The Science of Scaling: The 3 Steps to Knowing You're Ready with Mark Roberge – Ep 41

That's a great way of redefining the f- first two stages, which I think a lot of people think they know, [chuckles] but they don't realize, and most get it wrong.

And so I'd love to move to the third phase, which I think people, at least with the words, they might think that they understand it, but I think it's a really important phase that you've defined in the book, which is growth and mode.

And so first, can you define that stage for our listeners?

So now it's like, okay, we have product market fit and we have go to market fit, and we've calculated them using our own data, and we've calibrated them for the context of our business.

In some cases, we're under a lot of pressure to blitz scale because of a category, so we've set those numbers accordingly 'cause we gotta go fast.

Some mo- half the entrepreneurs go too slow, so we've done that.

Now it's like, how fast should we go? We're ready to scale.

And the first pothole is easy to fix and very intuitive when you think about it.

'Cause usually what happens is it's, okay cool, we have product market fit, we have go to market fit, let's go raise a foun- a round of funding or let's go sign up to the board what this year's gonna look like, and let's go from three million to 12 million.

And so like they, they sell that to the next round investors, they get a good valuation or they sell it to the board and they're like, "Okay, cool.

That means we add to a- we need to have nine million in revenue.

Each rep does 800,000 in ARR, and so I just do the math.

I need 12 reps." And they hire 12 reps next week, and that's the scale process.

And that is ridiculously broken and causes a ton of unnecessary failure because there's absolutely no awareness or consideration on the operational flywheels that are necessary to build to hire 12 reps successfully.

Let's just start on the recruiting front.

You could probably argue that the more qualified res- uh, first interviews you do to the hire is gonna yield hi- better quality hires.

If you do two high quality interviews and hire one person, you're probably gonna make a worse hire than if you did 10 high quality interviews and hire one person.

So if we're trying to do a 10 qualified phone interview screens to one hire and we're gonna make 12 hires, we need 120 good qualified resume and first screens.

Who's doing that? Who's doing the interviews? And then who's ramping the rep and how are we 12X in demand then overnight? There's these operational flywheels.

So the fix to that is easy.

You don't think about scale at this moment as a lump sum hiring right after a fundraise or a lump sum hiring right at the beginning of a fiscal year.

Scale is about establishing a pace.

It's not, let's hire 12 reps and see how 2026 goes.

It's let's hire three reps every other month.

Okay? So now we do that, and that allows us to build these operational flywheels, okay? And it also allow...

That's a great way of redefining the f- first two stages, which I think a lot of people think they know, [chuckles] but they don't realize, and most get it wrong.

And so I'd love to move to the third phase, which I think people, at least with the words, they might think that they understand it, but I think it's a really important phase that you've defined in the book, which is growth and mode.

And so first, can you define that stage for our listeners?

So now it's like, okay, we have product market fit and we have go to market fit, and we've calculated them using our own data, and we've calibrated them for the context of our business.

In some cases, we're under a lot of pressure to blitz scale because of a category, so we've set those numbers accordingly 'cause we gotta go fast.

Some mo- half the entrepreneurs go too slow, so we've done that.

Now it's like, how fast should we go? We're ready to scale.

And the first pothole is easy to fix and very intuitive when you think about it.

'Cause usually what happens is it's, okay cool, we have product market fit, we have go to market fit, let's go raise a foun- a round of funding or let's go sign up to the board what this year's gonna look like, and let's go from three million to 12 million.

And so like they, they sell that to the next round investors, they get a good valuation or they sell it to the board and they're like, "Okay, cool.

That means we add to a- we need to have nine million in revenue.

Each rep does 800,000 in ARR, and so I just do the math.

I need 12 reps." And they hire 12 reps next week, and that's the scale process.

And that is ridiculously broken and causes a ton of unnecessary failure because there's absolutely no awareness or consideration on the operational flywheels that are necessary to build to hire 12 reps successfully.

Let's just start on the recruiting front.

You could probably argue that the more qualified res- uh, first interviews you do to the hire is gonna yield hi- better quality hires.

If you do two high quality interviews and hire one person, you're probably gonna make a worse hire than if you did 10 high quality interviews and hire one person.

So if we're trying to do a 10 qualified phone interview screens to one hire and we're gonna make 12 hires, we need 120 good qualified resume and first screens.

Who's doing that? Who's doing the interviews? And then who's ramping the rep and how are we 12X in demand then overnight? There's these operational flywheels.

So the fix to that is easy.

You don't think about scale at this moment as a lump sum hiring right after a fundraise or a lump sum hiring right at the beginning of a fiscal year.

Scale is about establishing a pace.

It's not, let's hire 12 reps and see how 2026 goes.

It's let's hire three reps every other month.

Okay? So now we do that, and that allows us to build these operational flywheels, okay? And it also allow...