Almost every owner I talk to has the same story: They’re an accidental entrepreneur who found themselves thrust into a business and surrounded by employees. They don’t have a business degree. They’re making it up as they go.

With this in mind, most of the business models I deal with are reactive. This happens when every process you come up with and every person you hire is a reaction to something negative. You’re trying to plug the gap and fix it with another person, process, or system.

Because they’re busy reacting, most owners can’t find time to ask, “If I started over again today, how would I make this work?”

This led me to the concept of the scalable business model. We had a chance to reinvent the wheel during the pandemic. This model manifested when I asked people who had decades of business experience, “If you started over again, what would your company look like?”

Give yourself permission to hit the reset button. That’s where the scalable business model comes from. Some of it will be counterintuitive at first, but it’s really uncommon sense.

5 Uncommon Sense Tips

1. Ditch the pricing in your rental management system and replace it with cost pricing.

Ditch debt and replace it with costs. That means ditching the pricing in your rental management system or estimating software and replacing it with costs. That way, when you build a budget, you’re building from cost. Then you can add margins by using negative discounts, which is the same as a margin in the current pricing in your system.

Rather than having a retail price, put your replacement cost on each item and build the budget from there. (Pro tip: Never let your customer see it.)

Now you know exactly what the job will cost. You just need to add margin to the job or to each pricing group.

2. Never negotiate with a price-shopping customer.

Your least favorite customers are all price shoppers. You’re never going to turn them into your favorite customers if you continue to play their price-shopping game.

Always give your price-shopping customers the best price you are willing to give, and then be ready to walk away. You need to reserve your capacity for better customers, and you’ll never do that if you fill your calendar with low-calorie revenue.

3. Stop customizing.

Customizing sounds like you’re creating a lot of value. But if you have to customize what you do in order to create a customizable solution, you don’t understand what customization is.

Customization is an assembly of elements that are non-customizable and done repeatedly. Reinventing the wheel is extremely expensive and time-consuming, and it doesn’t yield a better job.

Stop customizing. Ninety percent of your jobs are stock.

4. Your biggest job of the year should have the fewest number of full-time employees involved.

Reserve your core team for the work you do all the time. When you have an outlier job, it’s time to bring in a heavy hitter — a technical director, producer, or other high-level technician you don’t use other times of the year. Fill out the job with the best people you can find in the industry so that the rest of your team can continue to serve your core business.

Don’t dump all your resources into the biggest job on your plate. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the job; it just means you shouldn’t let the big job become a time suck. If you do, you’ll neglect other customers.

5. Plan on running out of capacity.

Have more capacity than you think you’re going to need. When you expect to be busy, start outsourcing before you apply your internal resources to the project.

Otherwise, you’ll have too much overhead because you have to keep too many people on staff. Or, you’ll look for outside direct support too late in the process, and nobody good will be available.

If you start outsourcing immediately, you’ll never have more capacity than you think you’re going to need.

Final Thoughts

Do these tips make you uncomfortable? That’s the point. That’s why they’re counterintuitive.

Use uncommon sense to your advantage.