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Scaling is one of the most important things for your business. However, it doesn’t always go as planned. Many entrepreneurs experience some degree of failure when they try to scale their startups.
It’s not always easy to build up a company into something that can compete with larger companies. But these lessons learned in scaling will help you avoid common pitfalls and get the most out of your company’s growth. They include the following:
1. Hire Slow, Fire Fast
The most important part of scaling your business is ensuring you have the right team and talents to help you. Take your time when selecting the best candidate for your team. If you’re not careful, you can get stuck with someone who isn’t working out, but it will take months or even years to realize they’re not a good fit. If a new employee is struggling in their role or can’t seem to get up to speed on their new responsibilities, it may be helpful for both parties involved if they leave the company voluntarily.
You’ll know when the time comes; don’t be afraid of firing someone because they aren’t contributing enough value or are making others’ jobs more difficult by dragging down morale around them.
2. Focus on Hiring Coachable People
It’s a mistake to hire someone who isn’t coachable. It doesn’t matter how smart or talented they are. Hiring them is no point if they can’t learn from you and their mistakes. You’re wasting your time and skills.
Coachable means someone willing to take advice from others without getting defensive or arrogant about it genuinely wants to improve themselves and is open-minded enough to see value from a different perspective.
Someone like that will apologize when they screw up instead of blaming others for their mistake or making excuses for why it happened. You can hire people like this by looking for self-awareness during interviews. This can be done by asking how they deal with failure or incorporating feedback into their work.
3. Adopt a Referral Mentality
When scaling your business, the more people you have working for you, the better. But finding great people to work with can be quite a challenge. Most entrepreneurs focus on the wrong things in their search for new hires. They look at education, experience, and personality as job qualifications. But those things don’t determine whether someone will make a good employee or not.
What matters more is whether they’ll fit into your corporate culture and whether they can pick up new skills quickly enough to stay up with all the changes occurring in the fast-paced commercial world of today. Therefore, you can ask your employees to refer people they’ve worked with before, as this will facilitate seamless onboarding.
4. Ascertain What Drives Your Team Members
What inspires your employees? It’s a question that every entrepreneur needs to answer for themselves, and it should be given top priority. Rather than offering incentives based on the task at hand, it is far more effective to understand what each employee values most and provide appropriate incentives.
To acquire an employee’s loyalty and dedication, it would make sense to offer up their work hours as an incentive rather than cash if they have a sick family member who requires help with child or elder care. Offering flexible working arrangements has been very effective when recruiting new talent because people want freedom in their lives; they do not want everything dictated by the clock.
5. Do Whatever It Takes To Keep Morale Up
It’s essential to keep your employees feeling positive and motivated significantly when you’re multiplying. However, this doesn’t mean you should be unrealistic about the scaling challenges.
Be optimistic but realistic. It’s easy for people to lose faith in their work when they don’t see immediate results or feel like they’re not making progress fast enough; that’s why it’s essential to set realistic goals and share them with everyone on your team and remind them frequently. If there are setbacks along the way, let everyone know that these are only temporary setbacks, and things will get better.
6. Hold One-on-One Meetings
The best method to promote a positive working connection is through regular one-on-one sessions. As the leader of your company, you must allow your employees to share their thoughts, ideas, and concerns with you. They should also be able to ask questions at any time during these meetings to get answers quickly to move forward on projects effectively.
Regular one-on-one meetings allow employees to share their progress in a way that isn’t possible when communicating via email or chat. For example, you can learn some of their non-verbal cues, such as discomfort or fear, when talking one-on-one, which isn’t possible through emails.
7. Never Hesitate To Relinquish Control
Letting go of some control is essential. If someone doesn’t have something at the top of their priority list, they’ll never be able to do it well. You must delegate and trust your employees to get things done for your company to grow successfully.
Delegation isn’t abdication, though, and it’s trusting others with responsibility so you can focus on other things. If you’re not delegating, how will you gain skills in areas that no one else has experienced? It would help if you had people who are strong enough and skilled enough in their fields to take over when needed without having to rely too heavily on one person.
8. Become More Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
It’s easy to get comfortable in your skin, but adapting and changing when the situation demands it is also essential. You’ll make mistakes along the way, and that’s okay; you can learn valuable lessons from each.
If something isn’t working out as planned, don’t hesitate to ask for help or take a step back if needed. You’re not alone! When things get stressful, remember that your goal is not perfection; it’s growth. While perfectionism can hinder progress, so does giving up after mistakes in business.
9. Start Viewing Business as a Funnel
When you’re a small business, it can be easy to focus on the process and forget the result.
To scale your business, you need to start thinking about it as one giant funnel or pipeline that turns leads to return customers. And while this may seem like an abstract concept at first, there are concrete steps you can take to ensure everything works well together.
Create customer profiles based on your ideal customer’s appearance and how they behave online. Then use those personas as guides when creating content or determining which platforms best suit them. This will help move your customer from the lead generation stage to the purchase stage. In turn, your business generates more returns and grows.
10. Get Feedback, But Don’t Compromise Your Vision
Improving your business is constantly trying new things, getting feedback, and making adjustments based on what works and doesn’t. When it comes to making significant changes or taking a big leap forward with your business, like raising money, you might not need to involve your employees.
But when it comes to decision-making, you’re better off keeping an open mind. This will ensure that you consider every possibility and measure them before implementing the best. However, trust your gut first before seeking out external input that might be biased by personal circumstances or, worse yet: lousy advice from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about
11. Ensure Effective Leadership and Organization
Scaling is a process, not an event. It’s tempting to think of scaling as something that happens to you, but the reality is that scaling requires leadership and organization from the very beginning. Be a leader rather than just another boss. Your employees don’t want someone barking orders at them all day long; when things get tough during growth spurts within your company structure, try being more open-minded about how others can help out before jumping in yourself.
When you become a leader, others will easily follow your lead and help your business grow. Also, being a leader ensures that you become approachable and others can bring ideas to the table on scaling your business without being intimidated.
Conclusion
Scaling your business can be one of the most challenging tasks to take as an entrepreneur. While all business founders want to grow, the fear of failure holds them back. But with the right lessons, such as those discussed in this article, you can easily and successfully scale your business. If you feel you need assistance in your scaling, consider applying for a coaching session to learn more about how you can go about working with us to support your efforts!
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