When you own, or run a business, there are many considerations to take into account to keep it successful, and relevant. One of the things you need to constantly evaluate is how to scale your business. Here are several important things to consider when it comes to scaling a business.
Investing in your employees
When it comes to building anything from the bottom up, you want to ensure that you have a strong set of foundations. When it comes to scaling a business, your employees form a large percentage of these foundations. A large number of employers will mistakenly not see their workforce as an overly important pillar of their business, but instead see them as a means to an end, and just as a way to get from A to B. The businesses that run with this mindset will often become unstuck rather fast due to employee satisfaction, lack of skills, poor engagement, and low morale. To make sure that this does not happen to you, you should carefully consider each employee that you plan to take on as a part of your team. Ensure that they are provided with the relevant training, tools, equipment, and support so as to complete their role to the highest standard, and take on their feedback whether it is good or bad. The money that you invest into your workforce is an investment and will help you scale your business due to a reduction in staff turnover, along with higher engagement levels, and of course a higher quality in work output.
Outsourcing work
If you are looking for ways in which to scale your business, then often you will need to make use of tactical delegation, and outsourcing within your company. The way that this will help you scale your business is that although you will inevitably be spending money on hiring others to complete a variety of tasks for you, you will be freeing up a lot of extra time, and effort, not just for yourself, but for your business as well. For example, rather than doing things such as creating all your employee ID cards in-house, you could get ID cards online printed out by a third party. As you can see, this not only saves you time and effort, but you will not have to purchase or maintain any extra equipment. In addition, the results of outsourcing various tasks to third parties will likely be of a higher quality than what you could have produced yourself, as these companies are professionals within their industry, and want to provide others with a quality service. Rather than looking at outsourcing as an outgoing, or a drain on your business’s expenses, look at it as an investment or a tool to help your business grow.
In-depth competitor analysis
Scaling a business often focuses primarily on improving the way you run your company, and either producing more, or better products or services for your clients, while simultaneously attempting to attract new ones. However, another way in which you can help yourself scale a business is by doing competitor analysis. By doing this it will help your business stay relevant, and competitive, not to mention you will be able to observe and respond to any weaknesses in your competitor’s business plan that you see. For example, if you both sell the same product, but they have opted for a cheaper, low-end, and slower delivery service, it might be that you decide to look into focusing on your delivery timescales. This would increase customer satisfaction, and as a result, make you a more favorable choice to purchase goods from. At times there may be opportunities that arise while analyzing your competitors that would have otherwise been missed. These opportunities may be the crucial pieces of information that help your business grow.
Think about the customer experience
One of the most, if not the most important factor for any business looking to grow, is their customers. After all, your customers are who pay your bills, support your business, and grow your business’s success. Without customers, every successful business would be non-existent. So, make sure that when you are making alterations to your business plan, discussing new ways of doing things, and bringing out new products or services, you think about your customer experience and their journey with you. You can gather information from your customers in a variety of ways such as analyzing old data, and sales figures, sending out feedback questionnaires, connecting with your customers through social media platforms, or even through the complaints that you have received. Regardless of how you do it, make sure to think about your customer experience, because if you consistently look to improve it for them, they will notice, and it could have a huge impact on the speed at which you can scale your business.
Don’t compromise the quality of your product or service for higher profits
When you are looking to scale your business, it can be tempting to cut corners to create the illusion of larger profit margins, which then allow for larger investments into the business. However, if you are looking to continually scale your business you should make sure that you do not follow through with this option. The people who buy your products or services from you are not going to be naive enough to simply feed into a reduction of quality, and in the end, all that this will achieve is a shrinking of your customer base and a host of bad reviews. This is of course the last thing that any business wants. Instead of lowering the quality to boost your profits, why not think about what you can do to enhance or add to your product or service for a premium? This way your customers will see you have not compromised the quality, but are instead offering them an alternative with added benefits if they are that way inclined. This will over time help you to scale your business, rather than destroy it.
Sometimes making improvements is hard, and you may need to embrace change to grow your business. So, why not consider implementing a selection of these ideas into your business?
Be First to Comment