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Susan Goebel

Scaling Management Consulting Group and Scaling Resources were founded by Susan Goebel, who has been helping top entrepreneurs and CEOs turn their ideas into scalable businesses for over two decades. Our team offers a variety of tools, templates, resources, and services to help you scale your business through operational support. From DIY templates and checklists that we use with our clients to one-on-one mentorship and full-on fractional COO services, whatever you need to pinpoint your problem and solve it, we’ve got you covered.

We have three core values with our team: Integrity, Building Relationships, Under-promise and Over-deliver. These core values are focused on delivering long-lasting quality services to help CEOs and founders who:

  • Want to be less frustrated with their business.
  • See the value in having an outside party help identify the challenges.
  • Are growing their business but encountering chaos on the way.
  • Struggle to feel successful because it feels like growth comes with unsustainable input.
  • Want to build systems that will scale with the business.
  • Spend so much time working in the business that they aren’t working on the business.
  • Want to benefit from a team that has helped hundreds of CEOs just like them scale their business.

Tell us about yourself?

Susan holds a Master’s Degree from the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London. Susan worked in the pharmaceutical world and found herself wearing different hats as she moved through organizations. She worked in R&D and project management, contract negotiation, managed an export division, completed mergers and acquisitions, acted as a government lobbyist, and more.

One day, her manager handed her two gifts: a plaque to commemorate her noteworthy contributions and her pink slip. The entire division was being shut down.

​While this was devastating in the moment, this was the turning point in Susan’s life that allowed her to pursue a new path: helping entrepreneurs and CEOs develop systems and operations to scale their businesses.

​Now, Susan and her team are excited to bring decades of expert experience to helping hundreds of CEOs reach their goals.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

If I could go back almost two years in time, I would tell my younger self that growing a company brings with it a whirlwind of needs to be attended to. The best way to grow and scale is with an eye on the longer-term vision AND short-term goals, reminding myself that there are always multiple ways to solve a challenge and reduce risk.

Keith Cunningham, AKA Rich Dad, talks about the “dumb tax”. Small decisions can lead to unintended costs. In my case, I would recommend a different path for growth with three key decisions that differ:

  • More structure and evaluation when bringing on leadership roles.
  • Be more creative at times of cashflow constraints.
  • Keep an eye on the larger vision, and be mindful of not getting so caught up in the whirlwind for too long before coming up for air

What problem does your business solve?

Scaling a business isn’t easy. And you know why:

There are sales to close. Orders to fulfill. Processes and systems to implement. Marketing content to create. New hires to train. Top talent to retain. Objectives to hit. Invoices to send and pay. Compliance to follow.

The list goes on and on.

CEOs and Founders have done a great job growing their businesses to a certain point. They have happy clients and are bringing in consistent revenue. Yet, they might be so busy working IN the business that they don’t have time to work ON the business.

As Marshall Goldsmith penned, “What got you here won’t get you there.”

To ensure CEOs and Founders hit their business goals, they need to leverage available resources to help take the vision in their heads and make it a reality. Resources – tools, events, networks, services – that can help them manage the day-to-day operations so they can focus on the higher-order strategic decisions that only they can make.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Small and medium-sized enterprises are the lifeblood of our economies, and helping them survive and thrive provides benefits to all. Having experienced the challenges that come with losing the only source of income, it’s our goal to solve business operations challenges for as many businesses between one and 10 million in annual revenue as we can.

What is your magic sauce?

We are all about the fit – the secret sauce of pairing the right COO or Integrator with the CEO or Founder. Having your Second-in-Command be in lockstep with the vision and goals of the company is KEY to its success.

Not every company is able to access the talent that’s needed to grow and scale at the one to 10 million level. Ensuring that we can provide fractional services (part-time) saves the company at a time when cash can be constrained while still providing the access to expertise.

Fractional COOs and operations support at a fraction of what you’d pay for a full-time COO with the same level of expertise.

We are the only company in the operations support space that provides a unique element – a force multiplier, if you will. It’s a unique pairing between the COO and an Operations Manager, allowing for the perfect mix of strategic AND tactical assistance to move farther faster.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

Over the next five years, we’d like to become the go-to business for fractional C-Suite support. We already have Fractional COOs, CEOs, CTOs and CMOs on our team. The ability to grow and help more small and medium-sized businesses is key.

Of course, aside from helping the businesses, we are also providing a way for those who join our team to be compensated and provide value.

There isn’t a goal that says – we must reach 100 Million or help 10,000 businesses. We have already helped over 1,200! It’s about building and strengthening relationships to elevate as many lives as possible and give back where and how we can.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

We had initiated a tech project under a series of assumptions. We even validated those assumptions with market research! Taking steps to develop an application in an area we didn’t have a deep enough skillset was a learning curve with lots of ups and downs.

The challenges we needed to overcome turned out to be greater than anticipated. Even after doing the research to confirm a roadmap, bring on a team, raise funds and mitigate the downside were quite the learning experiences. With lots of pivoting, we did eventually launch a minimum viable version of what we had in mind.

How can people get involved?

If you are a CEO or Founder running a business with more than 500,000 in annual revenue and experiencing the whirlwind, we are here to help. Pop on over to www.scalingresources.com to sign up for FREE to get access to tools, templates, and services; sign up for our FREE tool at www.scalinggrp.com or send us an email at support@scalinggrp.com

We can’t wait to connect!