If you are a business owner with over 15 employees and want to grow, this book is for you. It’s time you knew about Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… And Why the Rest Don’t. Imagine this, your team is engaged, the customers are doing the marketing for you, and everyone is making money. It sounds like a dream come true, but little did you know that dream is just within your grasp! This book focuses on four major subjects: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The keys to scaling up your business are attracting and retaining the right people, creating a truly diverse strategy, driving flawless execution, and making money moves.

AUTHOR & ACHIEVEMENTS

Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… And Why the Rest Don’t (2015) by Verne Harnish. Verne’s first major revision of his best-selling book “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits”. This book was an overachiever in the General Business category back in 2015. Accomplished in winning seven awards, including Paris, Amsterdam, and San Francisco Book Festivals for Business, and was even a finalist for the International Book Awards for Best New Non-Fiction.
Verne Harnish is a founding participant of the esteemed Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants” and WEO’s “Advanced Business” executive program, both held at MIT. There are so-called “mice” in the business world, used to describe small organizations and “gazelle” companies that breach the $1 million barriers and scale up to even $1 billion. Harnish is the founder and CEO of Gazelles and known as the “Growth Guy”. He has spent the last three decades helping companies scale-up and has made a name for himself along the way. So when you’re looking for someone to help your business take flight, you’ll know who to call – well-read.
BOOK SUMMARY

Now, how did this book became a page-turner in the business world? In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team shared essential tools and techniques for building a dominating factor in industrial growth in business. This strategy has honed tens of thousands of CEOs and has helped them become great leaders in the gazelle league. Leaders in gazelles recognize their team’s good works, delegate tasks, and focus on the future by using data to make better predictions and decisions. This book aims to help you create a company whereas the team is engaged, the customers are doing the marketing for you, and everyone is making money.
This book’s categorized lessons are into four keys to scaling up your business. Upon reading, you’ll notice that it not just about growing money. Verne focused on giving solid business advice for prioritization. See how the first subject to scaling your business is to treat your people right. “‘Fairness’ does not mean ‘sameness.’ You need to be creative and flexible to keep your top talent happy, from a compensation-package perspective.” It’s true! Invest in your employee’s development and value them more than just an asset of the company. Identifying your core values and core purpose will be a fixed point to your strategy when it comes to process. Verne highlighted, “A good plan now is better than a great plan too late.” Numbers drive flawless execution; monitor everything. If you do not measure it, it won’t get done. Always remember that cash is king. A brilliant strategy can’t save a company with cash troubles. Without money, it will be difficult for the company to grow even it has the best leaders, the most competent and dedicated employees, and the best strategy. With these in mind, are you ready to transform your business from mice into a leaping gazelle?

BASED ON EXPERIENCE

David Pohlmann, SaaS CEO of Billbee, is one of those tens and thousands of CEOs moulded into gazelles. He started his high school professional career as a cooperative student at a former 120K person HP with stops in Europe and California. Later on, he began as employee no 1 and took over the growth part to further bootstrap Billbee to a 7-(and more)-figure SaaS, now working as the MD for revenue and operations.
Billbee is a software toolkit for multichannel e-commerce with a team of 20 people with eight engineers launched in 2015. He started selling early on the DIY area in the German competitor “Shopify”. They have over 9,000 customers paying $17 a month, about $153,000 per month. One of the book’s goals was for customers to do the marketing for you and that reflected on David. They get referrals from their integrated partners such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Amazon, eBay, and more. Shopify is their largest referral partner. Overall more than a thousand free sign-ups per month and 300 new customers monthly. Billbee continuously grew while being completely bootstrapped, meaning he started his online business without any funding, which he loves. Billbee was ranked 50th in the 2020 Latka 250: List of Fastest-Growing SaaS Companies. They were making about 1.2 million annual revenue in 2019. As of 2020, they are over $2.2 million in revenue. That’s about a 67% growth rate in a year. Quite impressive, if I do say myself.

CONCLUSION

We can conclude that this book does provide practical tools and techniques and the skillset of being a leader in gazelle. However, scaling up will never be easy. As shown in the cove, only a few wills and the rest won’t.
“Verne Harnish has once again proven he’s the Growth Guy. Scaling Up is packed with the tools to help you bust through the barriers to growth and climb learning curves faster. But don’t let your leadership team carry the load alone — multiply your impact by sharing the book with every employee on your team.”
— Liz Wiseman, best-selling author of Multipliers and Rookie Smarts