Plan your next move: Scaling your business involves making a few strategic adjustments to your operations that will ready your company for future growth. Photo credit: Unsplash
Is growing your business the same thing as scaling it? The answer is no.
What the word “growth” generally means in business terms is an increase in revenue.
For example, if you own a small keychain-making business that just closed a major deal with a client, you need to ramp up on your production and possibly even hire more staff since you may get more of such deals in future.
However, while you may have grown your company revenue, you also need to add resources to make that revenue increase possible.
A company is said to have achieved scalability if it is able to handle a bigger workload in its current state without affecting the quality of its present output or performance.
This means you are increasing your revenue at a quicker rate than you are spending on new costs.
Scaling your business involves putting in place various conditions that ready your company for future growth.
Doing so will afford your company the means to grow without running into roadblocks.
This means that before you can achieve and sustain meaningful growth for your company, you need to scale it first.
So how can you find ways to replicate certain processes quickly and effectively? Here are five ways:
Now that you have decided you want to scale your business, the first thing to tell yourself is you must let go of some of the control you have as a boss.
As a business owner, you can’t be hunting for namecards, updating manual databases and cold calling, then expect the business to scale magically. You should be working on your business, not in it.
In order to develop the breadth of vision you need for scaling your business, you need to take a step back from fretting over the nitty gritty parts of your operations. Delegate if you need to.
Then look at your team. Are they the people who can help you achieve what you want?
If so, equip them with the knowledge and training they need so they can take your business to the next level. Your team should be lean but super efficient.
A lot of the rhetoric about scaling revolves around two words: Technology and automation.
It is very difficult to scale your business if your daily operations are still mired in old-school processes and manual grind.
Technology can also improve the production capacity of your business and enable it to grow. Manual processes can slow growth and cause bottlenecks even when you want to grow. Think ahead.
Remember that time is money. You can easily save the time your team spends on doing time-consuming, tedious work by employing the right technology to do these tasks instead. Your team members can then spend their time more productively.
Look at what you are doing right in your business. In order to achieve focused growth, you must identify key processes that will enable your business to develop in a targeted and strategic way.
Then sit down with your tech team and figure out which processes can be automated or streamlined. Next, get your tech team to teach your staff how to use the new tools.
The technology you use should allow some room for flexibility so you can adjust to increased growth without too much difficulty.
You may have to spend a little, but the time and effort that the technology helps you to save should enable your team and equipment to do more and achieve more in the long run.
Since your business has the potential to scale, you must have been doing some things right. Figure out what these “things” are.
What is your business’s unique selling point? What makes it different from others that offer similar products and/or services? What is your competitive edge? What is your customer profile? How can you capture a bigger slice of the market?
Finding out the answers to all these questions is crucial. It will improve your focus and help you refine your vision.
Without taking your eyes off your current pool of customers, find out how to engage them even further with the new resources you have (a revamped website and automated ordering system, for example), while seeking to increase your customer base.
While it’s great to get more customers to your website or social media pages, as a business owner, you need to get the word out about your company in person too by forming a business network.
Attend business functions and networking events, and actively get to know public relations personnel, other business owners, venture capitalists, sales partners, suppliers, marketing folks… the list goes on.
Meeting more people also increases your chances of forming valuable partnerships. For instance, if you are a health food supplement retailer, consider working with a gym or spa for referrals and marketing campaigns. This instantly expands their network reach (as well as yours) and allows businesses to integrate into ecosystems.
Just as your staff are learning, you should keep picking up new things too. Most, if not all, of the people you come across can probably teach you a thing or two or inspire you in ways you never expected.
After all, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Even better, you may meet an angel investor who is interested in your company. You never know!
Even as you try to scale and grow your business, there are certain variables you will have no control over. Case in point: No one expected a pandemic of this scale to break out in 2020.
So don’t wait until something big happens before you have a Plan B. Begin developing a line of credit now. Start sourcing for working capital facilities and build up small credit track records with lenders and banks, so that if and when you need a loan, you know exactly where to go and what to do.
This is the shortened version of an article that was first published in Lendingpot’s October 2021 newsletter.
Leading digital loan marketplace Lendingpot connects SMEs to its network of 45 lenders comprising relationship managers from banks, financial institutions, and private and peer-to-peer lenders in Singapore for free. It aims to help SMEs overcome the information asymmetry problem and lack of transparency prevalent in the SME financing sector by offering SMEs financing options such as business term loans, property loans, revenue-based financing, credit lines, working capital loans, bridging loans, invoice financing, and more.
Apply for a loan through our digital business loan marketplace and instantly connect with 45 financial institutions for free!
Belinda loves thinking about random stuff, and collecting useless bits of facts and trivia. She often roots for the underdog, and believes the world needs more happy endings.
