“I want to scale up my small business.”
I’m pretty sure you’ve heard these words everywhere on the internet especially among online businesses. But it is often used incorrectly, scaling doesn’t mean growth.
Growing a business just means adding resources at the same rate you create revenue. Scaling, on the other hand, means adding resources at an incremental rate while creating revenue at an exponential rate.
Scaling your business is attractive, but is your business ready to scale?
Before thinking about scaling your business you need to ask yourself why. What do you want your business to be like after you scale?
Should You Scale Your Business?
Scaling is every new business owner’s goal. But the reality is, scaling is not for everyone.
For instance, a consultant who earns enough to live for his ideal life may not necessarily need to scale his business. Instead of scaling up, the right move for him is to keep his business small to be easily manageable.
But if the lifestyle you desire requires a scaled-up company, you’re in the right place. In this blog, we’re going to go through the things you need to know to successfully scale your business.
The 5 Components your business needs to scale
To ensure that your business scales successfully you need these 5 components ready;
- Systems/Processes
The first step you’d want to take is breaking down all your business’ challenges. Identify your bottlenecks, inefficiencies, labour-intensive and repetitive tasks.
Then, see what tasks can be eliminated and outsource.
Koruna Assist can help you outsource your administrative work to an expert. So you and your in-house staff can focus on the core business processes.
After you’re done optimising your tasks, you can turn them into systems to guide what’s left. Businesses that scale successfully learned how to systematise their complex tasks by creating repeatable processes and workflows.
If you want to save time so you can focus on strategy, growth, market research and innovation, systematisation can help you.
- Automation
Once you’ve got your systems and processes in place, the next step is to automate as many tasks as you can.
There are a lot of automation software out there that can help you perform efficiently and serve more clients. It may seem like it won’t do much but it will have a positive impact on your business.
The most obvious benefit of automation is gaining your focus back on the things that matter the most to you. Automation allows you to focus on optimising your strategy, business growth, and innovation. This can tremendously increase your productivity without increasing your resources.
Automation software can give you analytics to measure your business’ performance. This information requires time and resources to gain access when you do the work manually. For example, an automated lead generation funnel can tell you precisely how well your landing pages and offers work.
Automation can also free up your staff’s time and bring their focus on high-value tasks. By automating menial tasks, your team can engage more in responsibilities that require creativity, intelligence, and critical thinking that software can’t replicate.
Here are ways to automate your workflow;
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- Manage and prioritize support tickets.
- Subscribe/enroll or unsubscribe/un-enroll customers.
- Organize and sort contacts and customers.
- Manage projects and tasks.
- Identify opportunities and leads.
- Move, transfer, and manipulate data.
- Move prospects through your marketing funnel.
- Alert your teams to tasks that require manual attention.
- Turn raw data into insightful analytics and build reports.
- Don’t be afraid to find ways to automate your tasks. You might even consider building a custom tool to handle your unique needs.
- Human Resource
Hire people who can help your business scale. Hire people with an entrepreneurial mindset because they help our business grow. But this comes with risks as people with an entrepreneurial mindset have an appetite for risk-taking.
They strive to grow. So to retain them, you need to give them the space and tools they need to grow the business. Let them focus on what they do best by outsourcing their administrative tasks to a Koruna expert. It can help them build their career and skill set while helping your business reach its goals. If you do it, your people will automatically create solutions that eliminate their inefficiencies and clear the roadblocks along the way.
It’s hard to find people with the right skill set, dedication, and work ethic to help your business scale. But I assure you that it will be worth it. If you find them, make sure you try your best to keep them. Pay them right. Invest in their development and growth so they continue to push your business.
- Focus
It’s easy to be distracted by new people, opportunities, and different ventures but you must keep your eyes on the price. Don’t dive into a new business opportunity that’s completely unrelated to your current business.
You’re not helping yourself and your business by pursuing too many business directions. It is always a recipe for disaster and most certainly won’t help you scale. It will only take your focus away from core projects and tasks, energy and resources from your business.
If you do everything at once, you can’t do any of them efficiently. You’ll waste time building new systems and processes, automation, and onboarding new staff. Investing in so many new resources is counterproductive when your focus is nowhere to be found. You’ll deprive yourself of the chance to grow and scale.
- Leadership that aligns with your business’ vision
The final component of scaling a business is leadership. You need someone in charge who can see what a scaled-up version of your business looks like and drive the rest of the company toward that goal.
The leader needs a forward-thinking vision. They should divorce themselves from the day-to-day work of the company so they can work on the business, not in it. They should come to work every day to build something greater, leaner, and more efficient than the day before. They should inspire the team to find ways to automate and streamline their jobs.
Last but not least, the component of scaling your business is leadership. Your business needs someone who shares your visions and pushes the business towards that goal.
As a leader, they need to have a forward-thinking vision. They should stop working in the business so they can work on the business. They should go to work to build something greater, and more efficient than the day before.
