The transformation that all businesses go through can be broken down into four main stages. 

Stage One – The Business of One

This is the startup phase. In the business of one, this is usually typically you or maybe you and a partner and essentially you’re doing everything. It’s you or you and a partner doing some of the marketing, and then you and a partner doing some of the sales, and then maybe you or your partner maybe doing some of the fulfillment. With all of this, you and your workload get full very quickly because you inevitably end up wearing many hats. 

Stage Two – The One Big Team

When you have one big team, it’s really you slowly scaling up the business. At this point, you’re maybe just hiring an admin person or a VA or an assistant and somewhat you’re able to lessen the load of everything that you need to do.  Everyone’s doing a little bit of the marketing, a little bit of the sales, and a little bit of the fulfillment. You’re getting some help, but at the end of the day, everyone is still doing a little bit of everything. 

Stage Three – A Team of Teams

When you’re at stage three what starts to happen is things start to get a little bit more organized. You now have one team handling strictly fulfillment, one team handling strictly sales, and then one team handling strictly marketing. 

Stage Four – A Business of Businesses

Essentially, in this stage of the business of businesses, each little silo of your business is now selling one product or one service. Each silo has its own marketing, sales, and fulfillment. 

And maybe that’s selling one thing or solving one problem, then you may have another one solving another problem or providing a completely different service, and so on and so forth. Okay, so let’s talk about some real-world examples of the four stages of the business. 

Take Amazon for instance. It started off with Jeff Bezos, and it was just him and his garage selling books. It evolved into maybe him hiring a few assistants, stage two, to help do the fulfillment of those books and creating the website and really kind of managing that whole system and process. And then stage three is where he started to silo some of the responsibilities of who’s going to be responsible for sending out the books, who’s going to be responsible for marketing, who’s going to be responsible for the upkeep of the upset, and so on and so forth. The fourth stage is really what we see now and what Amazon has evolved into. It’s a business of businesses. 

It’s a business of e-commerce where they’re not only selling books, but they’re now selling products within the website. They’re selling another business, which is hosting services for websites so that’s the AWS system or the cloud system. They also have another business Alexa. That’s a whole other business of businesses that each one of these silos has its own marketing, sales, and fulfillment departments. 

Using Tesla as the next example. Elon Musk started off with one big team with him and a few people that created a prototype for the Model S. And then when it went to scale, then they started siloing everybody between marketing, sales, and fulfillment. They then started to scale, even more, and they grew to a business of businesses where it’s now selling products for the Model S, the Model Y, the cyber truck, the model three, and so on and so forth. 

Another example that maybe you’re familiar with is Ryan Ceram, superstar coach, and real estate agent. He started off by selling real estate himself. Then he started to develop a team, and then once he was able to develop that team, he started siloing the responsibilities. He became a business of businesses, where he’s now selling real estate and also selling his coaching services and really all of the other things that he’s doing, like his media empire. All right, now let’s bring this full circle, and let’s tie this back to you because I know this information is a bit overwhelming.