How to use LEVERAGE to scale your business to SUPER GROWTH

It is necessary to use leverage if you want to scale your business to super growth. As a business owner especially a startup, you may think that bootstrapping means to do everything all by yourself. Yes, you bootstrap but make sure you leverage most to reach your super growth fastest. The more leverage you use the more leverage you need to use.

What is leverage?
Leverage is the ability to control a lot with just a little. It gives you the ability to utilise more than just you. Through leverage, you can affect change much faster. Leverage equals speed, or velocity. The more leverage you have, the faster your journey to super growth.

Below are the seven forms of leverage:

1. OPM – Other People’s Money
   This is popularly referred to as OPM. It is also known as gearing
   which is simply the use of debt. It is what you put in the liabilities
   section of your personal balance sheet. The likes of Dangote
   leverage on this tactic a lot. When you spend time on the Central
   Bank’s website, you would notice that some companies or people
   are always being listed in every bank debt profile. That shows that
   these companies or people understand how to leverage on other
   people’s money. If you want to scale your business easily, you would need to save hard and use money from other people to move you to your business goals faster. Just make sure that you have twice of the
   loan that you want to take so that in case your plans go south, you
   would not have AMCON publishing your name in Nigerian
   newspaper. OPM lets you buy assets earlier, at a faster rate, and
   control a larger amount than saving the whole amount. These three
   characteristics of financial leverage enable you to scale your
   business faster. It is generally true that “you need money to make money.” However, it doesn’t need to be your money. OPM allows you to fast track your business growth faster.

2. OPT – Other People’s Time
There are numerous companies, small businesses and individuals
that will sell you their time. These range from labourers to
professionals specialising in a field. We all have these professionals
work for us from accountants, lawyers, insurance broker, real estate
agent, and so on. We use all these people, as they save us time and
money. They save business people money because they free up
their time to focus on the things that is most important to us which
is to make more money, and their knowledge helps business
people.

3. OPW – Other People’s Work
This is like OPT, but now you employ people to leverage their time.
Bill gates applies enormous OPW style leverage. He leverages the
time and effort of over 65,000 staff worldwide. OPW (and OPT)
essentially allows an individual to capture the time and effort of
many. It allows you to produce quickly what you couldn’t produce in
one or more lifetime.

4. OPE – Other People’s Experiences
One of the best resources or leverages available to you is the
experiences of others. It is an enormous waste of your time and
totally unnecessary to try and learn everything you need to know by
trial and error. You can learn from the experiences, knowledge and
mistakes of others. This may be via a mentor, OPT, OPW, books,
seminars, school, college, etc. there is no point learning by trial and
error what someone else has already learned and can impart to
you.

5. OPI – Other People’s Ideas
This generally refers to learning and copying good income-
producing ideas. Franchise and networking businesses are testaments to the power of OPI – learn a proven method and replicate it yourself. The process of business growth is the ultimate use of the leverage of OPI. The system of wealth creation is the same today as it was yesterday, last week, last month, last year, last generation. Sure, the technology changes and systems become refined and improved, but the fundamentals don’t change. The process is tried, tested and works every time without fail. You just
have to learn it and diligently apply it. No trial and error. No wasting
your precious time. Just OPI.

6. Scalable Production & Distribution
Can your product or service be easily scaled for production and
supply? A book can be easily scaled as it can be printed as many
times as the demand requires. Compare this to face-to-face
teaching which isn’t easily scalable. Can a book be easily supplied
anywhere? Well until the internet came along it couldn’t. Now it can
be bought and distributed easily via the post to anywhere. But
that’s nowhere near as easily produced and supplied as an e-book,
which is just bits of information that you can instantly download
from anywhere in the world.

7. Scalable Customer Base
A restaurant or a corner store doesn’t have a scalable customer
base. It can only service customers in its local area. People from all
over the world may want your product or service but if they don’t
know about you or can’t get to you then it is as if they do not exist.
Let’s look at the dot com companies of the late 90’s. The internet
gave companies a true global customer base for virtually no cost.
Their potential customer base was highly scalable, which is why
they were so highly valued at the time. The problem was their
production and distribution were not highly scalable as they still had
to deal in physical products…they were very old economy after the
“sale.” People forgot this. Those companies that dealt in non-physical products had both scalable production and distribution and a scalable customer base. These are the real new generation companies that the internet truly empowers. You probably recognise a few of them – Google, Yahoo, Konga, Jumia, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on and so forth.

With leverage, you are not alone. You can tap the strengths of all
the resources you need around you. You can vastly multiply the
effectiveness of one person. Through leverage, systems of
productions and sales can run and grow independently of the
inventor or owner. Leverage allows you to create systems that run
themselves. Leverage is essential to creating business growth.
Those businesses which grow or are on the growth path must focus
on understanding, mastering and fully utilising leverage.

About Boma Braide
Boma Braide is the Managing Consultant of Forterun Global, a
business and financial advisory consultancy. They seek to help SMEs
and companies scale their business to 10x its original size within 5
years. They also help companies develop documentation to assist in
finding local or foreign financing at single interest rate in debt and
equity or both.

You can reach him on 09039151191 or on info@forterun.com.
You can visit their website on https://www.forterun.com