Selling like crazy? Thinking of growing your business? Are you ready to scale up? Well it’s time for the next business challenge, being able to deliver your product/service to all of your new customers. Scalability is about capacity and capability and before you decide to scale up you need to make sure you have the capacity to grow, and will your business systems, infrastructure and team be able to accommodate the growth?
Are you ready? Essentially, scalability is the ability of a startup to grow, you can adapt to a larger workload without compromising performance or losing revenue. Do you think your business has what it takes to set the stage to enable and support growth? Here are some vital steps to scale your business.
Get your plan together
Evaluate your business to see if you’re ready for growth. You won’t be able to know what you need to do differently unless you understand where your business stands today.
Come up with a strategy to how you will deal with increasing sales. Try assuming that your orders doubled or tripled overnight, do you have the resources and systems to handle the influx of new orders? With more orders comes more expenses too, make sure you thoroughly take this into account.
Automation is your best friend
Spend some time, resources, and budget on “setting up” your business. Even though it seems to take a long time, this will pay for itself in the long term. With automation tools you’ll be able to access your data faster, hire new staff faster, market better, pay easier, and streamline operations to ensure you’re ready to scale up.
You should consider the following automations when setting up;
- Cloud storage
- Training processes
- Marketing tools
- Payroll
Increase your marketing efforts
Focus on marketing and surely, your scalability will follow. Afterall, how can a business scale if no one knows about it?
Not all types of marketing will be useful to scale. Content marketing is your best bet, it’s one of the most scalable growth methods due to its evergreen value, and viral potential.
Hint: most startups use this method as a growth hack.
Don’t hang around too much
Get out of the way, your business should be fully functional without you. Start shift your responsibilities to your staff, take frequent days off to force the business and your staff to be independent.
Don’t take it to heart if you come back to the office after a holiday and find your business is thriving without you being present, it’s a sign that your employees are feeling empowered and your business is ready to grow.
Ensure minimal risk
Richard Branson was quoted to say, “Focus on your passion, start small, dream big, and plan ahead. Scale up only when you are ready – not just because opportunity knocks.” Scale up only when your business is ready. Don’t put your business and its’ progress under unnecessary risk just because you performed better during one quarter.
Signs telling you to scale up aren’t always set in stone, but if you feel your business is exhibiting signs it’s ready, it might be useful to evaluate your options. In the end, it’s your decision to manage, lead and scale up your business and achieve your business goals.
With Holded’s automated accounting software, you can be one-step ahead by utilising an online software that automates all of your accounts, tracks payments, sales, and expenses.
