Scale

Picture a squid eyeball from space. 50 miles away. Now picture a squid eyeball from our boat, The PescaSqiudaleous. A mile away. Now picture a squid eyeball from the view of our iPhone we juuust dropped in the water when it swam beneath the boat scaring the crap out of us, uh...literally. At one scale, we can barely see the ocean. At another scale, we saw waaaay too much eyeball.

Scale in business has the same kind of dramatic effect as operations come into play. That is…it’s one thing to serve lemonade drinks to 100 people a week. It takes one stand, a permit, and a grocery store’s visit of supplies. It’s completely another thing to serve a million drinks a week. For the latter, you need infrastructure, trucks, storage, and armies of servers to...serve.

So when a company scales, it means that they have gone from a modest few million dollars of sales...to sales of a hundred million...and then a few billion. The skill set for the former is a vastly different set than for the latter. And some people are able to do both. Howard Schultz, founder & CEO of Starbucks, we’re lookin’ at you. Starbucks started off as just one store in Seattle. And like...5 minutes later, there were a gazillion of them all over the world.

So yeah, that’s how a company scales. Incidentally, you may want to stay off the scale if you consume Venti caramel fraps with whip on a daily basis.