The challenges of business don’t end when you find room to grow and further explore the company’s potential. No, if anything, the real challenge only begins then. Out of all the businesses that fail in their first two years, the majority fail because they don’t handle the scaling process right.
So, what is the best way to grow your business safely but effectively?
Make another business plan
This plan doesn’t have to be quite as extensive as the one you should have written when you first created the business. Rather, many of your plans can fit but two pages. They’re a roadmap on what you scale and why you scale it. It’s about re-evaluating the plans of the business and the resources you need to do just that.
Make your move talent-centric
It doesn’t matter how you’re growing the business. Whether it’s expanding to a new location, finding another way to reach into the market you’ve already grown, or finding a new revenue stream entirely. It’s about the people that help you make that move first and foremost. First, you need to think about existing sectors in the business and which need to have their workforce expanded. For instance, if you have a mailing room and you’re expecting more customers and deliveries, then yes, you need to expand it. If you’re expanding marketing efforts, however, you might not need a bigger marketing strategy team. In fact, you might fall foul of the ‘too many cooks’ issue. More than just hiring people, you should think about identifying the leaders within the business to step up and form a new management team, too.
Grow to your new role
One of the reasons you need to find those leaders is because, as you scale, you will not be able to handle all the responsibilities you once could. The business will grow too large to make it feasible. You have to get used to the idea of working on the business from a bird’s eye perspective rather than on the front lines. Work on the business, not in it.
Get things moving
You can take your time planning how the business is going to grow, what resources and what changes you need. When it’s time to put in action, however, you need things moving quickly. You might need commercial movers to get you promptly set up in a new workspace. You need an employment policy and process ready to implement to quickly find the best picks for new positions. The actual scaling operation itself needs to be done without delay. The more time you spend in transition, the less time you can spend on the business itself.
Don’t forget to expand your lead-building
To sustain the growth of a business, you absolutely cannot forget to keep lead-building as a continuous process. This is for before, during, and after the scale. Besides your online marketing efforts, your business should always be looking for trade show opportunities, networking events, and building a referral system. A new revenue stream without a collection of active leads to offer it to is going to get off to a slow start, meaning it will take much longer to recoup the costs of your scaling efforts.
You have to be bold to scale the business, but you need to make sure you have a plan to execute. Scaling without a roadmap can lead to conflicts in what it means to grow, as well as an improper idea of what you should prioritise first, leading to a stunted business that can’t handle its own weight.