How Scaling a Business Can Kill Your Brand.
Brands often lose sight of their target audience when scaling a business.
Maintaining a vision is not a huge feat for most single establishment businesses. However, the waters can quickly get murky when scaling a business, be it a start-up or a franchising deal of a single location business. Why? Most leaders will forgo their vision to execute tasks or lose said vision to cast a bigger net and target more potential customers. While vision and target market are not the same, you can not have a future without an audience; they are directly related.
Let's take a trip down memory lane to my first company, where I had the vision to modernize the stigma around plant-based snacking. In 2010, this was a small market, but I knew the future opportunity was huge. Within my first six months of a single-person operation, I caught the attention of an A-list celebrity who picked my product for a chain of Juice Bars in New York City. My vision allowed me to create a highly focused marketing and sales approach that resulted in many early successes.
The issues arose when it became time to scale. When raising money, I got asked in every pitch: "could everyone eat this product?' Sure, I'd say. 'Hmmm, ok, if you can position it so that everyone could buy it, we'll invest,' they'd reply. Eventually, I was casting a net so big in my pitches that I targeted every human on the planet. Because my audience changed, so did my vision; I stopped building for a future goal and focused solely on the right now. When I closed my series A round, the first thing to go was our pink logo mark, turning it to a reddish-orange in hopes to 'not scare off men.' I was inexperienced, scared to death to fail, and knew I needed to scale at an unprecedented rate. Unfortunately, my once clear-as-glass vision was long-f*cking-gone. I had no clue where we were going or who we were targeting amidst scaling a business.
I lost sight that my investors were not the creators of my vision; they were merely its buyers. By losing my vision, I lost my audience. Without vision, we took every sales opportunity that came our way. We went from selling out in natural and organic stores with little marketing dollars to wasting time, energy, and money trying to move pallets of product sitting in conventional midwest grocery stores. The vision went from modernizing the stigma of plant-based snacking to pretending like we weren't a plant-based food company in hopes of not losing a sale.
And therein lies the problem—the fear of not targeting everyone when scaling a business kills vision. When my vision died, our strategy died. When our strategy died, our audience died.
Almost all organizations start with a vision, but only great organizations keep their vision clear year after year. If you want your company to be great, you need to define your company vision, share it with your employees and investors, and actively live it. I strongly advise against changing said vision to something else that may seem more appealing for money's sake. I find second and third-time entrepreneurs are more adamant about standing their ground with scaling a business or raising money, and I believe it's part of why they often succeed more than 1st-time entrepreneurs.
Unfortunately, most leaders who focus on vision do so out of a past failure. Luckily many individuals like myself are actively helping businesses and entrepreneurs making it easier to learn through education and not failure.
If I had to recommend one book on Vision, It would be Michael Hyatt's The Vision Driven Leader, a thought-provoking, easy-to-digest handbook on cultivating vision.