You’ve worked hard to get your business off the ground and while you may be doing everything yourself, there’s no reason why you can’t scale up your business into a sellable asset.
Here are suggestions to avoid wasting time or money as you grow your business.
Get the right team in place for growth.
Before scaling up your business, it’s important to have the right people in place who can help you do that.
A common mistake many owners make is to scale up from the bottom. They go with the most unskilled and cheapest labour because it keeps the margins healthy. The problem though, is that no one can take the high-level tasks off your back.
So consider investing in hires that can take the day-to-day supervisory tasks off your back to free you to strategically scale and grow your business.
Also beware shiny CVs. Often stars in corporate environments flounder badly in a dynamic entrepreneurial environment. Better to find people who are committed, organised and have experience in growing businesses like yours than pedigree CVs.
Develop your Why. Creating a clear mission statement and goals.
You should be able to clearly articulate the WHY you are in business. What’s the ultimate problem you solve better, faster, or easier than others. Your mission statement should reflect your values, what you do, how you will do it, and why you are different. Any goals listed should be measurable.
Invest in the right technology to automate processes and provide services.
Technology is key to scaling up a business when it automates processes, improves efficiency and productivity, gives robust analytics for better decision making, reduces costs and provides value-added services to customers quickly and easily.
Best of all, automating processes saves your most valuable resource – your time, which can be invested better elsewhere.
Invest in measurable and effective marketing without breaking the bank.
Understand your Customer Lifetime Value, the metrics for your acquisition costs, and then use those for smart investments in advertising.
Profits are made from existing customer relationships – so look to convert prospects to customers at breakeven, or even slight loss (if you can afford the cash outlay) while you focus on creating long lasting relationships and repeatable business with them.
Create Systems of Accountability
As you get bigger, you can’t be everywhere at once. This is where you have systemise accountability with clear performance standards and guidelines. Everyone should understand their roles , responsibilities , timelines , etc.
Accountability is key when scaling up a business because if one link fails then the whole chain has been affected.
And with accountability you can truly focus on growing the business. You won’t have to play policeman and chase everyone around to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to.