Imagine yourself in a huge gymnasium. On one end of the gym is a pile of beach balls, and on the other end is an oversized bucket.
It takes some time and effort to pick up a beach ball, walk it across the gym, and drop it in the bucket, but you get $5 for every ball that ends up in the bucket.
You do this a few times, then you wonder if something can be done to speed up the process. This time, you pick up two beach balls at once. You can barely hold them both, but you manage to bring them to the bucket and make $10 in one trip. You do this a few more times, but once you get used to making $10 per trip it doesn’t feel like enough.
Can you do more? Not alone.
You decide to enlist the help of one of your friends. While you’re gone on this errand, no beach balls have made it into the bucket. You come back and show your friend how it’s done. You both start carrying two beach balls at once and you make $20 per trip now. You pay your friend a portion of the extra income.
You run into the same problem. You need more people! You repeat this process slowly until you build an entire assembly line of beach ball jugglers.
There’s a team of people collecting beach balls and bringing them into the assembly line. They pass them off to the next team of people who then pass them on, all the way until they reach the bucket. Some beach balls fall on the ground and roll away, but that’s OK – not every beach ball needs to make it, especially if retrieving it would compromise your system.
You get to the point where you’re making $200 in the time it used to take you to make $5.
Running a business is like juggling beach balls.
Beach balls are customers and tasks that need to be done. You can only handle the cycle of so many customers at once, just like you can only hold so many beach balls at once. When your business grows, you begin to run out of time and hands. To keep growing, you enlist the help of employees who take over certain parts of the business.
There’s a marketing team collecting beach balls (leads) and bringing them into the assembly line. They pass them off to the next team of people (sales) who then pass them on (production), all the way until they reach the bucket (final check). Some beach balls (customers) fall on the ground and roll away, but that’s OK – not every beach ball needs to make it, especially if retrieving it would compromise your system.
Delivering for a customer and getting paid may not be as easy as moving a beach ball across a gymnasium, but it certainly can be as simple.
Don’t overcomplicate it.