Essential Steps To Scale Your Business
We're talking big picture stuff.
What is a scalable business?
When a business is able to adapt to a larger workload without compromising performance or losing revenue, it’s a scalable business.
Scaling your business shouldn’t be left up to chance…
It should be a strategic step forward. The following are some basic starting points for preparing your business to scale up. Each topic could fill volumes so consider it your study guide.
Optimize the Basics.
Make sure your business process and foundation is foolproof. According to a survey performed by Startup Genome on 3200 startups, 74% of high growth internet startups failed due to premature scaling. Their study attributed it to an unstable foundation and haphazard processes.
Keep your product lean and consistent.
The last thing you want to do is keep adjusting your services and product at the last minute. Have a strong understanding of your target demographic.
Segment your target demographic into usable data.
You can then take that data and show it to investors, you can calculate your market saturation, and create marketing that effectively targets your best possible sales pools. Having strong processes will help you find investors who can fill the financial gaps when you try to scale your business. Your profitability will naturally dip while you scale up, your team will be busy training new employees or opening new branches, you don’t want to run out of money before they can get up to speed.
Automate, automate, automate.
We can’t stress the importance of automation enough. Use the technology to take away mundane tasks.
A common list of things businesses should automate:
- information backups and cloud storage,
- training processes,
- marketing,
- payroll entry and processing,
- vendor and bill pay,
- sales follow up processes,
- new client onboarding,
- create a client portal with FAQ’s,
- appointment schedulers,
- proposals, etc.
No matter what processes your business regularly uses, the chances are that you can automate them.
When you can’t automate – outsource.
After you’ve scaled your business into a corporate juggernaut, then you can look at bringing everything in-house, but for small to medium businesses on their way there, you can’t put the additional strain on your profit and on your team members. Your lean approach is what helps you perfect your processes.
It’s time to market.
Your current marketing tactics have worked or maybe they haven’t. When you are planning on scaling, you need to plan on building a marketing strategy. Whatever program you have in place now needs the input from professional marketers and additional resources to get in front of more people. Having a professional marketing company help you out is yet another example of outsourcing. They will also have software to help automate your processes. They will also create helpful reports to increase your profit and attract investors, such as profit and loss reports, financial analyses, and they will be able to report on your best performing target demographic.
Scaling your business isn’t something that should be rushed. You need to make stepping stones toward your ultimate goal. With the proper guidelines, you can achieve a successful business scale. Once you outline your goal and the methods you are going to take to get there scaling becomes just another natural progression.