In this episode of Freedom to Exit, Lani Dickinson unpacks the painful—but crucial—mistakes that sabotage business growth. From scaling too soon to ignoring retention systems, Lani breaks down what really happens behind the scenes when entrepreneurs rush into growth without solid foundations. Using real-world examples from home services, coaching, professional services, and e-commerce, she makes the case for optimization before expansion—and shares how to fix it before it costs you your exit.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

– Why scaling multiplies what's already broken

– The biggest silent killers of growth across industries

– The difference between growing revenue and growing profit

– How to identify founder bottlenecks and fix your follow-up

– Real examples of failed scale—and how to avoid them

– How automation and systems can boost revenue without adding staff

Links Mentioned:

✅ The Changes Assessment – Is Your Business Exit-Ready?

https://stealthfreedomtoexit.com/changes

Enjoyed this episode?

Subscribe to Freedom to Exit to follow the full Scale Smart series and get more insights on building a business buyers chase.

Connect with Lani Dickinson:

📌 Instagram: @stealthfreedomtoexit

📌 Facebook: Lani Dickinson

📩 Email: info@stealthfreedomtoexit.com

🌐 Website: stealthfreedomtoexit.com

If this episode opened your eyes to growth mistakes you might be making, share it with a fellow founder—and don’t forget to leave a review!

>> Lani Dickinson: Hello and welcome back to the Freedom to Exit podcast.

I'm Lani Dickinson, your host, and today we are in

our third episode of our Scale Smart series

and episode 19 of the podcast. So we're so glad

that you are here. And if you've been following along with

our Scales SMR series, you know how good this information is. I'd

love for you to share this with someone who needs to hear it

and certainly subscribe so you continue to get the updates as we

move forward. Today we're gonna talk about

the hidden mistakes that sabotage growth, which is really

the unsexy stuff, the painful stuff, and also not

sexy. These are the things that most business

owners don't see until it's too late. The truth is,

scaling a business doesn't just add stress.

It multiplies whatever's already

broken. And that's the painful part. So if the

wheels are falling off, pretty soon it feels like an

earthquake's happening, right? So if you're leaking

leads, mismanagining delivery, or growing

without a really solid foundation, you're not scaling. You're setting

yourself up for a crash. And we've talked a lot about that in the prior

couple of episodes. So let's fix that

before it costs you, your team, your margin, and

eventually the ability to exit. So I want to talk about

Blockbuster versus Netflix. Think about this for a

minute. In the early 2000s,

Blockbuster had every advantage.

They had stores in every market.

They had team. They had all

kinds of stuff, right? They were obsess_ed

with in store experience. My kids still

remember going to pick out their tape and

then the candy and all the stuff. But it was

kind of an event to go to Blockbuster and get the

weekends movies while that was happening. Netflix was

very unsexy. It was. I used to get these. That's how

old I am. The white little package with the

CD in it in a red sleeve. Very

unsexy, boring. It was optimizing

systems and logistics and consistency. They weren't as

worried about what it looked like or what the experience

of it was. It was very efficient. You put in your list and then the

next one would come when they get the CD back.

Blockbuster kept focusing on their retail

footprint while Netflix was

streamlining delivery and followed up religiously

on CDS and DVD reminders that

hadn't come back in smart packaging and

improving the speed in which you received the next

movies. Netflix scale and Blockbuster failed.

That happens in small business today at a smaller

scale, but that is exactly what's happening for entrepreneurs and

small business Owners today who don't think about how to

scale smart. So let's talk about how this might be playing out

in your business right now. Here are some of the universal mistakes

that kill scale scaling before stabilizing. So

I've talked a little bit about this in the past and this is why I

focus on optimization. Optimization, optimization.

We use data, make decisions, do something different, measure

and keep going. So if you don't know your

customer, churn rate your close rate by sales

rep. If you don't know what it costs to deliver,

like down to the scent of how many pencils

you're using, how many pieces of paper you're using, what

each traffic source costs, if you don't understand that, then

you don't know your margin. You may be delivering service at a loss.

That means you're not ready to add more. I had an offer

when I was first starting to replace my corporate

income. And it started as a done

with you kind of like get Clair on your avatar

and launch your expert expertise kind of a

business. And it was, done with you kind of group

coaching. And it started out as $6,000. I could

see that the problem everybody was having is they would come to

the next call and they hadn't done their homework, they hadn't done their research, they

hadn't talked to the audience. So we don't know if we really have an

offer. But the rest of the group has moved on to writing the

copy. So I started adding

more done with you sessions that were

focused on exactly the next step. And in the

beginning, I just was doing that at my cost

because it was just my time. Do you hear that? Just my

time. But time's the one thing we can't get back, right? So

eventually then with automation, I started adding in

drag and drop things like a sales page that could be edited

instead of waiting for them to learn how to build it because

they were brand new in their business. So they did the

I'm going toa learn how to do everything rather than pay somebody to do

it. So they were not yet who how entrepreneurs. So

at the end of the year, this offer came up to

$25,000 and it was still the same

outcome. They just went faster. Because what I realized

is they knew they wanted to start the business, but they

hadn't yet dealt with how do I execute

consistently. So I had to find a way to

overcome the lack of execution. And that

started with we'll just meet more and I'll hold

hands more. And then it got into how do I just

Drag the solution into their account. I

could not have scaled that to replace my

full corporate income had I kept

delivering more small group

sessions to get the result right. So

scaling before stabilizing is a crash and burn

pattern. Hiring too fast. People will always say, you know,

hire people to go faster. But you can also go too

fast if you don't know exactly what they're gonna do or how they're

gonna do it. And you don't have a process and a system documented for

what they're going to do. Now, you may hire an expert to come in

and create the system. That's a different story. But if you're bringing

in regular employees and they don't have

a process and a system and an onboarding to go through,

you're not delegating, you're babysitting. You're actually increasing

your workload and paying more money to do it. Chasing

revenue, not profit. This is very, very common.

We did a million last year. I'm a seven figure entrepreneur.

But they only kept 28,000 do after ads and

payroll and fulfillment and refunds. And that should be

closer to 40,000 doars, right? So where's the

$12,000 that's gone into thin air?

So chasing revenue, not profit, is a real

problem. Platform hopping. So

adding TikTok and LinkedIn when you

haven't done the basics on Facebook,

Instagram or YouTube, wherever your people are hanging out, and then

also hiring somebody to do SEO, you have to

master the one where all your people

are before you start going to all of the other

places. Ignoring retention and

systems, you are always going to make more money

more easily. If you sell to people who

already know, like and trust you. Solving their next

problem, pretty soon you become their

stealth. That's my business name, right? Stealth. Their

back pocket for everything they need done.

That can only happen if you understand what problem

they next have and you deliver excellent service,

committed to their results every step of the

way and building a back end that will

allow you to scale. So you have to

focus on customer retention and the systems

that support that founder bottleneck. If you get sick

or go on vacation and revenue drops, that's a

real problem. One, you can never sell that. But your family's at

risk. If you are the revenue

producer and you do the sales and you can't

be there to close sales, that is a serious problem.

Right? So this has to be fixed. And in the

lais last episode, I went in depth about

making sure we're replacing the founder in the sales

function of the business. So let's talk about

in home services the

mistakes you should look for. We'll talk about home services, professional

services, online coaching and E commerce. That's what we've been focusing on

in this series. So if your owner is still doing estimates

and involved in any part of the scheduling, you have a problem

in the home services space if you're not

tracking calls and using automated lead

capture that has AI follow up. Remember,

in several episodes I have talked about

Mike's H Vac company where the sales team told

me every day that it was a dead lead list. But as soon as we

installed some AI sorting and automation,

pretty soon they added a couple million dollars to

their revenue to their top line and kept even

more in profit from that dead leads list, right?

Expanding to another city before you are fully

dominating in one zip code. If you can't manage

logistics and you can't get traction on your offer

in one zip code and then you add another city

that now you have travel and potentially a second office and

all of that, you're multiplying the problems and spreading

yourself more thin. But people just think

I need more. It's number one complaint I get. I

need more leads, right? Hiring techs with no process

and having inconsistent delivery, that makes sense,

right? But not collecting reviews in home services

and then not responding to them is kind of

a death nail. I do a live webinar every week

where I talk about AI and automation and in that

webinar I attach a statistic to just about

everything I say. And not collecting

reviews and then not responding to reviews

is the death nail to just about any business,

but especially home services. Now today I find

most home services people understand that they need to focus on their

Google my business. But there's still not enough reviews and

definitely not enough responses. So I encourage you to sign up for that

webinar and really understand how you can

use AI and automation to stop

leaking money out of your business for things you

don't have time to do like collecting and responding

to reviews because it is real money at the end of the day

in the professional services space. If you're still writing

a custom proposal for every client and you don't have

repeatable process and you have an unbundled and focused

on the thing that is clearly your expertise

or the thing that makes you the most money or a reason to

niche down, then you

are about to commit suicide in your business.

You're about to create something that is not manageable long term.

If you don't have any onboarding, automation and systemize

process for what happens with new clients when they come through.

Again, that's a big problem. If you're not specialized in

something then you're a generalist and generalist means

lower pricing, lower margin. So this is back

to bundling down and focusing on something

that your niche actually needs and getting really good at that.

One or two things, not 10 things. The founder still

delivering all the client work. That's obviously a problem.

Relying entirely upon referrals and

word of mouth without having a lead engine or a

visibility or something that's building your

authority and getting the

masses your message to the masses so that when they

have the problem, you're top of mind and they know you're the expert and come

in and then you have a lead capture. With online coaching

it's always too many offers in a confused audience. So what

exactly do you do? Confused mind doesn't buy

right over promising and under delivering

leads to refunds and churn. So if you're focused on

five different offers, you're not going to be able to

over deliver for the results that people are willing to pay for

over and over again. If you don't have any automation in

onboarding or content delivery, you're going to sync because as soon as

you have 10 more clients, you have to hire

one more person to be able to take care of those, right? The next

one is something I mentioned it just now with, the professional

services. But this is a big problem in the online world. If

you avoid the visibility in the content

production, you have no pipeline. If you're not

giving people opportunities with lead magnets and to see you

on video and all of that, you're not building the no like

trust and authority that people need to give you their hard earned

dollar to continue to solve the problems that they have.

You've got to kind of be omnipresent. If you're an online

business, if you have communities where there's

no defined journey and there's no

moderation in the community, it just becomes an energy suck

for everyone and it won't become a lead producing

magnet in the e commerce space. Relying on one

item, one sku, that's a killer.

Scaling ads with no back end flows. You have to have your

abandoned cart, your upsell, your down sell, your reviews,

your winback campaigns, all those things need to be in

place. Otherwise you're just throwing money

out the window with the ads because that is what it takes

to keep that person buying and rebuing, adding

new ad channels before one is profitable. Learn one

before you move on to the next one. No email

segmentations. The quickest way to get an unsubscribe

and we know in e commerce email is doing

the heavy lifting of these sales so you've got to

segment that list so that you're talking

to people about what they want to hear about so they don't

unsubscribe and then spending money on

apps and tools no one checks. I guess that's probably a problem

across all businesses. Here's some real world examples. I

talk a lot about a salon owner who had a

receptionist who was telling people you don't need the

upsells that the owner is going to give you. And that's more

about using AI and automation to

get people to stay on script and do the

sales you need them to do. But this was a salon

owner who added a new lead magnet to come

see us but didn't have follow up set up. So

they launched this free offer to bring in new

clients but the front desk wasn't following up

and there was no salespeople in the building so

they didn't get new appointments book. They would say something soft

like would you like to schedule your next appointment? And so

the offer flopped and everyone blamed the marketing

team that they hired. But every marketing company you ever

are going to hire is going to say I found you

leads but you didn't follow up appropriately. And at the end of

the day that's true because when we start AI and automation in

people's companies, we figure out without adding

anything else, revenue goes through the roof. And that is

because salespeople don't follow the process. They don't follow

up enough times. I talk a lot about that in that webinar. There was

a law firm that hired three new paralegals but they didn't

have any onboarding for the paralegals. Weeks later,

documents aren't filed correctly. It's pure chaos. The

founder has to step in and start micromanaging and dealing with

client complaints because the new people weren't trained in anything. Nobody

could find any paperwork. It was all in the owner's

head. And so the owner had to start solving all the problems which

meant all of the evenings were gone. Fixing

existing client issues and they couldn't bring on any new clients

for a few weeks. So that's a revenue problem. Right. There's an E

commerce brand that killed return on ad spend

trying to add TikTok and they hadn't really done

anything with their Google. So Google's not

optimized but they're Trying to learn something like

TikTok, which is also funnel

optimization after they click and all of those things.

So ad costs tripled and sales

stayed flat. They did not realize that Google was

producing a 1.4 times

return and cart emails abandoned. Cart

emails hadn't been turned on. So these basics have to be

in place before you start going on to the next thing.

So here's how you fix it before you scale it. You gotta know

your metrics, you gotta run a metric audit. What does it cost you

to acquire a customer? What is the lifetime value of

a customer? What is your close rate by person

who's responsible to close? What is the churn rate? How

many people rebuy from you and how long does it take

them to do that? What does it cost you to

truly deliver the results that you're promising?

If you don't know those things, you're in big trouble. You're

at risk to lose money while building

revenue. Right? You have to fix your lead follow up. That's always

gonna go back to automation and AI.

Most humans stop attempting to

close a sale after the first attempt. I think it's 44%

after the first attempt. Another 8% will try

a second time, but after that nobody's following

up. But it takes 8 to 12 times to close a sale. So

you absolutely need AI and automation to be able

to do that. And if somebody needs 7 to 12

touches, the nurture sequence really needs to

be built out with lots of video and nailed

pain points in the emails and downloads of things that

they can test you out on. You have to have all of your contacts in

one place with tags so that you know

who's consuming what and what is the next sequence you need to

create. You have to simplify delivery, you have to have

SOPs and when something doesn't work, you have to

go back and update the SOP

and say why didn't it work? Why didn't it work for us? Why

didn't work for the client? How are we goingna improve that? Then

update the SOP and then say okay, let's run it

three more times this new way and see did it get better?

If we can use checklists and templates and pre built

pathways, everybody feels better. Everybody knows

this is what my next step is. I think of my little granddg

Charlie when he's walking with me. If he's not

sure, he's constantly looking back at me. What are we doing?

What are we doing? But when we go for our walk to Starbucks, he

knows he will Pull me to the right to turn the corner to the

right. He knows the packed Starbucks and his pubup. But when we're

doing something not as cool as Starbucks that we haven't done before,

he's looking left, looking right. Where's grandma? What are we

gonna do right? You want everybody to know where do we get the

pub cups? You have to streamline your offers. One

core offer is way better than three half

built ones and you can understand why if you

have frustrated people in three different offers,

you are much better to just focus on one and make

it hum and then think about do I really

want to offer something else? You want to

automate 80% or more of your administrative

the calendaring, the payments, the forms, the onboard

put in all your links here before they're ever a client.

Just everything you can automate, you want to automate.

That is going to drop a lot of profit to the bottom line. And

in this day and age there's so much this

drag and drop. You don't have to learn how to build this stuff from

scratch. Always ask yourself, can this be

automated, eliminated,

delegated or done by AI? And if

the answer is yes, that means you're gonna have more

profit, simpler service delivery and better

outcomes. So I'd encourage you to take the changes

assessment to see where your is leaking revenue right

now. You can get that in the show notes. You can download

our free Freedom to Scale field guide and find

the checklist that applies to your business type.

And this field guide is amazing. I actually just created

it two weeks ago and we're making it look

beautiful. But I am just so proud of this field

guide. I think you're going to love it. So you want to go download that right away

and you can register for our AI employee webinar to

figure out where you can stop leaking money

with a robot doing things that humans are

actually bored doing. The biggest thing there is. You will

capture all of your leads and suddenly your revenue goes

up without you adding any marketing or traffic

cost. Smart Scale starts with fixing the

cracks before you ever try to grow. Much less

scale. So patching them together with duct tape is not

the answer. Filling the problems with you working till

midnight is not the answer. So download some of these

things, attend that webinar and let's start

building smart. As always, I'd love for you to subscribe

or share this episode with somebody who needs it

and we will see you on the next episode in

our Scalesmart series. Thank you so much for joining

us today.