‘Quantity is a quality of its own’ is a popular line that is floated around in economics, business, and military discussions. And it is easy to understand why – whether there really is too much of a good thing is up for debate, but too little of it does not really solve many problems for sure. And therefore, if you have already set up and are running a business which offers a market-beating product or service, the next step on your agenda should be to scale it up. That is because if you create a need in the market for your offering, and then are unable to meet the need for the bulk of your target consumer-base, competition would crop up to fill the void you leave. Here are some tips to help in scaling up your small business.
Bring home the Technology Advantage
As a small business, most of the work would be performed on an ad hoc basis by different team members as and when different types of tasks arise. However, as the business growth, you would feel the need to formalize your operating model. And in doing so, nothing will help more than technology. If at a young stage, you adopt the use of enterprise technology for driving your operations, you can have far greater control over the way your business functions. Be it CRM, ERP, or Decision Support Systems, you would be able to monitor progress on various tasks, drive organizational communication and co-ordination, and have greater security and access control of your confidential information.
Adopt Analytics-Driven Working Model
The biggest of businesses have seen the benefits of adopting analytics, so why won’t you? In fact, if you set up your systems and processes to run on the basis of analytics-driven insights, you would be able to function smartly. Your accuracy of decision-making would improve, you would be able to identify what tactics have been working for you and what are not, and accordingly, you can build intelligent business strategies.
Automation – the game-changer
If you tick off the above two points, you would absolutely not want to miss out on this aspect which is perhaps, the greatest source of competitive advantage you can gift yourself and your business. And because you would do it when your business is small, you would be able to achieve optimization of operations right from a formative stage of the business, without having to worry much about change management. By automating monotonous tasks, you would be able to free up your employees to only handle those tasks that require human-like discretion. Thus, they will have interesting and challenging things to do at workplace every day and would not feel the boredom that comes with having to do repetitive tasks. More importantly, you can now extract greater productivity per employee, and thus, even as your operational scale goes up, you need not increase your workforce size in the same proportion. Which brings us to our next point –
Setting up the right organizational culture
The happier your workforce, the more successful your business would be. And therefore, it is essential that you keep your employees feel motivated at all the time. Which means you should regularly implement employee engagement activities outside of usual business operations. This will help achieve a higher team chemistry. By doing this and also focusing on the previous point, you would be able to generate more revenue per employee. Which means, you can afford to pay them more, and also attract the best talent to your organization. In the right work-culture, such talent would tend to stick around for longer, and a stable, committed, and talented workforce is the central pillar of an organization’s growth.
Prepare a Marketing Plan
It goes without saying that a business cannot scale-up without growth in customer-base. Therefore, one of the most important things you need to do is to create a carefully thought-out marketing plan. This involves identifying your customer needs, wants, desires, and aspirations through carefully designed market research, followed by using those insights to tailor your product development and promotional strategies. By using analytics as mentioned before, you would be able to identify the most effective channels for marketing to your target segments, and thus achieve greater ROI on your marketing spend.
Financial management, Tax filings, and Regulatory Compliances
While you go about executing your business strategies, it is essential to have one eye on the credit versus debit balance of your journal. Because that is what will ensure that your P&L and balance sheet remains healthy. Moreover, when your business is at a young stage, you might feel the need to look for angel investors or venture capital to help propel it to the next level of scale. This would be easy only if you can present healthy financial statements to potential investors. Also, you would need to be mindful of meeting all the tax filing and regulatory requirements depending on the jurisdiction of your business operations and the sector in which it operates. By doing so, you would be able to avoid any litigation and penal costs that might arise.
While we have listed the above guidelines in a point-wise manner, it is easy to see that each of them feeds on to the other. Thus, one of the key takeaways from this article for you as an entrepreneur is the need to adopt a systems-thinking approach while scaling up your business.