When you first started your business, you probably felt both excited and nervous. It requires courage to take a leap of faith.
But now, your company is starting to gain steam, and you need to start scaling. Here are eight ways to keep up.
- Evaluate Your Business
When you originally created your business plan, you did the necessary SWOT analysis to determine your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. But your business is no longer what it was in the beginning. It’s time to reevaluate.
What areas of your business need to change to see an increase in sales. Where are the current gaps within your business and how can you fill those? Ask yourself the tough questions so your growth doesn’t plateau and you can continue seeing progress as your company scales.
- Adopt The Right Tools
As your business grows, you won’t be able to keep up with the demand of tasks that come into play. Even adding new employees to your team might not be enough. You have to look to streamline responsibilities by capitalizing on technology.
Consider adopting various tools for your business, such as an inventory management app to optimize the inventory process. Look at different marketing automation tools, such as email campaigns or social media scheduling platforms.
- Hire The Best Team Possible
A growing business will inevitably require more staff members. The important part of this equation is to hire the best team possible during the first round of hires.
However, it’s well-known in the recruiting and staffing industries that startup companies usually have a high turnover. This is a waste of company time and money.
Instead, be thorough during the hiring process, so you don’t waste time, money, and resources with onboarding, training, and offboarding.
- Get The Funding
As an entrepreneur, you understand that it takes money to start a business. This is equally as true for scaling a business. You’ll need to acquire additional funding for things such as adopting CRM systems or hiring new employees.
You may need to take out an additional business loan or look for alternative investors. You can also turn to well-reviewed online lenders like Fundbox for quicker access to cash. The more capital you have, the more potential there is for growth.
- Create Additional Products or Services
No business can truly scale without an influx of sales. But what better way to do this than to diversify what your company offers? Now is the time to look into what other products or services you can provide.
This doesn’t mean it’s time to slack on the other products or services you offer. You’ll want to look at ways that you can ultimately perfect what you have in addition to providing new resources for your customers.
- Delegate When Necessary
Being a business owner means you have to wear multiple hats at once. Before you know it, you’ll burn out, and so will your business. Don’t be afraid to delegate when necessary.
Your time is valuable. Every minute you spend on a task that someone else could do cheaper or better is a waste of your time.
- Set Rules And Expectations Upfront
You can’t set your company towards success if everyone is pulling in different directions. As you hire your new team members and combine them with your current staff, you’ll want to create a set of rules, regulations, and expectations for everyone to follow.
These need to be clear from the beginning. Remember, your team is there to help one another achieve a common goal, so they need definitive guidance on the best way to do that. Team alignment tools allow companies to cascade their strategy to everyone in an organization. Additionally, they enable managers to assign KPIs and strategic objectives to individual people, teams, and even branches. This helps build accountability across an organization because everyone can see their role and how it relates to the big-picture strategy.
- Ask For Outside Help
When in doubt, ask for help. Seeking outside guidance on scaling your business can be an incredible investment. There are professionals out there who have experience with these exact steps.
Think of them as a beneficial resource. They can help create a specific strategy to get your business where you want it to go.
Conclusion
No matter how much preparation you take to scale your business, you’ll still experience a few setbacks along the way. It’s the nature of business. You have to be willing to be flexible and view various issues as learning experiences.
Most importantly, don’t wait until a year later to evaluate your strategies. Instead, reevaluate every month to see how your tactics are working.
