Episode 12 - Growth Gets Harder When Everything Depends on You | Matthew Michalewicz of Complexica

What do you think is one principle of scaling? that you think consistently holds true.

So in those businesses, what's those kind of consistent scaling lessons that you've learned along the way?

I think like the lesson itself is standardization as the almost the be all and end all.

And I've worked and known so many different entrepreneurs in so many different industries, and I've had different services businesses, software businesses, and some businesses just are more scalable than others.

If you can make a widget and sell a widget, that's gonna be more scalable than selling people's time and doing labor as an example.

So thinking across all of those different industries and sectors and types of businesses that I'm familiar with, standardization of everything that you do is really, in my opinion, the underpinning of scalability and how you scale a

company.

Because obviously tech has been a consistency in terms of some of the businesses that you've

had.

Yes, yep.

And you started them from scratch,

haven't you? So

that vision, that ability to think about what the business might look like at its end, how do you do that? How do you go in, come up with the idea, and then take it through to think about you know a saleable business not always saying that you need to sell it but having an eye of that's the kind of business that you want to set up from the beginning

yeah i think there we can separate those two things one is getting an idea and getting a customer to pay for it and then delivering whatever that idea is a piece of software a service you know building chairs and selling it whatever the idea is And then beginning to grow a business around that.

And I'm a very market-driven person.

So I wish I could be someone like Steve Jobs, where you sit in a bathtub with a cigar and you have a genius idea, the iPod, and you go to work and you say, hey, this is going to be that.

Yeah, that's not me.

So the way I've gotten ideas, even we were talking about it in the office this morning, is by interacting with participants in the marketplace, understanding their problems, why those problems are problem, why aren't they solved? How have they tried to solve them? What would they pay to solve them? What's the competitive landscape? And you take those learnings and talk to other people about it, and they build on those ideas.

And from all of this messy ferment comes in the end an idea, and you try to get a customer for that idea.

And if you succeed, that means there's something there.

And if you don't succeed getting the customer for your idea, it's probably not a great idea.

And then that's the beginning of the business.

So I've always done it like that.

You've tested it first.

Correct.