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This is a great analysis, and spot on. Having a business that can run without you, and thus sell 24 hours a day, is very different than taking on project work

This is a great analysis, and spot on. Having a business that can run without you, and thus sell 24 hours a day, is very different than taking on project work where you are paid by the hour or by the project. Repeatable == scalable when you are talking about a product. You want to be able to ramp production, and, better yet, enable others to sell for you.

abalashov 17y ago
You're very welcome! I think repeatable doesn't inherently signify scalable; the key is that it's repeatable at a low marginal cost. Consulting projects are repeatable too, in the sense that you can - theoretically, if two clients wanted it - do the same thing over from scratch. But if your first project let you build scripts and infrastructure and training and process so as to let the second one happen in 1/3rd of the time, that's the kind of repeatable that's scalable. Of course, if you only get to reuse the infrastructure once, that doesn't do much for scalability either, but if it allows you to lower the price it may work out better. It just depends on what it is. Having a business that can run without you in a literal sense is a pipe dream, except perhaps in a rather large, mature company. Even I could afford to develop an actual product and hire people to sell, deploy and support it, I'd still have my grubby mitts all over the process, and it's got less to do with the fact that I'm a control freak and more with the fact that it's just a specialised area of endeavour, and I'm unlikely to be able to afford to hire someone with more perspective and experience in the exact same interdisciplinary nexus as I. But I'm not too concerned about that; the goal isn't to avoid work, but simply to get higher returns on one's time by replicating at a lower cost.