On The March To 12 Million Dollars In Sales by Joseph Heller

Over 12 Million in Sales by Next Year

For the past few years THE/STUDIO has grown at around 30% per year and if this years trend continues we will do over 5 million dollars in sales in 2015. This isn’t bad considering that the average US business grows significantly less than 10% per year. However, in my opinion 30% growth is still too slow. All of the managers in the company have agreed to take the company to over 12 million dollars in sales next year.

This is definitely not going to be an easy task. It’s difficult to grow at this pace without having an investor. Furthermore, it puts a strain on the company, because systems and teams need to be stretched to accommodate the additional workload. For example we have one person that is approving all of our vendor pricing negotiations. We will need to either add to that team, enhance our back-end systems or spread that work throughout a larger team. To accommodate our growth in 2015 we will need to go from hiring 1 to 2 new sales reps each quarter, to 2 new sales reps each month. This will obviously put a strain on human resources.

100 Million Dollar a Year Company

I have always said that if we can’t scale THE/STUDIO to become at least a 100 million dollar a year company, then I’m wasting my time. The math is simple. If we grow by 30% every year, it will take us 13 years to reach 100 million dollars in sales. If we can continue growing at the rate that we have planned for next year and maintain that growth it will take us 5 years to reach over 100 million dollars in sales.

The good thing is that it is clear we will hit our goals for 2015, which allowed us to start focusing on our goals for 2016 before Q3 even started. The company now has a competent management team, including a new Operations Director, Product Development Manager and Marketing Director, plus existing managers some of whom have now been with the company for more than 5 years. In addition we now have an amazing web development team, that I truly believe is comparable to any Silicon Valley programming team. This programming team is key to our success as it will allow us to develop technology and features that will allow us to scale the business without having to hire a proportional amount of additional staff.

As many people have noticed I have recently started contributing to my blog more frequently, and this blog is now going to be dedicated to documenting this very exciting time for THE/STUDIO.