The important difference between scale & leverage
“Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth. Give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world. Give me a firm spot on which to stand, and I shall move the earth.” —Archimedes (288 BC - 212 BC)
Recently, I’ve loosened the grip I used to have when it came to how people use the English language. I no longer sweat spelling mistakes, I don’t get hung up on their/they’re/there, and if you want to say “supposably” be my guest.
I’m hard on myself when it comes to these little details, but it’s just not worth the time, attention, or emotional energy to nitpick other people about them if it doesn’t interfere with my ability to get their meaning.
That is unless, of course, unless it does interfere.
These days I’ve been seeing people in the business-y corner of the internet use the words “leverage” and “scale” more or less interchangeably. For example:
“We could leverage our audience to 10X our revenue!”
and
“We could scale our audience to 10X our revenue.”
You could argue that this distinction doesn’t interfere with the meaning of what they’re trying to say, since the point being made is about growing revenue. But I would argue that it does interfere quite a bit with how they plan to do so.
Leverage vs. Scale
Very simply: levers are force multipliers and scalars are growth multipliers.
Leverage is something you apply in order to multiply the impact of an output, and scaling is something you do in order to increase the output. You can think of the difference as similar to the one that exists between the words less and fewer. The former describes a quality, an the latter describes an amount.
In the case of scale vs leverage, however, the difference makes a real difference. If you want to scale something you want to make more of it, and if you want to leverage something you want what you make to result in more.
Now you may be thinking,
“How does this help me as someone looking to make moneys on the internet?”
Here’s a super relevant example that might help make this abstract topic more practical:
Podcasts vs. Newsletters
If you’re an independent creator wanting to start a side hustle that makes the most of your small amount of available time and effort, you should be looking for something easily created and leveraged. A newsletter, for example, does not make the cut on the former. It’s pretty inefficient for a single individual to maintain a newsletter. It takes a lot of upfront time and effort just to gather ideas, plus all the writing time, plus even more time and effort to curate and format into final proof-read form. There’s only one of you, and you can’t create more without adding more hours to the day (impossible) or adding more people to the process. What takes hours to produce takes minutes for someone to consume.
Of course, once created you can leverage the final product with a distribution platform like Substack, but you can’t use leverage to optimize your time spent making it in the first place. To do that, you need to add tools, automations, and people. In other words: you need to scale your operation.
On the other hand, you could start something like a podcast instead and make the most of a much smaller amount of effort. If it’s in a conversational format, the actual time it takes to produce (record) a podcast is just the length of the recording session—say, 1-2 hours if you include setup time and minor admin tasks. But that one recording can then be easily uploaded (multiplied/leveraged) by a broadcast platform like Anchor. And that’s it.
Sure you could optimize (scale) things a bit by hiring an assistant to schedule your recording sessions or edit the final recording, but those are tasks that don’t require you, and weren’t taking too much time to begin with.
When starting out: focus on leveraging the results of what you can do.
Once you’re going: use leverage to scale what you can do.
Scale is what you do to make creation more efficient.
Leverage is what you do to make the most of what you create.
Until next time 🤙,
(For more on this idea of leverage and the ways it can be used to scale an operation, Erik Jorgenson’s thread about topic is a great place to start)