A lesson many business owners learn the hard way is that chasing growth too early can compromise the quality of a product or service. It can also overwhelm a young company’s operations, with potentially disastrous results. So how do you scale a successful business that’s inherently difficult to scale?
To answer this question, we turned to three founders whose business models don’t readily lend themselves to fast growth: Sarah LaFleur, founder of womenswear brand M.M.LaFleur; Ariela Safira, founder of mental health care company Zeera; and Christina Tosi, founder of bakery chain Milk Bar. All three of these founder-CEOs have faced unique challenges while trying to expand, from struggling with delegation to managing excess inventory to launching during the early days of Covid. Working through these issues has made them better leaders, they say.
Among the takeaways that came out of their conversation are that hiring early helps, and pivoting can unlock growth. But the founders started with questions of scaling: How founders should think about scalability, and whether they factored that into their own business plans when they were just getting started.
Tosi: I went to culinary school in New York City and worked my way up to fine dining restaurants, but I really missed that feeling of handing someone a plate of cookies or brownies from your home kitchen, which is why I founded Milk Bar. I’ve joked that the worst business plan imaginable is to open a bakery and try to figure out how to scale it. Baked goods are delicate—they’re meant to be eaten fresh and they’re not very resilient.
Safira: Zeera was set to launch as a brick-and-mortar business in April 2020, which obviously did not happen. We pivoted to a digital model and learned that a lot of people wanted group therapy, so we spent the next two and a half years researching and developing that model. We found that digital group therapy can drive clinical outcomes. Plus, it’s more affordable and more scalable. Last year, we expanded commercially into the employer space, which is now our model. The goal in scaling is to get to a place of pattern recognition so you can repeat what’s working. We’re growing, but we’re not there yet. Instead, we’re making the most of this day or this month, and then we’ll talk at the end about what our next steps will be based on how we did.
LaFleur: We have a program called Bento where customers come to our website and fill out a brief survey, and then our stylists put together a lookbook of items we think will work for them. This was what really allowed our business to scale dramatically in 2014. But the way we arrived at Bento was because we were sitting on a lot of inventory and we didn’t know how to move it. We decided to go out to our existing customer base and tell them we would send them a box of dresses, and they could keep whatever they liked and return whatever they didn’t. We came up with this method out of desperation, because otherwise the business was going to go under. That was a big unlock moment, when we tried something different and suddenly it clicked. As a company, we made more in the month we sent out that survey than in any previous month. I’ve had a few moments like that since, but a lot that didn’t work out, too.
Tosi: At Milk Bar, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can go from making 50 pies a day to 5,000 while making sure every slice is delicious and consistent. How do we source the ingredients? How are we baking it? As a control freak, I would prefer to bake in one kitchen, but we can’t do that. So how do I get the same exact ingredients into multiple kitchens across the country and make sure the product shows up at our customer’s door exactly how we want it to? You have to establish trust with your partners and get them on board so they know they’re part of the Milk Bar universe. That often means that I or one of the other team members is flying across the country to be in the room. Or going to the printer to make sure the Milk Bar pink on the wrapper is just right. Getting all these little textural pieces to line up is vital to scaling a business. Otherwise, it’s not a business, it’s an art project.
LaFleur: That’s so true. And if I think about what has really gotten in the way of scaling, sometimes it is, ironically, my grit. I tend to stay in things too long and think that if I just work a little bit harder or faster, then it will scale. I have been taught a couple of times now that if it’s not working, then it’s probably not going to scale, and I need to take my foot off the gas and go back to the drawing board. Mentally coaching myself to do that has been the hardest thing.
Safira: For us, the pain point in scaling mental health care is that there are only half a million therapists in America, which means we have only enough therapists in this entire country to offer weekly therapy to 7 percent of Americans. But even if we wanted to offer one-on-one therapy to all our customers, we would have to 10x to 15x our therapist population. This far exceeds any realistic venture capital investment, and I don’t think it would be a good use of time. My point of view in starting this company isn’t to re-create what exists in person, put it online, and slap some cute branding on it. First, we took 10 steps back and asked, what are we trying to get the mental health care system to do? How do we get patients to a better place more efficiently? Second, and this is where scaling presents a different hurdle, how do we effectively story-tell this to a world that compares mental health care to one-on-one therapy?
Tosi: Yes! Telling the story is more of a challenge now than before because there’s so much noise. How do you say to people, “Shh, just give me your time and attention and I’ll make your life so much better”? Because, to your point, Ariela, you could make something incredible and it just never reaches people because you can’t get their time and attention.
Safira: A beautiful marketing lesson is “say less.” But you’re always speaking to very different stakeholders, so the ability to remain succinct while delivering a message to people who care about very different things is a real challenge.
LaFleur: When you’re a founder growing a business, every year feels like its own unique startup.
Tosi: I have a question for you both. What’s been your biggest scaling mistake?
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