Achieving some success in your business allows you to see growth opportunities. But before you aggressively take on the challenges of increasing business operations, you’ll need to learn how to scale your business correctly. By understanding how to scale your business correctly, you can optimally achieve your goals while maintaining the growth you’ve already attained.
Business growth occurs when new capabilities such as capital, people, or technology are added while scaling means achieving the same growth and increased revenue with less significant costs. Learning how to scale your business right lets you accomplish this growth through effective methods that this article will discuss, leading to further exponential gains.
1. Understand Your Purpose
Your operations are already going great, and your business is now ready to take the next step. To scale your operations properly, your organization needs to be reminded of the foundation of your company’s purpose, which is to serve your customers. Creating customer loyalty is vital to scaling a business and will help you achieve the growth you aim to have.
To do so, you’ll first need to strengthen employee loyalty and share the enthusiasm for the future you’re feeling. This enthusiasm will naturally cascade from yourself to your employees onto your customers that they encounter directly. When you align your values and purpose with your employees, they can appreciate their roles in your company much better.
This will also allow them to share in the excitement of your journey as you and your team learn how to scale your business more effectively.
2. Strengthen Your Commitment
An aspect that has strengthened your resolve towards expansion is that small business failure rates have fallen by 30 percent since 1977. But while the trend may be good news for existing companies, the current challenges businesses face can still derail an organization towards failure. Whether it’s a lack of company funds or a shift in market demand, there can be several reasons that can lead to a business shutting down.
This is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that about 20 percent of small businesses still fail in their first year and about 50 percent experience failure in their fifth. You’ll need to prepare and learn how to scale your business properly to further your success. As a business owner, you’ll need to have the will and ambition to scale your business up.
You’ll have to strengthen your commitment to your organization, build realistic growth targets, and initiate proper plans and actions to scale your business up.
3. Evaluate and Plan
One of the first things you’ll need to do when scaling a business is to take the necessary step back to assess where your business stands today. Successful scaling needs a reliable strategy to increase your sales and support your growth effectively. Unfortunately, according to a Startup Genome Report, as many as 70 percent of startups initiated scaling up without proper preparations, which led to their inevitable failure.
As you effectively scale up, you’ll need to prepare your business for the increased demand you will surely experience. Evaluating your capabilities and creating a good plan gives you better coordination to help your operations even with increasing product orders. Prepare a reliable sales growth forecast that includes customer acquisition goals and targets for orders and revenue aligned with your vision. This can prepare your organization for a far more realistic and efficient manner of execution.
Later on, you’ll need to adjust your expense forecast, as you’ll need to acquire more assets from technology, staffing, infrastructure, and systems, to handle newer sales orders. Again, having the proper understanding of your capabilities, matched with reliable planning, can help you prepare better as you take the necessary steps to scale your business effectively.
4. Build a Business Map
Many entrepreneurs with a vision already have a solid business plan that lays the path towards achieving success. However, to support this foundation as you scale up, you’ll need to have a business map to go along with it. Business maps provide a comprehensive and effective way for scaling a business and help you meet your goals.
In learning how to scale your business correctly, having a business map can help you take your business to the next level. A business map provides a top-down view of how your business works and identifies your room to grow. It helps you see what you’ll need down the line, from hiring that additional sales team to help gain more profits to identifying the processes you can improve on to initiate further growth. Whether it’s a flowchart, a diagram, or a software-generated map, having the reference from a business map can help you answer the important questions you need to address.
5. Maintain Your Quality
One of the most important things you’ll need to face when learning how to scale your business is maintaining your quality and consistency. As your business is scaling up, you’ll start to notice how exposed your weaknesses can be. Your organization is already stretching itself thin and adjusting as you go along, and things can’t always get fixed immediately.
Whether it’s an IT systems or processes issue, cash flow shortages, or supply chain issues, one bump on the road can easily affect your scaling up goals. Unfortunately, these issues may leave you to neglect the primary focus you need to maintain: your product’s quality. By having the proper culture and staff aligned with the right processes, you can maintain quality throughout your scaling-up journey.
6. Know the Challenges to Face
As you scale your business up, there’ll be unexpected challenges along the way that you’ll need to navigate through. Having the proper preparation can help you face these challenges when they occur. This is why it’s imperative to understand the possible barriers to scaling up before they happen.
As you build your strategy for growth, you’ll need to be honest and see the problems you could face as you move forward. Issues such as a lack of leadership experience within your teams, lack of funding, or absent systems, are concerns that can be addressed even during earlier planning stages. By being pragmatic and having the foresight to anticipate and address these issues, you can prepare yourself for other threats that may unexpectedly arrive.
7. Learn from Success
While it’s always essential to establish and develop key relationships and networks in business, it’s also a helpful step when learning how to scale your business. Establishing a network of partners can lead to better efficiency as you scale up and provide the meaningful information you need as you grow.
In addition, you can learn from those you work with or even from your competitors who have successfully scaled up their organizations. By analyzing the methods they pursued and the processes they experienced, you can better prepare yourself for the things you’ll need.
How to Scale Your Business: Case Studies from Successful People and Brands
Tal Navarro
CEO, Social Lady Digital Agency
Tal Navarro is an award-winning digital expert and serial entrepreneur who is currently the Social Lady Digital Agency CEO. She is a highly experienced expert in the online space with more than fifteen years of experience and was a pioneer in digital marketing in Israel. Navarro established Social Lady more than ten years ago and has become one of the leading advertising agencies in the country. Now the firm has conquered the US, serving as a one-stop-shop for any client’s online marketing needs.
According to Tal, here are the things you need to prepare for when scaling your business:
- Clear Vision. Tal shares that having a completely clear vision of your company and what you’re setting out to accomplish is imperative before your business is ready to scale up.
- Check your Revenue Model. Tal Suggests that once your crystal-clear vision is well-defined, you should revisit your revenue model. You’ll need to make sure that your cash flow is working beneficially. Sorting out these financial concerns signifies that your business is ready for growth.
- Delegate. Once you notice that you have more clients and orders more regularly, you should consider scaling your business up. This is the time to build your teams and delegate tasks efficiently to avoid getting overwhelmed.
Sir Richard Branson
Founder, Virgin Group
Sir Richard Branson is one of the world’s most influential and recognized billionaires and is the founder of the Virgin Group. His business empire comprises more than 400 companies, originating from a record shop to eventually becoming a recording publishing powerhouse, budget airlines, and commercial space travel. Branson has written plenty of insightful books on business and never fails to share his behind-the-scenes of the ups and downs throughout his more than fifty-year career as an entrepreneur.
“If you can change people’s lives, you have a business” – @richardbranson
Branson suggests having the foresight to create solutions to people’s problems to achieve business success no matter what tier your organization is in. “The best businesses come from people’s bad personal experiences. If you just keep your eyes open, you’re going to find something that frustrates you, and then you think, “well, I could maybe do it better than it’s being done, and there you have a business”. According to Branson, having the foresight to come up with these solutions can fill the gaps in the market no one has ever thought of before, creating a product that can ultimately lead to success.
Alvin Poh
Entrepreneur and Author of Super Scaling: Systemise, Break Free and Skyrocket your Business to Millions
Alvin Poh is a successful entrepreneur who helps other entrepreneurs grow their businesses. He is the Super Scaling book author, compiling lessons from his 20 years of business experience, which offers business lessons, strategies, and systems to achieve scaling success. A proven methodology for Super Scaling that Alvin discusses in his book is the 5E Scale Engine:
- Evolve. To scale up effectively, you’ll also need to grow as the leader of your business. Setting this mindset while focusing on your wellness and fitness will allow you to perform at your full potential.
- Envision. Envisioning the future you want is vital when scaling a business. Plotting out the stages of your vision from short-term to long-term and overall goals allows you to strategize better to achieve your desired outcomes.
- Empower. Empowering your team is crucial to scale your business up effectively. This can amplify your efforts resulting in better performance and gains.
- Engage. Maintaining engagement with your customers and clients is always essential. Proper engagement throughout customer journeys can ensure your brand’s overall impact.
- Execute. Having a systematic approach through the efficient execution of your plans based on strategy and growth can drive your organization to success as it becomes a well-oiled machine.
Walmart Incorporated is an American multinational retail corporation with operations mainly in the US. The company founded in 1962, which started as a high-volume, low-profit margin discount store, is now the world’s largest company by revenue, amounting to more than $500 Billion. The thing that sets Walmart apart is its realistic scaling approach. When stores were opening up within big cities, Walmart focused on smaller markets in the Midwest.
Instead of aggressively going for rapid revenue growth, they opted for locations with a firmer grip on the market share. This allowed them to focus on operations instead of struggling with the competition. Another of its approaches has been to intensify its E-commerce business. For example, Flipkart, a Walmart subsidiary based in India, supplies 12 percent of Walmart’s international revenue. This has led the company to decide to scale up Flipkart’s delivery infrastructures by converting their physical stores into fulfillment centers. Doing so speeds up delivery times and offers new opportunities for the company.
Tech-Giant Google may be an online behemoth, but it is grounded on the principle that its growth is reliant on its employees. Developing this growth mindset is what Google has been famously known for, extending perks and benefits exclusively for Googlers. The benefits that Google employees enjoy include free food, college tuition reimbursement, extended paid parental leave, bonus payments for new parents, unlimited sick days, and many more. By securing the happiness of their employees, Google achieves its goals with loyal and hardworking team members who also benefit from the company’s growth.
Conclusion
Scaling your business right is a challenge you can’t afford to fail. Understanding that your business has grown well enough to expand is the first step of many you still need to undertake. Your business can grow faster, be more efficient, and achieve greater success when done correctly. Plus, do these tips on how to scale your business to reach that level of advancement and success you’ve always dreamed of.
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