This book lays out a cohesive strategy to, as its subtitle states, “Grow Your Business Bigger and Faster Than You Think Possible”.
It starts with the simple but profound insight that if you set reasonable goals based on what you’ve already done, you will get reasonable or linear results. You’ll continue to grow incrementally by working harder and getting marginally more efficient, but you won’t change your fundamental growth trajectory.
Instead, the authors recommend setting an impossible goal on an unrealistic timeline because “They force extreme filtering in the present, requiring you to let go of all ineffective pathways and select only the most powerful and potent ones” that could lead to that impossible future.
They give a great example of an entrepreneur who was growing her business one cold call at a time, so they asked her how she would 10x her current business, and she said she could just do 10 times as many cold calls. So they 10x’d it again, and asked how she’d get to 100x her business. She said she couldn’t do that many cold calls, so they repeated the question: how could she reach the number of customers she would need to 100x her business? She realized that other companies already had relationships with her target customers, so she reached out to propose a strategic partnership where her product added value to their offering. It worked – that one conversation increased her number of customers from 10 to 8,000+ (almost 1,000x!). But she would never have even considered that possibility if she hadn’t set an impossible goal for herself that forced her to throw out her current playbook and consider new possibilities that would scale to that level.
Their next recommendation is to shorten the timeline for your impossible goal. When you set a goal that is 10 years or even 5 years out, the deadline is far enough away that you don’t have to do anything differently today. But if you say you’ll 10x or 100x your business by next year, you have to start radically changing your approach right now. You start taking different actions today because you don’t have time to waste.
In particular, shortening the timeline raises the “floor” of what tasks are worth your time. That urgency forces you to drop products or services or customers that don’t exceed the new “floor”; if you can’t see them as part of the impossible future, then you need to let go of them to make space to create that future. You can’t afford to waste your time on paths that will not lead to the exponential scaling future. A few examples:
- For the entrepreneur above, cold calls to individual customers were no longer worth doing because there was no way that approach would scale to the number of customers she needed.
- When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he slashed the number of products they sold from 350 to 10 – he created focus and urgency by making it clear what was the future of the company.
- One of my CEO clients had an advisor ask him “Are you doing $80/hour work when you could be doing $8,000/hour work?” – that question helped him realize that he was still doing tasks just because he had previously done so, which meant that he wasn’t doing the most valuable tasks that only he could do.
This is the essence of the book: setting an impossible goal on an unrealistic timeline creates focus by forcing you to eliminate anything that isn’t part of that impossible future. Making the goal clear and urgent helps you to quickly filter out the tasks, products, marketing channels, customers, etc. that don’t lead to that outcome. As they summarize:
The Scaling Framework is three parts: Frame, Floor, Focus. The frame is the objective — a seemingly impossible goal and timeline. Because the goal is so high and urgent, it forces a far more aggressive filtering process, hence the floor rises. The floor is the new and higher cutoff on viable options, which for the impossible goal are much less than a smaller or linear goal. Thus, the natural process of attempting an impossible goal is that it forces your floor extremely high, requiring you to let go of what you were previously doing and who you were doing it with. … The truth is, most people won’t raise their floor.
I’ve read a lot of business books over the years and this one stands out because it immediately got me thinking about how I would apply its recommendations to my own business. How am I settling for linear incremental business growth today? What clients am I taking that aren’t part of my long-term future? If I set myself the goal of 10x’ing my business next year, what would I have to immediately do differently? This powerful framework makes me question my current path and take a look at my situation with fresh eyes. I don’t have the answers yet, but it’s inspiring me to think bigger about an impossible future that I can use to focus my efforts and attention today by forcing me to reckon with what I am doing today that I would have to let go of to create that future.
