Although most business owners can grow a company, far fewer can build one that keeps growing without straining its people, its systems, or its bank account. The difference often comes down to whether the growth follows a plan or just happens.
When Alex and Leila Hormozi needed someone with a proven track record of scaling companies to help lead Acquisition.com, they called on Sharran Srivatsaa to be their CEO. Srivatsaa is also the host of the new digital series Billion Dollar Deals, which reverse-engineers some of the biggest business transactions in modern history to uncover the strategies, negotiations, and lessons entrepreneurs can apply to their own businesses.
Srivatsaa joins today’s episode of Business Trends Today to break down the operational frameworks he uses to help business owners diagnose what’s holding them back, simplify their operations, and build teams that stay.
Defining scale
According to Srivatsaa, business owners often talk about scaling, but few stop to define the word first. His advice is to focus on growth first, and to clearly define what that means. Vague goals like “grow the business” don’t give owners anything to actually act on, he said.
"If growth is intentional improvement of a particular metric, then scale is formulaic growth."
Once a business owner identifies what they want to grow, the next step is scale. Scale means that growth can happen on a repeatable formula instead of constant manual effort.
Srivatsaa pointed to the earliest years of most businesses, when owners grow through sheer hustle, knocking on doors and closing each sale by hand. Momentum builds once that growth turns systematic.
Finding the real bottleneck
Every business faces the same three problem areas at some point:
- A demand problemÂ
- A supply problem
- An equity value problem
New owners often start out with that demand problem as they struggle to find customers. Once demand picks up, they run into the supply problem and can’t keep up with orders. After that comes the equity value problem, when owners start weighing whether to open a second location or expand into a new market.
To work through those stages, Srivatsaa developed a framework called the 1-1-1 Method. The method asks business owners to master one lead source, one conversion method and one delivery channel before adding anything new.
Once those fundamentals are in place, Srivatsaa recommends a second framework built around traffic, systems and skills. Traffic measures whether a business is generating enough leads. Systems measure whether those leads convert into paying customers. Skills measure whether the team can deliver on what was promised.
"The entire job of business is to find the constraint, solve the constraint, find the next constraint."
Many business owners assume they have a traffic problem when they actually have a systems problem, Srivatsaa said. He shared a story about Tesla, where a new company president discovered sales staff were generating plenty of test drives but never following up with the people who took them. Pausing new leads for 30 days and calling only past test-drive customers solved the real issue.
What business leaders can learn from Don Shula
When it comes to cutting through the clutter that slows a business down, Srivatsaa took a page from legendary NFL coach Don Shula. Shula coached the Miami Dolphins to the only perfect season in NFL history, and Srivatsaa said the secret behind that record applies just as well to running a business.
Every play Shula designed was built to end in a touchdown, stripped down to one or two steps instead of a complicated route. Srivatsaa built a business concept around that same idea and calls it growth by subtraction.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he cut the company’s product line from 300 items to just four. Srivatsaa said that’s a perfect example of cutting the chaos to focus on growth.
Building a team that stays
Srivatsaa runs his own team on what he calls a memo culture. The rule is simple: no memo, no meeting. Instead of jumping on a call to pitch an idea, employees write it down first, which forces them to organize their thinking before anyone weighs in.
The practice speeds up onboarding dramatically, Srivatsaa said. A new executive can read through 15 memos on the company’s current issues and get caught up in a couple of days instead of the usual 90-day ramp-up period.
Srivatsaa also encourages leaders to ask their teams two questions:
- What’s the one thing that would make them quit if it disappeared
- What’s the one thing that would make them stay forever
Most people are single-issue voters, Srivatsaa said. Meaning one specific frustration or benefit usually drives an employee’s decision to stay or leave, far more than money.
Billion Dollar Deals
Srivatsaa’s frameworks offer business owners a way to work through the same struggles that slow down almost every growing company, from unclear goals to bloated operations to teams that walk out the door.
Business owners looking to learn more can check out Srivatsaa’s new digital series, Billion Dollar Deals. The premiere episode breaks down Lionel Messi’s billion-dollar decision and the strategy behind one of sports’ biggest deals, offering lessons entrepreneurs can apply to their own businesses.
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