Mastering Millions: How To Scale a Service Business

1. Get the right team in place

To make a million dollars in a year, you will need to make $88,000 a month. That’s roughly $22,000 a week or $4,500 a day. 

That’s a lot of clients served, products sold, or services rendered. As you well know, those clients, products, and services come with a hidden amount of labor invested into them. Knowing how to scale up a service business is, in part, learning how to get help and delegate tasks. 

To get to a million dollars in a year, you need to have a team behind you. And you need to trust that team with aspects of your business you may want to take care of yourself. 

Dan says that one of the most powerful mental shifts he needed to level up his business was about people. “People are everything. Our team is great, our leadership is awesome, and I’m not the smartest person in the room.” He hired experts who are (in his words, not ours) smarter than him. “As soon as I shifted that, the business just exploded, which was what my purpose is.” 

READ MORE: Where to find employees for your business

2. Structure a business that can scale

First off, we need to talk about the difference between scaling and growing. Simply put, when your business grows, it becomes larger: more employees, more clients, and a bigger footprint. You get the idea. 

When your business scales, however, it becomes larger with a business model in place to support the growth. Think of it like corporate scaffolding. That structure may include:

• internal processes, 
• software tools, 
• administrative, sales, accounts, marketing and middle-management teams, or 
• a defined brand, including a company culture, values, and identity. 

You don’t need everything at once. But as your small business grows, you’ll begin to see the importance of the corporate scaffolding successful businesses have put in place to scale. Take a look at multi-million dollar companies; they often have similar business structures. There’s a good reason for that, and it’s something you can look to emulate.

READ MORE: Make an employee a partner to grow your home service business

3. Automate where you can

When figuring out how to scale a service business, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is time. You’re often the last line of defense, picking up the slack. One of the ways you can pay your future self today is to put processes and systems in place with the goal of automation.

When you’re trying to scale your business to seven figures, every minute counts, but it’s not about working harder (that’s what got you here). It’s about working smarter. The good news is that there are tools that can help take care of many of these tasks for you. 

Think of these tools as your “silent support team” working in the background. They allow you to focus on things an owner should focus on. Things like strategy, innovation, and leadership. Tools can give you the space to work on your business instead of constantly working in it.

Key automation areas to support business scaling

• Field service management. From the first inquiry to quoting and scheduling, invoicing, and payment—finding operational efficiency is vital to scaling your business. Home service software like Jobber can help you automate every step of your job workflow.
• Marketing and client communication. Acquiring and keeping clients can be a big undertaking. Tactics like email marketing, setting auto-reply messages, and creating a workflow for getting customer reviews will help get you more potential clients and keep your customer base happy with less effort.
• Accounting and billing. For a growing business, spreadsheets and manual processes aren’t going to cut it anymore. You need the right software to manage your accounting and payroll efficiently. Look for solutions like QuickBooks that integrate with your other systems. As you grow, look to bring in in-house talent to manage them.

4. Know your numbers 

Businesses, says Donovan, should be able to scale up profitably and scale down profitably.

Your financial goal should be to be profitable, whether you’re pulling in $50k or a million. To do so, you need to know your numbers—revenue, profit margins, credit, debt, and cash flow.

Capital funding considerations

When you’re figuring out how to scale a service based business, it can be easy to overspend. But don’t spend what you can’t reasonably pay back. Donovan says, “If you’re going to play big numbers and do big jobs with big quotes, then there’s potential for big losses. If you’re going to take on big debt, okay, well, if the economy goes sour, then you could be in a real bind.” 

When it comes to capital funding, the goal isn’t to avoid debt entirely but to take on only what’s necessary and manageable. Building your business credit early is essential for when you need to take out necessary loans, but don’t spend money you don’t have in the bank. Every investment or expense should be profitable or contribute to future profitability. Ask yourself, “If this decision goes wrong, will it threaten the stability of the entire company?”

Remember, the bankers you’re dealing with are often following the bank’s guidelines. To work within the system, Dan recommends reverse-engineering your financial needs to fit the bank’s criteria. Banks want to lend money they can count on getting back, so start small and build your credit steadily.

Financial insight will give you agility

Immediate access to real-time financial insights is hugely important, says Dan. An in-house (and in-house is key here) bookkeeper allows you daily transparency into the financial health of the business. This lets you make decisions based on weekly cash flow rather than waiting for monthly reports. 

Being proactive with your numbers helps you seize opportunities for revenue growth and quickly pivot if necessary.

Hypothetically speaking, you could have had a great week and been able to afford a new tool to bid on a new job that just came through. Without immediately knowing your financials, this opportunity could have slipped by. The more in tune you are with your financial health, the more strategically you can scale your business without missing opportunities.

Pro Tip: AI-powered tools like Jobber Copilot let you access key business metrics in seconds.

5. Adopt a growth mindset 

Entrepreneurs have to train their brains to think differently. As a business owner, you’ll need to make some mental shifts to scale your business to a million dollars and beyond. 

Notably, you need to change your mindset from working in your business to working on your business. You’ve got to move from a reactive mind to a proactive one, positioning yourself for long-term success. 

Here are a few of the critical shifts successful entrepreneurs like Donovan and Dan have made to break through the million-dollar barrier:

Let go of limiting beliefs 

Do you handle everything yourself? Ever feel anxious delegating aspects of your business to others? Recognize that knee-jerk reaction of doing it yourself, and ask, “Why can’t they?” instead. A limiting belief is a state of mind that restricts you. When you believe you are the only one who can handle things, you are restricting yourself to that role. 

Dan advises owners to just jump into the process and ask yourself, what’s the worst that can happen? “Or again,” says Dan, “trust the process. You don’t have to trust all your staff, but you have to have a process in place for them to trust that they’ll get it done.” 

Reevaluate your idea of profitability 

If your business has made a million dollars, but your personal hourly rate is in the gutter because you’re doing three different jobs for the business, then what’s the point? 

Often, Donovan says, being profitable at a lower level means you’re wearing too many hats. When you grow, you have to pay people to do the jobs you once took on yourself. It might seem like you’re less profitable on paper, but you can’t discredit your time. 

Know that business has no end-game 

Business isn’t a finite task with a clear endpoint—it’s a long-term strategy. Focusing on the short term (like maxing out profits) can affect you in the long term.

Smart investments, whether in people, systems, or infrastructure, will cause a dip in profits initially but, over time, will pay off as your business grows larger, stronger, and more sustainable growth. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. 

Widen your perspective 

Don’t be afraid to draw inspiration from outside of your industry. One of Donovan’s mentors is a farmer who views sales as an organic extension of the business, a serendipitous outgrowth of quality and service. This mindset can apply to any industry—sales should not be forced but rather a natural result of the caliber of value you offer.