This is a review of the book “Scale at Speed” written by Felix Velarde. This review is unpaid, and has no affiliate links.
This book isn’t for me. And I’ll explain why.
Recently I was at my local library and I was really surprised as to how well stocked its business books section was. Nearly every book on their shelf they had I wanted to read. Marketing books, accounting books, books on advertising strategy, scale ups, start-ups. The works. I ended up checking out 4 books, “The 10X rule”, “Unreasonable hospitality”, “IdeaFlow” and “Scale at speed”.
Business books from local libraries can be really hit or miss. Sometimes you’ll get something fairly recent (by which I mean within the last 5 years) or more often than not, you’ll get books that are so old and out of date that whilst the principles are ok, the tactics and strategies just seem to fall flat.
Scale at speed interested me because often at events I attend or watch, they’ll always be someone who is promoting themselves to work for scale-ups, or growth minded businesses. Once, I just want someone to say – this is what scale means, this is what growth means, what the materials you need are, and this is how you do it. I don’t want you to hide it away behind a four figure, five figure, six figure consultancy. As Alex Hormonzi says “give away the secrets, sell the implementation”
I knew within 10-15 pages of Felix’s book Scale at Speed that this wasn’t for me. Written in 2023, the book takes an aggressive position on how to scale your business, or as Felix says it; “to triple the size of your business and build a superstar team” by setting a big audacious goal and creating a strategy around 5 areas, People, Customers, Sales and Marketing, Processes and Corporate and Financial.
The book is clearly for corporate businesses, or start-ups, and written with the view that you already have a business, that its trading, and you have the capability, ability, resources to hire a team, and have this already humming; and sets what it calls a realistic goal of achieving 3X growth over a 3 year timeframe, and gives an example around £2 million profit (EBIT), where your gross profit needs to be £100 million.
I don’t know about you, but these kind of numbers and size just isn’t who or what I want to have. There’s nothing wrong with being super ambitious, but in the post-COVID arena, and we are close to recession (if we aren’t in one already), and given recent growth trends in distributed nomadic workforce, AI, no code tools; I just feel that the book is written out of step of what is happening currently, and it seems to be for an audience I’m not just not part of.
To his credit Felix does mention page 19 that “implementing it requires significant resources – and it’s extraordinary complex. To understand, implement and cascade all of its processes and tools is out of the reach of most small or medium sized businesses”.
And this is the crux. As previously mentioned, I feel the book isn’t written for solo, micro, or any business smaller than the book’s primary target market: corporates, start-ups and already established businesses.
To help understand the strategem, Felix presents a “2Y3X framework:. Though, I still don’t quite know what it stands for, the book doesn’t tell you. Not within the intro (I read the first 30 pages to double check), and certainly not in the chapter dedicated to 2Y3X.
At first I thought I thought the 2Y meant two years, and the 3X is three times return/growth, but I’m not so sure. On page 14 it says it’s “a 3 year horizon is useful… long enough that you can get several things done between now and then”. So if 2Y doesn’t mean 2 years, what does the Y stand for? It took a Youtube video to work it out. Apparently It does mean 2 years, but later on in the video they say 3 years? Maybe it is 2 years? Who knows. The fact I had to dig it out, that it isn’t in the introduction, or in the dedicated chapter, or even on the back cover frustrated me.
The starting block is to work from an audacious goal, and setting a strategy over 3 years, fixing the workflow, processes score cards (for analytics), building a team, how you motivate them, and scaling clients, and going for growth.
Packed with some good illustrations, and explanations, I found the book to be quite readable – even if I wasn’t the audience.
On page 20 it illustrates the framework over 3 years where people, customers, sales and marketing, processes, corporation and financials are plotted over a 3 year period, broken down into sections, and on page 32 it gives you a breakdown where:
Average net profit over 3 years (400K) x 4 (multiple) = 1.6M; illustrated in a table below.
| 2x | EBIT | Multiple | Value |
| Year 1 | 400K | 4 | 1.6M |
| Year 2 | 800K | 6 | 4.8M |
| 3X |
The goal, task being asked is aggressive, way too big. The size of the ship you need, the team, the processes; everything is out of my league.
There are some good take-aways, such as development of a team, your company’s core values, how to hire a-players, how to use a research, prototype, implement loop, a scorecard breakdown of customer service from The Drum (a website listing creative agencies), sales, KPIs and other tools.
There are things the book doesn’t address.
Scaling at speed, means your costs also scale. It never really addresses this. To move your ship this big that fast will need a team, technology and a whole lot of resources. That means payroll and your costs increase.
It also assumes the golden path. There is no planning for a rainy day. Maybe that’s the intention with such a growth strategy.
The questions I kept asking myself when reading this book were: What if you don’t want this big machine, what if you don’t want a 100-fold staff, what if you want to micro everything, make small bets? What if you just want a lifestyle business? What if you want an Internet business that generates passive income (incidentally I think passive income businesses are more a myth than reality)?
There were also times reading the book that made me wonder whether the book was authored pre-COVID? The post-COVID trends of working from home, people wanting to start their own thing at home, distributing their workload to VAs or other people, the atomisation and democratisation of small-bet micro businesses, and the emergent growth trend of AI, no-code tools just don’t seem to be addressed at all.
Overall, the book is well written, and has a good pace; at just over 200 pages long it isn’t too long; and whilst the audience for the book is clearly for corporates, start-ups and established SME’s, ultimately I felt the book just isn’t for me.
Overall: 4/10.