Have you seen this excellent animated explanation before? It is made by an educational videos production company, called “Common Craft“, based in Seattle, Washington.

In the very beginning, this company started making custom videos for companies like Google, Ford, LinkedIn and Twitter. Due to their quality works, their instructional videos, which usually paid in five figures, have generated a lot of buzz on the web. Had they continue to make videos for private clients, their business should still be doing alright.

Custom Videos vs Generic Educational Videos

But their founders saw a different picture. They believe producing custom videos is too labor intensive and difficult to scale. Similar to doctors, dentists and lawyers, when these professionals are working on a project, they just can’t take care of other potential clients at the same time unless hiring more people. Common Craft wants to remain small and still able to grow. So they changed their business model to solely focus on making educational videos for educators and corporate trainers. They have built a library of educational videos to help their customers to explain complex subjects. In this way, one particular video can be sold to different customers again and again.

So what can we learn from this story? Does your business or product allow you to scale? When you realize that scaling becomes an issue, do you have the gut to change the direction of your company in a timely manner? Your business may be doing OK right now but don’t forget to review the scalability of your business from time to time. This decision may help your business to become the leader in your field.

Video source: Common Craft

Related posts:

1. Built to Scale: Huffington Post
2. Scale Matters
3. Startup to IPO: Why Few Companies Make the Leap and What We Can Learn from Them (Part 3: Growth)
4. Scale Big but Start Small

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