Scale or Fail: How to Build Your Dream Team, Explode Your Growth and Let Your Business Soar, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Scale or Fail: How to Build Your Dream Team, Explode Your Growth and Let Your Business Soar, by Allison Maslan

Scale or Fail, the new book by serial entrepreneur and global business mentor, Allison Maslan, shows business owners how to grow, replicate, and expand while at the same time building a self-managed company they can step away from for periods of time as it continues to soar. In the first and only book on scaling a business written by a woman, Maslan draws from her own experience as a true business mentor to provide a roadmap to bring businesses to the next level.

Allison says, “Scaling your business is one of the wildest rides you will ever take in your life. It gives you the opportunity to utilize your gifts and solutions to not only affect those around you, but to literally impact millions — and potentially billions — of people around the world. In the process, you will build an asset that can support your desired lifestyle for years to come.”

It’s a logical area to discuss in more detail. Many entrepreneurs are asked by potential investors if their proposed business is merely ‘a lifestyle’ one rather than one that they believe can grow and scale. It is a massive challenge to achieve growth for your business. It is a competitive environment, and having a good product is rarely enough, you also need to get everything else right too, to differentiate yourself from your rivals. Maslan has a good insight from the perspective of having done this with several of her companies, and equally the fact that not all of her ventures achieved this upward growth is also a useful reservoir of experience to draw on as well.

This book aims to be as practical as possible, and get you asking yourself hard questions about your own business, and the decisions you are taking. It is also vitally important to recognise that the skills and talents you needed to get your business off the ground are rarely the same ones that you need to scale it. It has often been said that a successful founder needs to be able to keep conflicting ideas in mind at all times – both to be completely positive and believing that your venture will succeed, while at the same time also being ruthlessly honest and critical about everything you are doing. Similarly with growing a business, this may require someone with a different skill set to the person who was so adept at growing it in the first place. In this context this book is a good mirror to hold up to your own practices and evaluate if you are doing everything possible to ensure that your business will actually grow it. A useful read.

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