There Are Ways to Scale Up on Your Own Terms

The opportunity to speak with somebody who dreamed of becoming a pastor but instead became an entrepreneur is not one you get too often.

That’s why I was excited to interview Taylor Welch, an internationally recognized business consultant and entrepreneur. As a CEO of several multi-eight-figure companies, Taylor has advised and serviced more than 50,000 businesses in the last five years.

Additionally, Taylor Welch wrote: The Consultant Next Door: The Modern-Day Consulting Playbook for Getting Clients & Getting Paid, an entrepreneur’s guide to powerful coaching and marketing frameworks. Aside from that, he’s also the Chairman of Traffic and Funnels, a digital marketing consultancy that helps entrepreneurs create online marketing systems and scale their businesses.

Taylor’s persistence to learn and surround himself with smarter people, even in the midst of adversity, is one of what I admire most about him. Within five years, he scaled his first company, Traffic & Funnels, to tens of millions of dollars.

In less than a decade, he has built a name for himself across hundreds of industries and has made over three-quarters of a billion dollars in client revenue.

It is now his goal to show other businesses and individuals how to achieve similar success. Throughout this article, we discuss his journey from wanting to be a pastor to making millions in real estate, as well as the effect mindset has on living a life of abundance.

What exactly does it mean to scale?

In addition to being subjective, scale is also relative, Taylor explains. In the eyes of some, “scale” is 100 clients. Others define “scale” as ten clients. By thinking about your market cap, you can gain a better understanding of “scale.”

My definition of “market cap” for your business is slightly different. Here’s what it is:

“When the “increased growth” of a business begins to produce diminishing returns or less options — you’re approaching market cap.”

Financial returns cannot be the sole indicator of diminishing returns. In addition to monetary returns, there are non-monetary returns that are just as important.

A person’s wealth can be defined as the sum of all their assets, less the maintenance they need to maintain them. The definition of wealth is what you want, but I consider it a “net number,” not a “gross number.”

According to Taylor, trying to achieve a “number” while losing options in your life is not wealth.

Entrepreneurial inspiration

Inspiration can come in many forms. You make your own path based on what matters to you and what drives you. However, no matter where it is found, it is often a crucial part of what keeps you going during difficult times.

The inspiration for Taylor’s entrepreneurial journey came from his wife.

Just a week before our wedding, she decided to take off for a week, he explains. I asked her, “What do you mean you’re going to take off for a week?” Her response was, “I’m just not going to work. I’m not going to take clients” (at her salon). For the first time, I was like, “Man, I don’t know if I’m just like dumb or I’ve been living under a rock, but how can you take off for a week and survive? This was completely foreign to me,” he adds. “I didn’t really know what entrepreneurship even was. My whole life, I had one goal, and I wanted to be in the ministry, and I wanted to be a pastor, which is fine — but I got that wish and then promptly decided I no longer wanted to work at a church because you don’t get paid.”

“Suddenly, I was faced with having to figure out something else. Then I transitioned into real estate, and from real estate, I got exposure to Lindsay — who’s my wife and who owns her own salon.”

“Day after day, I was like, “Man, I think that I could develop a skill set, and I could go on to do my own thing.” That’s exactly what Taylor did. “And one of the cool things about what I did is I actually learned marketing and did it for my employer.” So, I tell people, “I kept my day job the first time I got my own client because I treated it as two different incomes that I could invest with.”

In addition, Taylor decided to use the other income to pay their bills. Many people today quit their jobs so quickly, leaving them in a bad position. “I worked for 14 months after figuring out the entrepreneur side,” he says. “Let’s use that to bankroll investment opportunities and courses and things like that.”

Build a winning skill set by focusing on your priorities

When Taylor started his own business, he prioritized helping his wife scale her business. Because he wanted to serve her — he was able to find this niche market that he was able to tackle and grow wealth and influence to a level he might not have been able to reach otherwise.

Taylor says that “when you’re focused on service, two things begin to grow exponentially just because of who you are. For one, you’re able to connect with like-minded people” — (such as Taylor’s business partner, Chris Evans). Today, Traffic and Funnels has over 75,000 customers. In turn, his businesses are essentially running without him so that he can continue to focus on what truly matters.

What you can do to change your circumstances.

“Everything comes down to what I’ll call your frame,” Taylor states. “You can call it perspective. You can call it whatever you want. But it really is a lens or a frame through which you view the world.”

“For example, sometimes, when I speak or talk, I will ask the audience, ‘Who here feels that $50,000 is a lot of money?'” Everyone puts their hand up. There are a few people in the room who are aware of what we are doing, so they don’t raise their hands. Most of the audience, however, are thinking, “$50,000 is a lot of money,” because they’re playing small or they’re limited in their thinking.

Taylor then changes the question by saying, “Imagine that you are unable to work, you’re in a catastrophic accident, and $50,000 is the amount of money you have to last the rest of your life. Who here feels like $50,000 is a lot of money?” No hands go up. As a result of the change in “frame,” the answer changed as well.

“And life is just like that,” he continues. “Life is the same way.” It depends on the frame you have, and frames come from exposure — frames come from people. As he tells people, “Everything starts in the mind.”

Taking a strategic approach to finance

Taylor says that “good money for me is the documentation of the lessons that I should have learned as a kid but didn’t learn until later on.” When most people are looking for a way to afford something, where do they go? They check their bank account, right? Is there enough money in their account?

“And it’s like no, no, no, it’s all wrong,” he proclaims. “Look at your plan. Don’t look at your account balances. Look at your plan.” Ask questions such as:

• How do you set aside money for taxes?
• What can you do to make yourself more valuable, not just for the sake of being valuable, but actually negotiating that value for more money and negotiating increases?

“You can control your income if you take action.”

Taking control of your finances

You know, there’s this thing where people simply don’t budget once they’re making good money. “But like, when I think about budgeting, I think about like my plan for future money,” Taylor says. The question is, “How do I tell my money what to do? Instead, let us reverse the control and give the money in my accounts a purpose.

What if it doesn’t do its job? “Then I’m going to hold it accountable to that,” he explains. “And so, really not looking at tracking and budgeting and some of these things that are just kind of like negative connotations, not looking at them from a place of weakness or slavery but looking at them from a place of control and power.”

Long-term, your money will do more for you if you plan well. “We get a little bit into some of the asset protection,” he continues, “Not a lot, though. I think some of it, but just because you need to have a will and testament or you need to have a trust.”

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Monstera; Pexels; Thank you!