I am guessing that you are here because you have successfully started a startup and now you want to scale up your business. So before you start growing your business you should find out whether your business can take the intense pressure of the workload without losing revenue.
Without a foolproof business plan, great team and right system you will fail to grow your business. Know what you are up against and prepare yourself for the outcome.
Here’s how you can scale up your business and succeed.
Plan from the beginning to scale up your business:
The first step to scaling up your business plan right from the beginning. Make a complete plan for growing your business before growth happens. This way you can allow yourself to put your money in the right section like IT infrastructure, equipment, software application. To facilitate growth from start you must optimize your initial infrastructure and budget for the current customers. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be prepared for the new clients. The best way to obtain scalability is to make a plan and see it through.
To grow business, make your customers your top priority:
For any small business, scaling up is a major achievement. Create a customer-centric business to grow your business successfully. A systematic approach to ensure an unvarying level of product quality or customer service. Whether a small business or huge multimillion dollar industry, it’s essential to deliver a consistent and uniform customer experience to manage growth successfully. Build your business’s reputation. This way even when you are downscaling your business your loyal customers will keep your brand popular. Provide the best customer care experience and expand your footstep worldwide.
Scale up your business by always being prepared for change:
Change is good. Of course, you need a plan to be able to manage your budget and foresee the outcome your actions but you also need to be prepared for the change. With the expansion of your business, you might need to recruit more staff or let other people make a lot of major decisions for your business. You must remember that delegating other members of your team to take care of some major tasks will only help you to handle your business successfully. With growth comes the unavoidable need to perform some fundamental changes with your business plan, infrastructure and other aspects of your business.
Grow business by learning from your mistakes:
Every business, small or big, is bound to make some mistakes. Learn from the mistakes and use that knowledge to make major decisions in the future. The most common mistake is trying to scale up too fast. When you try to expand your business too fast then it becomes hard to predict the outcome. It becomes impossible to predict whether your business can handle the expansion or not. It is common sense that your business won’t be able to jump from hundred customers to thousands overnight. Measure each step as your business grow slowly and then take actions for appropriate scalability.
Take risk to scale up your business:
Scaling up your business is always risky. But success lies within calculated risks. Every small business owners must bear in mind that only a minimum and calculated risk can help to scale up their businesses. But the reality is, even with a controlled and precisely calculated risk can cost you money and resources. Keep the risk to a bare minimum against the projected return of the scaling up of the business.
Use your networks and communities to scale up your business:
It doesn’t what type of business you are looking to scale up. There will always be like-minded people who want to collaborate with you and move in the same direction. Ask your service providers, friends, other small business owners and even your sales channel partner to establish a business relationship and use each other’s information and resources to achieve the same goal. This will only prove to be extremely helpful to scaling up your business.
Grow business by checking out all financial options:
The riskiest period for any small business is the growth period. In this period you need to look for the best small business financing options to scale up your business. Because you will need to finance your infrastructure and invest in resourcing the increased demand.
Most small business owners make the mistake of taking huge bank loans or overdraft their funds. Look for the easier options like sharing venture capital, multiple equity investors or employee stock options. Somme small business owners negotiate with their suppliers to delay some payments to slow down the cash leaving the business without damaging their working relationship. Be innovation with your financial options.
Wholesaling is another way to grow business:
Many small business owners have increased their profits exponentially by focusing on scaling than growing. Scale up your business through wholesaling and see an increase in profits. This method has almost worked for most of the startups that you can easily call this method to be a rule in scaling up business.
Wholesaling can be added to your existing business without increasing any costs. With the right plan in mind, add wholesaling as another sales channels and your profit will roll in. with the help of eCommerce, wholesaling can be the best workable scaling option for your business.
To scale up your business, always abide by your rules:
Like I have said before, make a plan and see it through. Having a business plan will guide you to take the right decision and will help to figure out recruiting the right type of people. Your strategy will help you to select the talent you need to include on your team.
Set up your own rule when scaling up your business. Choose the confident, skilled and hard workers. Surround yourself with compassionate and driven team members. Remember, your team is just as valuable element as your investors in scaling up your business. Make sure you are on the same page. Everyone in the team should pull in the same direction. Your team should be able to detect where improvements can be made and help your business to grow and get better.
Be consistent and choose quality over quantity to scale up your business:
A small business has to be customer-centric in order to grow. To scale up your business, you need to be consistent with your product quality and customer service. If you lower the quality of your product to cut the cost in half then you will only lose customers. Your total revenue will decrease. Provide your targeted market with quality product and customer service and build your business reputation.
To grow business you must know your limits:
Even the big industries consider their limits before they start implementing their plan to scale up their businesses. When developing a strategy to scale up business, you should dedicate a part of to discover your limits and barriers. Be practical and calculate the chances of failure. If you can identify and weakness then immediately find ways to improve it. Avoiding the weakness and choosing to not work on it will only leave a negative impact on scaling up your business.
To scale up your business, never compromise your values or principal:
When you start scaling up your business, you will be forced to face many times deciding what is right and what is easy. The process of scaling up a business needs a lot of financial investment. When business owners become unable to keep the process going then they get tempted to look for dishonest ways.
Your business should be built on values rather than on just making a few grand. Add values to the society and your community than just looking for ways to make profits.
Always maintain the time limit to grow business:
One of the common problems every small business has to face is that they become forced to stop growing their business when the money runs out. They either stop renovating or increasing the services. So whenever business owners can find new investors or manage to take a loan they start scaling up their business again.
This is a bad practice. Give yourself a time limit before executing your plan. Take everything into account including the obstacles, challenges, and setbacks. Be honest and pragmatic with your plan. Often people fail to maintain the time limit is because they are late to spot difficulties that are coming your way. Create a team of expert to help you to detect any problems in advance and fix it.
To scale up your business you need to dream big. Have a scalability mindset. With the right system, plan, and people you can unleash you dream to become big in any well-established market and earn a lot of money.
Scaling up your business can be a very stressful job. But once you get the hang of it, it will get easier. With the help of a thought out and controlled plan, you can start growing your business and take it to the next level.
Even with all the right product, system and people, things don’t work out according to your plan. You will never have a smooth ride on your journey to expanding your business. Use your experience to spot the difficulties in advance before it damages your business.
