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Comment by PopeDotNinja | Hacker News Reader

One "hack" is too simply not listen to people who say it won't scale.

I wanted to grow a service business, and everyone will tell you that service businesses don't scale for any number of reason. I grew my consulting business by identifying stuff my customers really needed, was teachable, and had great margins. Once my customers saw the value, I switched from hand to mouth survival waiting for invoices to get paid to working for upfront payments. With cash in hand, I could hire people to so the work as fast as I got the business. Maybe my business wasn't infinitely scalable, but it grew way bigger in a short period of time than anyone expected :)

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As a service business owner, it’s great to hear this perspective here. Service businesses might not be “the next google” but you can absolutely make 7 figures a year pretty handily if you know what you’re doing. who cares that it doesn’t scale infinitely, and you get to keep all the money unlike VC funded startup!

7 figure profit or revenue?

7 figure personal income for the owners of a services company is not unheard of.

The owner might elect to keep money in the business account instead of transferring it to a personal one for tax reasons. If you are fully in control of the business there isn't much difference. For example you can buy a house with company money and lease it to yourself for $100/month. This would not register as profit for you or the business.

That all sounds widely inaccurate from my experience. It's just pass-through income, it was even addressed in the recent tax overhaul. Additionally, a requirement for rentals (or check at least) is whether it's being rented at the current market rate.

Depends on your margins & efficiency. I was charging $100/hr & paying $20-$30 (which wasn't a secret to anyone, clients or employees). But it was hard to save because I needed automation I didn't have, and paying for it was not tenable for internal reasons. Eventually I sold my stake for a modest amount and became a software engineer. I decided I wanted to have the option to automate.

There's a lot of weird conventional wisdom that is all based around the hypothetical VC lottery ideal: grow a business from nothing into a multi-billion dollar "unicorn" in a handful of years, and reap massive RoI for the investors in the process. This is great if you're a VC investor but it's often harmful for everyone else. You don't need a billion dollar startup to be financially secure or to have a robust and rapidly growing business.

To add to this, you have to figure out if it really won't scale, or if the specific individual you're talking to just doesn't know how to scale it. Are they the right person?

I had the option to scale more, but I chose not to. It was more work than I wanted to do, and perhaps more than I could do. I decided to cash out instead.

Service businesses definitely scale. See Accenture, WPP.

Could you hint at your market? What business are you in? I think I get your point about the workflow being "teachable". I am unsure it's generalisable. I'd love to hear more if you fell like telling. Marco

Any guidance/advice on how to do this?

Here's part of the path I took:

- Pick something you really wanna do

- Sell something with big fat margins

- Don't run out of cash

- Go where the customers are

- Don't outsource your critical path to anyone ever

- Figure out what customers want to spend money on but can't

- Figure out how to get customers to pay you in advance for work you haven't done yet

Service businesses get told they can't be scaled all the time. Thanks for proving it can still work!

I'd call it offering hope, but I'm glad you sound inspired :)

what size (any metrics you care to share) did you grow into?

I grew from just me, my first $5K customer payment, and a checking account overdrawn by $1K to 15 people & doing ~$100K USD/month in about two years. Funded entirely from cash flow.

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