The Flywheel: A Lesson for Persistance & Growing Your Business

Yes, you must start. Start where you are. Don't wish for better this or better that...start.

Let me give an example. In the mid 2000s I took a contract role to start up a metal fab shop bought by a friend who had another job and couldn't run the thing. It had been left to be run by the employees by an absentee owner. The branding had slipped, the reputation was bad and moral was low.

Fortunately, Vancouver was in the middle of a housing boom. So if you could offer the combination of quality work and on-time delivery, you could do well.

Problem was, the new owner had changed the name of the business...the phone number of the business...and nobody knew where it was except the previous clients who had had a bad experience.

Fun place to start from.

Yours truly didn't know much about steel and aluminum, either, except what I'd learned about steel in school about 10 years earlier.

Anyway I got on the phone and started calling builders, contractors, architects. I sucked. I didn't know what would interest them. They'd ask questions and I wouldn't know the answers. Didn't matter. They badly wanted that combination of quality product and on-time delivery. I could get the answers.

After a week or so of calling, I had pain points direct from the horse's mouth, and a script firing on all cylinders. Every word out of my mouth made my new contact want to learn more...and then make use of us.

A couple months in, after I'd learned the new terminology and could answer questions, I started calling ex-customers. The ones who would be wary. I got a lot of them back. They called me "politely persistent," which was a carry-over from my credit manager days.

And still the business worked in fits and starts. We'd run out of work. I'd have to jump in a truck and drive around looking for construction sites. A few hours later and we'd have ourselves a custom 3/8" bracket project to hold up the house or something.

I learned how to program and operate the fine plasma cutting table.

Finally I hit on the idea of going after repeat projects with high-end custom home builders. Gates, stair railings, chimney caps. Six at a time. Thousands and thousands of dollars...and, provided I met my delivery dates, I could creep my prices up 5-8% every time.

Now we started to make money.

Had to hire on more people. Had to move the shop because we needed more space.

People I'd never talked to or met were getting out of their trucks in front of my place and saying they'd been referred there.

This was about six months in.

No longer did I have to bid. No longer was I in competition with other shops. I could set my price, because word had gotten around: these guys do what they say they'll do.

After that, the problems stopped being those of sales & marketing. They become purely operational: How was I going to fulfill on all of this work?

And then my workshop supervisor broke his kneecap. Off to the hospital for months, and years of botched surgeries later...someone had to run the whole business. That's another story. Good thing I'm an operations management guy first...

But you see how the flywheel works. There were days early on when I thought we were going to fail. But every time I got into the truck, I knew I could pull enough work out to keep going for a couple days. Once I honed in on my target market, and started getting that base of business to cover our expenses to start with, then I could continue to build the revenue stream. The growing reputation did things and gave me reach that I could not achieve on my own. That's the flywheel at work. So get started, and keep at it.