Growing and scaling a business is hard and we wanted to hear from business owners who have successfully scaled a business. Below, you’ll find our conversations on scaling with some very talented and insightful folks.

Katherine Reed

Texas Hand Pie Co. has humble beginnings, starting in a toaster oven in a 300 square foot tiny home selling at a Farmers Market. I vividly remember making a batch of 30 hand pies and thinking to myself “this is going to be a lot of pie for me and my family to eat, there is no way I will sell this much.” To my absolute shock, I sold out in 30 minutes flat. That’s when I realized that I had something special. Read more>>

Amanda Kolbye

Like most business owners, what you see online is not the full story. I started my company 2.5 years ago and have scaled to over $1 million dollars by the age of 27 years old all while traveling around the world full time in places like Bali, Thailand, Croatia and many more. But let’s look at what happened behind the scenes to get there, because it was far from an overnight success. I often tell the story about my first month in business and how I made over $5k, was booked out with clients and starting hiring a team. But what people don’t always hear is how I had spent 1 year prior building up an online personal brand and audience where I was building relationships and posting content every day – building trust. Read more>>

April Henley

The path to success for Dogs On The Run was never about attaining wealth or growth. It was about the process of continuously seeking to be better than traditional pet care options. Scaling happened as a natural response to our unexpectedly sudden success in supplying the demand with the hole in the market. Originally, my company was a personal passion project. Once I learned that the community desperately needed a greater level of professionalism in the pet care industry, it became our mission to be the best. It all started with taking a risk. I had to trust that someone other than myself could be and would be reliable, trustworthy, and understand my belief that pets come first and no one should ever go without care, PERIOD. Read more>>

Kayla Opperman

My goal every year is to double the revenue from the year before, and that is always on my mind with every move I make! It might sound like common knowledge, but my strategy has always been to do whatever I can to get the customers first. I’ll worry about the staffing, the materials, the details of my program, where I’m going to find the time to complete it, etc, later. I always get it done and at 100%, even if it means I didn’t sleep, and at times, it might even mean I didn’t make money because it cost me so many resources to get it done. That’s OK, because I have the customer now, so we’ll make up for any loss later! Read more>>

D’Lisa Khademi

I became and Esthetician in 2002. Looking back on 20 years of being in this business, it feels like a lot less time than 2 decades have passed. It is a continuous hustle and just when you think you might be able to slow down and coast a bit something always happens. But even from the beginning I was always striving for something better. We all need to start somewhere and after 6 years of working for other people I opened my first salon location in Old Town Scottsdale in 2008. I maxed out all my credit cards and took out a loan. One factor that made it all possible was the landlord that took a chance on me. Read more>>

Tamar Israel

Although I’ve been a makeup artist for 10+ years, it wasn’t until 2019 that I decided to go full-time in my business and truly do the work to scale it and make it my primary source of income. It definitely required time and grace to truly assert myself to pursue this route as I knew that our household income would decrease by 50%, but now in 2022 our revenue is trending towards 6 figures in just 3 years. Read more>>

Angela Leavitt

For my business to scale, the key ingredient has been sacrifice. I bootstrapped this business with no debt or funding, so the early years only happened because I lived very lean, paying myself only enough to handle bills. I survived by shopping for clothes at thrift stores, hardly ever eating at restaurants, and going years without a vacation. I paid my staff more than myself during the first six-seven years, giving myself only modest increases when our profit margins grew. I certainly could have earned a lot more as an employee at another company, and sometimes I worried that I was behind my peers in terms of things like owning property and retirement savings. But the vision of what we could become drove me to keep pushing. Read more>>

Cortney Berry

When we first started our mobile swim school, it was a one-man show! I did all of the marketing, scheduled the clients, collected payments, and taught all of the lessons by myself. I slowly added staff, and eventually my husband quit his full-time job to help me build our family business. After we added several instructors, we decided to expand into a new territory. We were operating in Houston Texas at the time, so Austin seemed like a logical next step. We ran into several obstacles, such as difficulty finding clients because not as many people have home pools in Austin. Read more>>