How to scale a business: How To Scale Your Small Business in 6 Steps 2023

How to scale a business

The word ‘mindset’ gets tossed around a lot, and it’s easy to brush it off as a non-essential requirement to grow a business. However, none of the other ingredients in this list will work without having the right mindset in place first. Another alternative is to build an advisory board of experienced entrepreneurs. Having a board of advisors can provide valuable guidance that could help a young startup navigate various obstacles in the early stages of its development. An advisory board also provides accountability, which can give startups greater focus and discipline. After qualifying prospects, it’s time to onboard your new clients.

That’s the only way you can create the robust business systems and stable infrastructure needed to support increasing scale. Track sources you get the most traction from to identify and fix issues in your lead funnel. Use the money saved by reducing costs to augment your product or service. Invest in customer service and functionality improvements, add new features and train your employees. It seems obvious but establishing a strong team is a prerequisite for scaling a business. Developing a flexible management team to grow with the company is crucial in learning how to scale a business.

For instance, having a support team with a customer-oriented mindset will make you better understand your niche needs. As a result, you will know what features of your product you should develop. Furthermore, creating an effective business system will help you meet customers’ expectations and solve problems. Moreover, knowing your company’s core strengths, such as your mission and values, enables you to create a solid foundation for your business.

How to scale a business

Invest in yourself, invest in people, and invest in your business. You don’t have to find an investor to bring money into your business. The smartest people in business are those who understand the power of delegation and letting go. You can delegate tasks to your team, other businesses, freelancers, and others. If you are not prepared and ready to grow, you risk falling flat on your face. Having structured systems inside your business helps to secure your business and prepare it for rapid growth.

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When you scale your business, you add resources and team members as revenue grows but at a slower rate than the growth of your client list. As a result, your business scales in a manageable way, allowing margins to increase slowly over time. And if you experience a dip in clientele, your revenue is still enough to sustain your workforce and resource costs.

How to scale a business

Scaling too quickly can lead to a lack of focus, ineffective budgeting and misallocation of resources. This can ultimately undermine your success—exposing you to unnecessary risk. Consequently, selecting the right strategy and managing the process carefully is essential. Without knowing your core competence it’s difficult to create strategies. Many start-ups have evolved by doing certain things without articulating their core competence.

It’s also productive to get involved in personal or business coaching and connect with those business veterans about becoming your mentor. Scaling a business is not a solitary task — the more people you have on your side, the more successful you will be. Speak to influencers and see if you can find someone willing to help grow your business. To grow your business fast, you must reinvest a larger percentage of what you bring into the company back into the company. This is so important because if you don’t do that, your business’s growth will suffer.

For example, communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams let you share files with employees, make calls, and organize video conferences. However, only spending money on better equipment, new hires, or marketing cannot guarantee success when scaling your business. Other than that, you will need to improve your workflow and internal processes, upgrade to professional web hosting, and get a CRM system. After ensuring that your business is ready to expand and that you have chosen the right team and tools to optimize your company’s goals, it’s time to finally get to it. Ideally, you’ll hire just a few inspirational people who can get a lot done.

Grow Your Team

Salesforce is one of the most popular CRMs, and there are also tools like HubSpot and Zoho CRM. That way, you can have phone calls, start video meetings, and send instant or SMS text messages all from one app instead of toggling back and forth (and paying for multiple tools). If you invest in the right solutions, you’ll achieve massive scalability with less labor. Get free online marketing tips and resources delivered directly to your inbox. Katie says Pantee doesn’t see their relationship with customers as purely transactional—they’re a community.

Discover what they did that helped them reach the level of success you aspire to achieve. But I’d ask you to take a step back and instead, focus on refining the product you already have. This isn’t to say, never launch anything new, but in our rush to innovate, we might leave a half baked product on the line. Great leaders know one thing — having a natural curiosity and thirst for learning separates the good from the great.I’m not going to lie, scaling up will shake things up at your company. And for that to happen, you must have the expertise that comes with knowledge and experience to handle it. Developing strong operations management will help you care for products, services, and people.

Hiring additional employees and building out the right infrastructure and business processes typically require capital. You need to know what kind of financing is necessary to support that growth and where you can cut costs. At what point should you consider expanding into new geographies or markets, or building additional products or services? It’s easy to lose focus when you start to scale, but having a map of growth options helps. When focusing on massive growth, many business owners fail to ensure that they offer a solid product or service, often figuring that they’ll fix the issue after getting more users or distribution.

  • Collect data and use it to inform your decisions, manage your resources effectively, get the right advice from experienced professionals and ensure that you have a solid strategy in place.
  • The word ‘mindset’ gets tossed around a lot, and it’s easy to brush it off as a non-essential requirement to grow a business.
  • You must have a firm belief and confidence that you will reach your destination.
  • Katie and her sister Amanda are the brains behind Pantee, a line of underwear and bras made exclusively from dead-stock t-shirts and t-shirt fabric.
  • Consequently, selecting the right strategy and managing the process carefully is essential.
  • However, none of the other ingredients in this list will work without having the right mindset in place first.

You can’t scale your business fast without having a structure in your business. One of the first things you need to do to create a structured business is organising your business’s essential functions. Systems are so crucial for maintaining consistency and measurability in the business. They will also help you optimise what’s working and ensure that every person, tool, process, and so on works together within the company. I’ve got an entire blog and video all about Systems & Processes, so check that out if you want to learn more about implementing successful systems inside your business.

Discover the keys to scaling a business for massive success

Your team also needs to have the right mindset for scalability. As business growth sees you take on more clients and orders, you’ll make changes to your workflow for efficiency. The founder will have to delegate more responsibility, and promote some team members to managerial roles so they can guide the others. Even though some people think “scaling up” is just a buzzword, it’s a necessary step that growing startups have to take. Long-time customers of Pantee are drawn to its commitment to sustainability, so they remained committed to that philosophy.

Sorting through the maze of digital data is necessary if you want to build, grow and scale a successful business. Compare vendor services and choose the most cost-effective ones. Entrepreneurs want to scale, but not all businesses are ready for scaling.

  • Most entrepreneurs have big ambitions when they start a new business.
  • In order to scale up, you need to concentrate on winning in your niche.
  • According to the report, many early-stage ventures lack the will and ambition to scale.
  • Think Steve Jobs’ decision at Apple to focus on just producing two desktops and two laptops.So what is your niche that you’d like to dominate?
  • If your company started as a hobby, like in Matt’s case with Hug Sleep, you may have just been going with the flow up until this point.

Expect some ups and downs—Katie said some pitches went better than others, but they did reach their goal in the end. Once they started hearing “yes,” it gave them confidence to go out and pitch more. “Our strategy is very heavy on influencer marketing, ambassador marketing, and our partnerships, and it’s a very, very time consuming element of the business,” says Katie.

Scale your business: 11 ways to build lasting growth

Don’t let trends give you tunnel vision because business opportunities are everywhere. It might seem that in recent years, with the birth of countless technology companies, that this sector is the only way to success. This includes using high-quality image products, creating a clear headline to show your value proposition, and keeping a good site performance. Make sure you know how many people you need, and bear in mind that you’ll have to pay for the best talent. The right software can help, specifically with onboarding and training new hires.

The brand’s early customers, the ones who’ve come along for the whole journey, are a pillar of support that have helped it get where it is today. Scaling costs money, and you might need to identify the right time to seek outside investment to see your plans through and keep your cash flow flowing. These can be simple fixes, like how Matt created scripted responses to deal with a heavy influx of customer service inquiries after he appeared on Shark Tank. In either case, evaluate whether your current sourcing and manufacturing processes still function well at scale. Pantee, for example, was originally inspired by creating underwear from thrifted t-shirts. They then turned to dead-stock t-shirts, but they can actually be slower to process.

While scaling, it is crucial to maintain productivity and efficiency. A successful business handles spikes in workflows without losses like employee turnover. The following strategies make scaling up less stressful and improve efficiency and productivity. Creativity is vital for any company but running a business is not the place for knee-jerk decisions. Think of creativity as a method for scaling a business rather than a free-for-all tool for solving problems.