure—so similar story, just different type of industry. They hired rapidly, over‑built their product, and burned through the funding—right when demand shifted. And, by the way, it wasn’t just funding; it was also cash generated through revenue. But when the demand shifted, they couldn’t pivot fast enough, so they collapsed under their own weight.
So, the difference: the first business focused—initially—focused on efficiency and process before scaling. They really got to understand: what is the process? What’s the system? Do I know when that system is succeeding, and do I know when that system is not succeeding? That’s being able to measure success of the system. Once that’s working and it’s working repeatedly, then it’s a template of success—we start to duplicate off of that, and that’s where scaling starts to occur.
Thank you so much, and I would love to hear more stories, obviously, about businesses that you’re helping—growing bigger, scaling down, scaling up—the success stories. It’s always—it’s great to hear. What else do you have for us, Bruce?
Well, I’m glad you mentioned the scaling‑down component, and that’s something I wanted to talk about this morning—but of course we’ve only got limited time. But, you know, there is—and Peter Drucker, who’s—for those that don’t know him, the father of modern‑day management—but Peter Drucker always spoke about abandonment, and one of his clients was Jack Welch from GE back in the day, early ’80s. One of the things that really helped GE quadruple its size was what we call abandonment—and what Peter Drucker called abandonment.
The same applies to any business of any size. Abandonment is essentially realizing—or acknowledging—that what you’re doing right now in your business is not working, and the weight, or the dead weight, eventually that starts to build up and you start to carry as a business becomes something that, at one stage, was really, really supporting and driving your business, but now is actually dragging you down and you’re—you’re not really realizing it, like a frog in proverbial boiling water, right?
I’ve recently dealt—we dealt with a client about about a year and a half ago that came to me with the exact same situation, and we had to have some seriously hard discussions by saying, “This is no longer a value to your business. We have to—we have to abandon it; we have to get rid of the dead weight.” Now, human beings are not very good at doing that. We naturally don’t want to get rid of something we tried so hard to build and that was working but is no longer relevant anymore. That abandonment is so important, and guess what happens, Jill? The business starts to scale again; the business starts to grow once that happens.
Ah, awesome. Thank you for this. You’re teaching me all about this, and I mean clearly you’re working with businesses. Just tell me, big and small, so people are aware.
Small Start Ups And Large Corporations Can Use a Business Builder
Yeah, absolutely. So, it—it really depends. For our larger businesses, larger corporations, we—we focus on on specialized projects like change management, organizational‑structure alignment, redesign to create more profitability on the bottom line. The midsize, small‑size, small businesses—we work on similar things, but work a lot on leadership, cash management—bringing a very new perspective and insights into how to actually manage cash in your business that helps you not only to pay the bills day‑to‑day but also to thrive—to become profitable.
Thank you again, Bruce. And, you know, as far as these different components of what’s expected, and—you know, some people are just—they don’t know, and that’s why you’re here as an expert to guide them through. Tell us a little bit about the way you do work with your clients.
Yeah, so we—we have quite a unique way of dealing with our clients. Most businesses that are similar to us, or services that are provided—even educational institutions, books, and courses—always start off with the business side first. That’s the intellectual, the left‑brain side first. And, as we know, based on the significant failure rates we see with business—especially small‑ to midsize business—it doesn’t work. Fantastic information out there, great stuff, but why are businesses still failing?
The primary reason why, we found through our research and discovery, is that it’s because you don’t deal with the author of the business first. You don’t deal with the very component—the person—that actually needs to execute based on this information provided to them, and that need to execute—people will do that when they feel they are capable. So, a big part of what we do is making sure we—in many, many cases—make sure that the field is fertilized enough to actually produce results—in this case, the person is emotionally ready to drive that execution sustainably. And that makes a huge difference between getting results and not getting results for businesses.
Got it. All right, thank you for that. And—you know, with your experience, with your programs, and you do offer quite a few things—I’m sorry I don’t have it in front of me—what are the names of the programs that you offer?
Seven Day Bootcamp for Startup Entrepreneurs
So, right now we—we offer a great little program, especially for startups, and it’s a first of its kind. We—we haven’t done this before, but it’s a virtual program—seven‑day boot camp for startup entrepreneurs. It’s—it’s, like I said, it’s our first launch, so be the pioneer. We—the cost is minimal, and the reason why the cost is minimal is because we would rather invest in people’s future but also become pioneers and a part of branding this program, which we’ve seen a ton of success. The program is called Living Life Living Business, and as you go to our website, www.4workplaces.com, it’s right up in front of you—it’ll be flashing—so it’s an awesome program for a lot of startups.
Great, thank you so much. And how did you want to kind of leave off for today? We have a few minutes left.
Yeah, you know what: I want to—I certainly want to reach out to those folks as businesses that are having challenges right now, struggling for various reasons. Remember, your reality is—essentially—created by your interpretation of it. If you’re in the—the—the black hole, concerned about “How do I get out of this? How do I survive? How do I get my business back on track?” you’re not alone, and all that needs to be done at this stage is—make sure that you don’t continue to isolate yourself. Pick up the phone, give us a call. It’s not going to cost you a thing other than some time—a few minutes—and even if we don’t work together, I can guarantee you that that call is going to give you some new insight and some motivation to drive you out of that negative place that you’re in in your business. So, let’s—let’s make sure that that happens.
Call Workplaces for Business Help!
Wow. All right, well, thank you so much, and Bruce, always a pleasure having you here. Thank you for the conversation. And again, if you are in the market needing the help, Bruce is here for you, and clearly he’s passionate about what he does. And, Bruce, now—we’ve had some great calls before, and—you know, I should say shows before. You’re based in Canada, but you’re helping people worldwide. And again, don’t forget about the seven‑week—Life Living—the seven Life Living Business—biggest business program, and there’s—if you go to the website, there is a profitability quiz you could take there as well. But he’s here really to help you achieve success and grow.
So, thank you so much, Bruce, forworkplaces.com, and we’ll hopefully connect again next week. Thank you so much for being so thorough.
Thanks for having me. You take care.
All right. Have a great day. Bye‑bye to all of our listeners. Stay tuned—we’ll be back with more. Bye‑bye.
Broadcasting from the business capital of the world, this is the Podcast Business News Network.