How to Find the Sweet Spot You Need to Scale Your Business

There’s a particular sweet spot in your business planning which, once discovered, is a key factor towards your business being scalable. 

 

Planning is one of the Entrepreneurial ScaleUp System’s (ESUS) four fundamentals of strategy. For a plan to be successful, you and your team must be focused. Discovering your business's sweet spot will help ensure that your business is not just focused, but focused on the right area. 

 

So, what is your Sweet Spot and how do you find it? 

Your business’ sweet spot can be found at the intersection of three key areas: 

 

What you love doing 

What you are really good at 

What makes you good money 

 

Now, you may have seen this under various different names: Jim Collins used it as a model to find a business ‘hedgehog’; others use a variation called the Value Joy Profit Triangle; and there’s even a Japanese version, ikigai, which is used for finding your reason for being. 

 

Whatever the variation or purpose, an intersectional model helps you identify the most viable way to move forward - in this case, move forward with your business. 

 

Here’s what it looks like in action: 

Where all three circles overlap is the sweet spot, the key to your success. If you are only focused on two of the three, the plan won’t work in the long term. 

Let’s take a look at filling in the circles. 

What you love doing should be drawn from your Core Purpose. If you are familiar with the Entrepreneurial ScaleUp System, you will know that your Core Purpose is all about why you do what you do. 

 

It’s where the passion for your business comes from. 

This may seem simple, but take a step back and examine what you do. Are there some services that you provide which get better results than others? Where does your competitive advantage lie? What is your X-factor? 

 

Be really honest with yourself here. 

If people aren’t going to pay for it, it doesn’t matter how good you are at it or how passionate you are about it. A business needs to make money. 

 

This ideally should also link to your Smart Stretch: your 10-15 year long-term goal that’s beyond the visible horizon, but you know is where you want to be heading. 

Discovering your sweet spot gives you the focus and clarity to grow your business. This is where leaders should devote all of their energy and resources. 

 

As Jim Collins said, ‘When the going gets tough, it’s the organisations that focus on what they’re good at that survive and thrive.’ 

 

We have seen this through the Covid-19 pandemic; the temptation for many business owners, when faced with their usual business being disrupted, was to grab the nearest opportunity, which may or may not be a good idea for the longer term. Those that understood where the sweet spot of their business was realised that, whilst they could not deliver in the same way, their Core Purpose had not gone away or changed; so they focused their energy on finding different ways of delivering on their Core Purpose. Businesses that did this put themselves in a much stronger position once the pandemic eased. 

 

Having this level of focus is essential as you scale. With all areas of your business growing and new team members coming on board, knowing your business sweet spot will help you keep your plan, and your overall strategy, on track. 

A final word to let you know that the sweet spot is not set in stone. It needs to be regularly reviewed as part of your strategic planning. What we are passionate about should be ‘forever’; what we are ‘best at’ might evolve but typically remains true for the duration of the Smart Stretch time frame; and what drives our profit may change within that but typically is ‘set’ for the next 3-year plan.