Scaling a business is no easy feat. Entrepreneurs who have successfully scaled their businesses have experienced many tough circumstances. They had to learn scalability techniques to expand their entrepreneurial horizons with minimum effort.
This blog covers numerous techniques and valuable insights to help you scale your business and experience sustainable growth.
- Focus Focus Focus: No deviating from your goals.
Scaling is all about bringing your business to a place of continuous growth. When in the scaling process, it is pertinent to base your decisions on what you want your business to become and not where your business stands currently. To scale, you must focus on the key activities that are going to move your business forward in a strategic way. Expound on the core activities you need to focus on, and then set boundaries around these activities to prevent stagnation.
- Have you established a standard process?
To scale, you need to establish processes and procedures that facilitate, align, standardize and streamline core functions. You need to implement standardized and properly delegated processes to simplify everyday tasks.
By doing so, you’ll be able to quickly build a solid foundation that will guarantee steady and continuous growth and thus accomplish larger business goals with ease.
- Develop a cash flow strategy.
One of the most prevalent reasons why small businesses fail is because they lack the needed cash. Solid finances underpin healthy business growth. So you need to have an effective cash-flow strategy in place to ensure that you’ll always have enough money to cater to your business’ financial obligations. Having a stable cash flow means that you are in a position to optimally exploit all the profit-making opportunities available to your business.
- Evaluate options for expansion.
Entrepreneurship is about taking calculated risks. Perhaps one of the best ways to scale your business is to venture into new markets. While this might be a risky proposition if carefully managed it can prove to be a very rewarding endeavor for your small business will be able to tap into a new revenue stream at a low cost with boosted profits as a result.
- Automate processes, saves a ton of money
A business that is labor-intensive is not scalable hence automation is inevitable for entrepreneurs with future projections. Automation is great as it makes the processes in your small business much easier. In addition, automation allows you to run repeatable processes smoothly at a lower cost and more efficiently by minimizing your manual work. With automation, entrepreneurs can improve the delivery time of any task performed and further reduce the risk of human error to boost productivity.
- Articulate your competitor’s strength.
As your business matures, you will start to understand your market and products better. To successfully scale your business, you will need to clearly articulate your company’s competitive strength and how it related to internal processes and knowledge. By doing so, you will identify the relevant growth path that will allow scaling to happen without you falling into a complexity trap.
- Identify core competence.
It is difficult to create strategies if you are unaware of your core competencies. While some start-ups have evolved by doing certain things without articulating their core competence, this is not the ideal method to follow while you are in the process of scaling. You need to identify and emphasize your business’ core competencies and utilize them to invest in focused growth.
- Establish your team.
It takes more than a founder to take a business from its initial stage to thriving. As you scale and grow your business, you need a strong team to take yourself out of the critical path as scalability demands an expanded skill set. As such, you should build a team with extensive and complementary skills. Consistency and quality are paramount in such a dream and will help your business excel. All team members must be properly engaged, motivated, recognized and rewarded.
Also, if need be, do not hesitate to invest in your team as their education will ultimately reduce your work and allow you to scale your business effectively.
- Network and collaborate.
Fostering growth and scalability requires collaborations and partnerships outside the business. The growth approach needs to extend to a network of collaborations with people and organizations, for instance, service providers, sales partners, suppliers as well as customers as they may be willing to assist you by providing important market statistics.
- Boost marketing.
Scaling marketing operations is one of the top priorities of any business. When you scale your marketing operations, your business will be able to stay lean, agile and on the verge of growth and able to improve their productivity and efficiency. You will be able to deliver marketing campaigns that will impress your customers.
- Increase lead generation and conversion.
It’s simple, more customers equal more sales, and therefore increased opportunities to make more profits. To create more customers, you’ll need to attract interested prospects first i.e. lead generation. These prospects must then be converted into paying customers i.e. lead conversion. However, attracting and converting should be done in a cost-effective manner thereby ensuring that only a minimal cost is incurred for each customer acquired.
This consideration must, therefore, inform your preferred means of advertising and promotion. Nevertheless, one of the most effective ways to attract and convert prospects is via referrals from satisfied customers.
- Increase transaction frequency.
Scaling your business obviously means you are making business transactions with each one of your customers as frequently as possible to increase your sales volumes and profits. In order to do so, you must have an effective sales plan in place which will assist you to generate more sales for your business. You can do so by having each customer purchase more each time you are transacting business by using effective up-selling, cross-selling and diversifying techniques without coming across as being too pushy.
Final words
To wrap up, if you think about scaling your business, you must have a clear idea of what you want to become in the future. By implementing the above-mentioned tried and tested strategies, you can be assured that your business will flourish and grow in the right direction.