Entrepreneurs often place their focus on achieving it right away and lose focus on what matters. To create a working definition of scaling a business, first, consider what it means to start and grow a business. You started your company to fill a need in your market, make a profit and likely fulfill a dream.
You need to grow your business in order to keep it profitable and expand your market reach. Many people think of business expansion as “hockey stick growth,” where there is an initial period of linear growth, but once the business hits an inflection point, revenue shoots up sharply.
If growth causes your company to stumble because of confusion, orders falling through the cracks, insufficient staff, miscommunication, not enough manufacturing or delivery capacity, you’re going to have unhappy customers.
- Know your purpose
Scaling a business is reliant on creating customer loyalty. Focus on employee loyalty first so they can spread the word and pass their enthusiasm for your company on to those they serve. Employees are loyal to companies whose purpose and values align with their own so they can feel their careers have a higher purpose
- Evaluate and Plan
Take a hard look inside your business to see if you are ready for growth. You can’t know what to do differently unless you take stock of where your business stands today. Strategize what you need to do to increase sales. Then assume your orders doubled or tripled overnight
- Find the money
Scaling a business doesn’t come free. Your growth plan may call for hiring staff, deploying new technology, adding equipment and facilities, and creating reporting systems to measure and manage results.
- Mindset
You must have a firm belief and confidence that you will reach your destination. Successful businesses tend to be run by people with an unstoppable mindset. They don’t let anything or anyone get in their way from reaching their goal.
- Develop a business map
Business maps are an effective, comprehensive way for scaling a business and meeting its goals. Creating a business map prompts you to ask foundational questions. Business maps encourage and challenge you to look at where you came from, define your purpose for starting this business and look ahead.
- Perfect your products or service
With their focus on massive growth, many business owners forget to ensure that their product or service is solid. They often figure that they will just fix it after getting more users or more distribution. learning how to scale a business before pursuing growth will save you headaches and money in the long run.
- Make sure you’re ready and prepared for growth
When your business starts to scale up, things can begin to creak. Weaknesses can be exposed, and you can’t always fix them once the journey’s started. Think very carefully about how scaling up and growing your business will affect your company, you must be ready and your processes must be robust.
- Learn from competitors who’ve successfully grown
Think about how they’ve done it. How they have succeeded. Finding out how many staff they now have could give you a rough idea of how many you’ll need. Where are they selling and how? Understand their business model and learn lessons.
- Create a sense of urgency
You need three things to scale a business. First, hire well so you can delegate. You’ll never scale if you have to handle everything yourself. Second, pick your battles and focus on acquiring more and bigger customers.
- Solve your customers’ problems
Providing real value to your customers is powerful. Its importance cannot be overstated. Offering a solution to a real problem that people care about will make it much easier to run a business.
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