You start out with an idea, fire in your eyes and enthusiasm to quickly launch your idea.

Everything is still in your head, who your ideal customers are, how are they going to use your idea.

You get into development, talking with customers and finally coming up with the product.

You also gathered a bit of seed money from friends and families to start your business.

You have your proof of concept when you get your first cold market customer.

You start to get real world response from the market.

The good feedback and the bad feedbacks.

You improve until you have the best processes for delivering your products to your customer.

Most of your clients from this stage are organic ( Referrals and foot-traffic ), you have little control on how many you can get.

This cycle goes on for months until the pain of stagnant growth is too much.

Most businesses stay stagnant here due to the fear of incurring marketing expense or hiring.

You come to a realisation that you have to start spending real money to get more customers.

You stop taking profits and start reinvesting in the business again.

Instead of trying to be the expert on everything, you engage the Pros to drive customers to your business while you focus on closing and servicing your customers.

Your revenue Quadruples and you wished you have overcame your fear and done this earlier.

But with an influx of customers, you find that you can't cope with the additional servicing and administration that comes with it.

Your quality drops and you feel the pain when you start refusing customers because you can't cope.

Now you need more help in running your business.

You start to realise the importance of delegation. 

After scaling successfully, you find yourself with enough money to make some key hires.

While your marketing is being handled,
you need to start cloning yourself to handle different roles in the company like customer service, operation and sales.

You make your first few management hires only to find that their expertise and quality does not match your expectations.

You start to realise that the cost of hiring is more than just salary alone, it is the damages done to your business.

You also start to learn that getting customer isn't hard at all, getting and training talent is harder.

You start training or up-skilling your managers through coaching services by consultants and experts.

They start to perform and you are officially "out" from self-employment to the free "business owner" you want to be.

Your business can now operate without you on autopilot.

Your focus is now on cashflow management and business direction.

To grow any further, you need a system that can replicate itself over and over again at different outlets.

You figured that you need to start operating like a franchise business with clear operating procedures and on-boarding programmes to deliver the same success anywhere with or without you.

You document all your successful procedures, working with your outsource vendors to come up with resources for new hires.

You include software that drastically increases the efficiency of each employee and automate previously manual tasks.

Your next step now is clear, you have done all the hard work for the past few years and you find that with systems in place, bringing your next outlet to the same state will only take you 1/10 of the effort as when you started.

You can now franchise your business or raise funding with ease to build your business empire.