A few weeks back, I wrote about my mistakes in not having a focus on a specific niche or vertical and mentioned a bit about what we are doing to push forward with a vertical in the health care space, focusing on mobile apps. We have made some changes and are pushing forward to create a market in the app world that is more scalable than what we were doing before.

Scalability allows you to take something you have already built and duplicate it over and over. It is a key ingredient in business. With the framework we have built, we can add a custom cover to create a product more quickly and with less cost than if we rebuilt one each time from scratch. This is a powerful aspect you get from software.

The healthcare vertical is still being explored, and we are gathering information to discover what we want to do to be a clipper ship and follow the money in that space. We will talk to different companies and ask questions to find their hot spots. With the mobile app platform, we will approach marketing firms about providing this platform for them, allowing them to reduce cost and speed up the process, which will in turn benefit their clients.

This will introduce another level of salability. We can develop relationships with one business at a time, build a mobile app for them, and move on to the next one. With the marketing companies, we can build one relationship with a marketing firm, and they could send us one, two, five, or ten apps to build. Creating value for others pays off with more business and, with the right execution, profits.

How scalable is your business and what are the possibilities of making it scalable to increase your opportunities?

Being an entrepreneur, I have a mind set to create something better and to “maximize” the future. One of the things that I like to maximize is time. The problem with that is time is not scalable; it cannot be expanded with increased use. What do we do then? Since you and I can’t change the fact that we all have 24 hours to utilize in a day, we need to approach it differently.

From the perspective of the majority, we all go to work and put out a certain number of hours. If you want more money, then you work more hours, right? This is because you are paid for being at work, either by the amount of time worked or by the project or production. For example, when we are building a custom software project, we receive payment for the hours we work on the project or, if we quote a fixed price, for the completion of the project itself.

When you work this way, you must ramp up each project and exert the time and energy into understanding each client situation, becoming familiar with the client’s environment, solving the problems, writing the code , testing the code, getting it stable, and then you do it all again. In order to grow and expand your profits, you need to acquire more time, more resources, or both.

We have the opportunity to build one software project and sell it over and over again. You build it once, but you can sell, lease, or give the software to a couple or even a few billion people at minimal to no additional cost to the company. This would be the same as a contractor building an apartment complex with 5 units but leasing the same space to thousands of users.

We are building software tools such as Sluice, which we are able to lease, thus multiplying the revenue as more people use them. This only works if you create real value for people by solving a big pain that is so troubling that they will spend money to get rid of that pain.

To be scalable outside of software may take some creativity, but even with fixed assets it is possible. For example, think of turning a condo unit into a time share unit. You can sell the unit to one person for lower revenue or to 52 people buying a week for more revenue.

What are you doing to make your time scalable?