How I 10X'd the Business Using the Same Trick Twice

Twelve months into property management and the same question came back around.

How do we grow from here?

Last time I had asked that question the answer was to solve a parallel problem for a customer who already trusted us. It had worked so well it almost felt too simple. So I went back to the same process and asked the same questions out loud.

What worked last time?

Solving a parallel problem for our customers.

Can we do that again?

Not really. We were already handling every single part of their investment property maintenance. There was no gap left to fill on their side.

Can we solve a parallel problem for ourselves instead?

Hot diggity dawg.

We were already managing trades on behalf of our customers as the middleman. Coordinating, scheduling, quality checking, paying invoices. The whole thing. But every time we did that we were sending money to someone else's business.

What if we supplied our own trades instead?

If I could generate enough consistent work to keep these guys booked out full time I could negotiate a volume discount. The customer pays the same price they always had. We make significantly more money. Everyone wins.

We implemented it for our property maintenance clients first.

Needless to say it worked.

Then I started looking at expanding the construction customer base into a separate list of private clients and the rest, as they say, is history.

Waste removal became property management. Property management became construction. Not by chasing something new every time but by asking the same simple question over and over again and following the answer wherever it led.

This is the part most entrepreneurs get wrong.

There is a deeply human tendency to get bored of what is working and go looking for something more exciting. A new idea, a new market, a new business entirely. Something that feels fresh and full of possibility.

But boredom is not a signal that something is broken. It is just boredom.

The most powerful growth strategy is rarely the most glamorous one. Sometimes it is just the same lesson applied again in a slightly different context. Same question. Same process. Different answer.

If the framework works, keep using the framework.

Lesson 13: Don't fix something if it is not broken. Just because it is boring does not mean it does not work.

We talk about how to grow without overcomplicating it every week on the TSP Podcast with Dale Meyer. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and join The Sequoia Project community on Facebook.