All the Right Things Wrong: Business growth strategies and scaling a small business

It was 2003.

A perfect summer day. The kind where you can still smell spring but feel the warmth of the hot sun.

And it was the best day to get a “free truck.”

It was a 1965 Ford Twin I-Beam. Baby blue.

Now, let’s be clear. This truck had an AM radio, no power steering, bad spark plugs and a bad distributor. The brakes were as smooth as a wooden roller coaster in reverse.

But it was everything I needed.

It had all the right things wrong with it.

You see, I needed a vehicle, and with a few minor fixes to some major problems, I was off on my own to my next adventure in no time.

Fast-forward to your business today or the one you might buy tomorrow.

Does it have all the right things wrong with it?

One of the most overlooked business growth strategies is learning to distinguish between problems that can be fixed and problems that fundamentally weaken a business.

When you’re scaling a small business, you don’t necessarily need everything to be perfect.

You need to know which problems are opportunities and which problems are warning signs.

Here are some of the “right things wrong” I look for in a business.

And no, having something on this list doesn’t mean your business is broken or that you’ve done something wrong.

It may mean you have an opportunity and strong new cost savings to implement.

The “right things wrong” are problems that are measurable, fixable and surrounded by something valuable.

Think:

Strong customers + weak marketing.

Good employees + poor systems.

Strong demand + outdated pricing.

Great reputation + zero online presence.

Those aren’t necessarily broken businesses.

They may be businesses with untapped potential.

I love this first combination because you’ll see how they can all be daisy-chained together.

Believe it or not, we see businesses quite frequently where at least one employee is being paid full-time for less than 20 hours of actual work.

Now, after the owner promptly turns down hiring me to do that job (😊), we see that they have a few options.

One is to expand that employee’s role and use those extra hours to create marketing and online consistency.

If they don’t know how, train them.

There is more than enough material online—and free training on YouTube—to become dangerous.

Everyone’s intelligence is like a rubber band. It will expand and contract over time depending on how it’s used.

Take those extra 20 hours and expand them.

You may already have the capacity you need sitting inside your business.

That’s a business growth strategy hiding in plain sight.

Start by documenting the entire business flow.

How do you capture a client from the moment they find you all the way through fulfilling their need and creating loyalty?

Think of it like documenting everything you do in one day, from the time you wake up until you go to bed.

Then, find a CRM that allows you to capture every major pivot in that business flow.

If the right CRM doesn’t exist, many companies will build one for you.

And if you need a “free version,” email your local college.

Every master’s student needs a capstone or thesis project. I know because I did one.

Email the software engineering department and find a student who wants to create a CRM as part of their project.

That could solve the next two issues.

A good CRM can provide robust reporting and create the management systems you need to run the business better.

This is what scaling a small business often looks like in practice.

It isn’t always about adding more people or opening another location.

Sometimes it’s about building systems around the business you already have.

If you’re pricing yourself based on the prices you receive from everyone else, you’re simply a pass-through—and eventually, customers will pass through you.

Rewrite your pricing as if you set the standard.

Because you do.

The list could go on:

• Great service but zero cross-selling
• Customer concentration
• Strong repeat customers with no retention strategy
• Weak net income because of avoidable overhead
• Amazing culture with zero accountability
• No strategic partnerships
• An owner who is still doing everything
• A great product with almost no sales process
• Strong demand but outdated pricing
• Excellent employees with no management structure
• A strong referral network with no formal referral strategy
• A great reputation with almost no digital marketing
• Strong margins with unnecessary overhead
• A successful business that has never seriously pursued growth
• A great business operating in only one geographic market
• A strong service line that has never been expanded

These are the kinds of problems that can create opportunity.

The goal isn’t to find a perfect business.

The goal is to find the right things wrong.

Because the right things wrong are often the things you can fix.

And when you’re thinking about business growth strategies or scaling a small business, that’s an important distinction.

You don’t always need a new product.

You don’t always need more employees.

You don’t always need more customers.

Sometimes you need to look at what you already have and ask:

What is working?

What is underutilized?

What is outdated?

What is unnecessarily expensive?

And what could be fixed without changing what already works?

That’s where growth can get interesting.

And when you find those things, you may have just found exactly what you need to take your business, or the business you buy, to your next adventure.