Scaling up is an exciting yet daunting endeavor for any business, requiring them to focus on quality and consistency in order to successfully scale. To do so successfully, focus on providing customers with consistent experience throughout their experience with your product or service.
One common error made by businesses is to believe that when their revenue grows, so must their team size. Unfortunately, this approach cannot sustainably.
1. Focus on Quality and Consistency
Growth means more customers, but expanding your business also requires you to ensure everything runs smoothly. There’s no point acquiring more customers if your products or customer service decline. As your scale up, it is critical that processes, culture and staff all support that growth while upholding quality and consistency.
One way of accomplishing this goal is by setting up a framework that helps your company stay on track when it comes to its business goals, such as the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 or targeting key market segments through effective marketing campaigns.
Your team should help you meet your growth objectives without jeopardizing its integrity or values, such as bringing on skilled leaders who can oversee their team effectively or assigning tasks to people who can effectively handle them.
2. Automate Your Processes
Scaling up a business requires developing repeatable processes within its internal operations that can be replicated easily and standardized, which is why investing in workflow automation tools is so crucial to its success.
Automating business processes allows your team members to devote their attention and focus on larger company goals and strategic priorities more freely, while simultaneously cutting operational costs and increasing revenue.
At each stage of scaling-up, it is vitally important to evaluate all current processes and identify those which can be delegated, automated or eliminated. An experienced automation partner is invaluable in this regard – they can streamline and automate existing business processes more efficiently than you could on your own. Simply encouraging employees to use keyboard shortcuts may save 8 full workdays annually thanks to its ability to accelerate workflows and become more productive.
3. Hire the Right People
Building a great team is integral to expanding your business. They will help you overcome challenges and ensure future success.
Hiring high performers is key for maximizing productivity; high performers can be up to 400 percent more productive than average employees and save both money and time by eliminating follow-ups, training sessions, or disciplinary proceedings.
Locating and hiring top talent can be challenging if you don’t invest the necessary time and energy in this process. Engaging skilled independent professionals is an excellent solution if hiring employees becomes an insurmountable obstacle to your growth strategy and operations scaling sustainably. Through Enterprise Suite’s platform you can quickly locate and hire top talent – providing access to freelancers, contractors, consultants, agencies that will help your business achieve success.
4. Decentralize and Automate
Decentralized models enable teams and employees to utilize tools that best suit them without worrying about centralized control, thus increasing productivity, employee motivation and communication as well as transparency.
As soon as it comes time to expand your business, it’s crucial that you decentralize and automate your workflows to ensure that you have enough resources and capacity for more work. Doing this will prevent potential issues from cropping up while freeing your team to focus on other crucial projects for its growth.
Establishing an automation center of excellence (COE) can help provide governance for this transformation while engaging and informing employees on the benefits of automation.
5. Set Clear Rules for Your Staff
One of the key steps in expanding your business is setting clear rules and expectations for your employees, to enable them to operate efficiently and effectively while helping you expand. Doing this will allow for scaleable expansion.
Establishing repeatable internal processes will make scaling your business simpler and save both time and money in the process. Automating these procedures will also make training new team members simpler while increasing productivity.
Setting long-term and short-term goals can help your business expand. As your business develops, however, you should remember that these goals may need to change as your customer base expands; perhaps your target market needs shifting or you need more customers served.