You have established your small business is making a ton of headway, but you are quickly seeing that there are more opportunities out there to take your business further. It is time to start considering scaling your company to help it grow. There are steps that can be taken and there will be no short order of tasks to accomplish your goals, but you knew that it would take hard work when you started your business.
You will need a plan, money, sales, technology, and staff to make scaling work and a miss on any one of them can create a recipe for disaster. Your company isn’t an online casino where you want to leave certain things up for chance while trying to make money. So let’s look at five steps that you can take to help scale your small business to help make it grow.
Plan
Anything you do inside of your company should have a plan. Without a plan, you are just hoping and praying that things work without actually knowing the direction you are trying to take your small business. This means knowing where you are at currently and where you would like to be in the future. It doesn’t have to be a set in stone date in the future, but at least have a goal in mind.
Write your plan down and strategize everything that could happen. When you employ certain tactics, how will you handle the response? Can your business handle and process more sales that will help your company grow? These are all reasonable questions to ask and try to answer. Cover as many bases as you possibly can.
Financing
Scaling does not always come cheap. The adage you have to spend money to make money usually reigns true for small businesses. Gaining financing for your scaling venture can be a stressful and hard situation, but it might be impossible to do it without further financing. In this instance, there might be several different options that you can explore to help take the burden of scaling off your wallet.
First and foremost is finding possible investors, possible friends or other business people, that are looking to invest and become part owner in your business. Some balk at this idea because they feel like they are giving up part of their company control, but this is exactly where you need to find the right partner to make it happen. Another option is going to the bank and taking out a loan or getting a line of credit to draw on as you need it. This is probably the most popular to fiance, so it is worth looking into and talking to a professional at a bank can be very helpful.
Sales
Scaling will require you to make more sales. This might be the most important aspect of scaling. You can plan and get financing, but without added cash flow through sales for your business, it is all futile. Make sure that you can generate leads that will turn into sales and allow for management of those sales through processing and billing. Without more sales, which is the driving desire behind scaling for growth, scaling with fail miserably.
Technology
Depending on the type of business that you run, technology can help tremendously with scaling. The right technology can help you automate aspects of your business which will help lower your operating expenses with less labor if done correctly. Evaluate different options that might work. Things like CRMs, automated marketing programs, sales management, accounting, and much more can all be invested in to help scaling become that much easier.
Also, make sure your daily hardware is up to date as well. Nothing hinders a company like out of date hardware like computers and printers when they are constantly breaking down.
Staffing
As you scale more and more, you will find that you may need more people to handle the added increase of sales. This is perfectly fine and there are a variety of different ways to go about it. Hiring internally and bringing on new people to work directly with you in person is one way to go. Or if you feel that you aren’t quite ready to hire full-time employees at a larger scale, hiring remote freelancers to run a support line or handle smaller tasks is also an option. But be sure that you have management systems in place to keep everything running smoothly.
