Are you interested in scaling your business but are not sure what steps to take? Getting the basics right is important to lay the foundation for limitless growth. However, if the first few steps are not implemented correctly, the rate of growth can be severely impacted.
With more than 20% of small businesses failing in the first year, laying the groundwork for success also reduces the chances of failure. Therefore, it’s important to scale your business correctly to avoid running out of money or making risky decisions.
Create Scalable Workflows
If you are a bottleneck for multiple processes in your business, then that will not have a positive effect on growth. As a business owner, it’s important to remove yourself from a process where you’re a bottleneck. This ensures business processes can run on an increasing level of scale without your manual input.
You can improve the scalability of your workflows by using software with integrations. For example, customers could fill out questions that suggest their buying preferences and the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software will record it. Consequently, an automated list of products will be sent via email as suggestions. This requires hardly any manual input and can scale as you increase the size of your email subscriber list.
Another strategy that’s worth considering is to use AI-based systems to handle tasks like customer support. For example, ZenDesk offers an excellent integrated AI chatbot that can handle queries 24/7 within seconds, and to a limitless number of customers.
Create A Business Map
It’s essential to create a map of where you want your business to go on a broader scale. This is important for creating a decision-making template that ensures every small step pulls the business in the correct direction.
Also, creating a template ensures that all employees can figure out the business direction in a methodical way. Therefore, there is consistency in the company as you scale your business.
The business map should include things like:
- Monthly revenue targets.
- How many units of each product you’d expect to sell.
- When you should secure extra funding and how much.
- What steps you’ll need to take at each phase of business growth.
- Timetable for scaling your business.
This is just the tip of the iceberg and you may want to include factors that relate specifically to your business.
Learn How To Delegate
Business owners usually start off by learning every aspect of how their company works. This includes product research, branding, marketing, listing optimization, and much more. However, it’s important to hire employees and delegate tasks. After all, a team of employees can do more work than a single person.
However, you need to empower employees to do their best work to delegate tasks effectively. Therefore, give them room and time to learn the assigned tasks. Also, make it easier by providing plenty of support material. This induces step-by-step documentation that allows employees to complete tasks without asking many questions.
However, effective delegation can take time to learn, so don’t expect to get it right from the outset.
Improve the Quality of Your Product
It’s next to impossible to scale a business with long-lasting effects when quality products aren’t offered. You need to offer something that matches the best in your industry, or ideally better.
Here are a few tips for how to improve your product quality:
- Customer reviews: inspect what your customers are sharing about your products – after all, they are the ones who are buying. Pay attention to common themes in the customer feedback to get an idea of the real issues plaguing your products. Also, you can ask for lengthy questionnaires with rewards as incentives. These allow you to ask questions where the answer will help you improve product quality.
- Quality inspection services: ideally, every product leaving the factory warehouses is as described with no faults. However, that isn’t always possible – especially for complicated products. Hence, you should hire a quality inspection company to check for faults. These services will pay for themselves as higher quality products can demand higher prices. Also, don’t hesitate to switch suppliers if one consistently delivers sub-par quality results.
- Spy on competitors: check out what competitors are doing to get inspiration for how to make product improvements. It’s likely that your competitors are doing the same, so why not return the favor. This allows you to figure out new market trends and not get left behind.
Brand a Brand
For long term success it’s important to build a brand instead of focusing on getting the next sale. That’s because brands can attract loyal followers, not just customers. This increases the likelihood of getting repeat sales, which is a much better foundation for a scalable business than relying on attracting new customers.
In fact, it’s significantly more expensive to generate new customers compared to selling to previous buyers. When building your brand you must be consistent and stay true to your audience. This ensures you don’t alienate customers who have stayed with you for a while.
Once you establish a strong brand in your niche, you’ll find that word of mouth based transactions will increase. Combine that with a solid product offering and they may find yourself struggling to come up with the demand as your business scales to new heights.
Final Thoughts
To summarize, there are many steps to take to ensure that you can scale your business with the best chances of success. However, you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by the long list of tasks to accomplish. Tackle one at a time, and you’ll notice how it gets easier along the way.
Also, it’s an ongoing process that never stops. You can always find a new strategy or step to add even more scalability to your business. In fact, it’s good business practice that ensures you keep pushing forward and avoid stagnation.
