Overall 4 Stars of out 5: ****
I’ve just finished listening to SCALE by Jeff Hoffman (Priceline.com and uBid.com founder) and business coach David Finkel. The first time I read it a few years ago, I loved it. And now that I have had a few more experiences in business including scaling my current company, this book’s teachings are even more relevant than before. I do tend to go back to a tome like this from time to time, and I’m very glad I did. I have actually recommended this book twice this month to colleagues. One colleague has a scaling and systems mindset, so this book gives us a common language. The other needs some extra pointers and can stand to grow his systems mindset. To anyone interested in understanding what looking at a business in terms of controllable items, or at least items you should consciously try to be controlling, this is an excellent book to get you on track. The book goes into a variety of great topics, but I will just highlight a couple here.
It establishes the three main pillars of any company that must be proactively managed and invested in, which are team, systems, and controls. I have met people who seem to only think a great team is enough, but the book does a wonderful job of breaking that misconception down into pieces. You do have to have a great team and invest in them, but you can’t scale on unicorns. I like Ryan Holmes’s (Hootsuite) description of a unicorn, but I’ll say generically it is someone who seems to be amazing at everything you ask them to do. To push the unicorn metaphor further in this context, you need systems that let you scale on unicorns, stallions, regular horses, and ponies. With that in mind, here’s a pic I sketched to promote the concept:
Scale discusses how to invest in getting the best team. It also identifies the major systems in a company, and like me, you can probably also break your departments into smaller departments and still see scaling problems due to lack of systems. One of my favorite topics this book visits the idea of hand-offs between systems. Often times, hand-offs happen via emails instead of a traceable, self-serve system. And email noise can drown key messages. One example that comes to mind is when a purchase order has come in for a new service contract. Instead of having that PO emailed to the engineering department, a sort-able field added onto the business development CRM database (like SalesForce) can notify the engineering department that sales is ready to move forward with staffing. Hand-offs between systems are just another communications mechanism. Scale recommends you diagram your systems, identify the hand-offs, and fix them with a systematic solution.
Finkel and Hoffman also provide a great time management paradigm, with A, B, C, and D levels of time vs impact on your company. A is the insanely impactful work you should be doing, D is the time-sucking low-impact work you should get rid of. They also recommend tactical ways to go about proactively driving your time management in a given week. I’ve gone through the exercise and I continue to find value in reminding myself to work ON the business instead of IN the business (WIB and WOB as a friend of mine has called it). Although this piece of wisdom is not unique to their book, I do like the way they have described solving the problem of time management.
If you want another book that is excellent for systems thinking and for setting your expectations on building a business as an entrepreneur, you should look at The E-Myth. I performed a review on Audible here (scroll down to find the cover).
I think Scale is 90% meat / 10% potatoes. It’s a good read. I listened to it on Audible. It reads well at 1.5 speed.
I tend to listen or read business or technical books all the time, but I am not an affiliate marketer. You can see…
… more of my Audible book reviews here.
… more of my Kindle/Paperback reviews here.
… books I have authored here. (Except the scripture book, not mine.)