Want to Scale Your Business? First, Work on Your Trust Issues

The founders of Milk Bar, M.M.LaFleur, and Zeera share some of their best tips for growing a business that's inherently tricky to scale.

- KEVIN J. RYAN

A lesson many business owners learn the hard way is that chasing growth too early can compromise the quality of a product or service. It can also overwhelm a young company's operations, with potentially disastrous results. So how do you scale a successful business that's inherently difficult to scale?

To answer this question, we turned to three founders whose business models don't readily lend themselves to fast growth: Sarah LaFleur, founder of womenswear brand M.M.LaFleur; Ariela Safira, founder of mental health care company Zeera; and Christina Tosi, founder of bakery chain Milk Bar. All three of these founder-CEOS have faced unique challenges while trying to expand, from struggling with delegation to managing excess inventory to launching during the early days of Covid. Working through these issues has made them better leaders, they say.

Among the takeaways that came out of their conversation are that hiring early helps, and pivoting can unlock growth. But the founders started with questions of scaling: How founders should think about scalability, and whether they factored that into their own business plans when they were just getting started.

TOSI I went to culinary school in New York City and worked my way up to fine dining restaurants, but I really missed that feeling of handing someone a plate of cookies or brownies from your home kitchen, which is why I founded Milk Bar. I've joked that the worst business plan imaginable is to open a bakery and try to figure out how to scale it. Baked goods are delicate-they're meant to be eaten fresh and they're not very resilient.