Scaling Your Business: Strategies For Growth

Business owners often dream about becoming successful overnight with a viral product, but, scaling up successfully means you need to come up with a good long-term strategy. It takes hard work to get there, and knowing what scaling looks like will help you come up with the steps you need to get there.

Start Working on Your Management Skills

Your managers need to be able to motivate your team to do their best, and then guide these team members there. They may hold your employees accountable, and they are accountable to you if they fail to meet their goals because their success often affects the success of the entire organization. It’s important for them to be able to drive your business forward. Whether you directly oversee your employees or have managers do it for you, you need to have management skills so you can motivate everyone under you to do their best. You can learn these skills by taking courses or getting your degree in a field like business management. If you are thinking about getting your degree at the graduate level, you can get a student loan to help cover the cost. It’s good advice to take advantage of lower interest rates and choose the one that works for you.

Know How To Delegate

When you have a great team, you should be able to trust them enough to give them important work so you can free up your time for other tasks that will help your organization expand. Of course, it is easy to want to feel involved in every aspect, and it might be hard for you to let certain things go. However, being able to build up your negotiation skills and delegate work is an important aspect of scaling. Look over your current tasks and ask yourself if there is anything you could have someone else do for you. Your business needs to be able to run, even if you are not around to do things, and the best way for your team to know how to run it is by doing so when you are around to consult.

Focus On Your Offerings

If your goal is to grow instead of scale up, you might be focused on bringing in as many sales as possible, and you might seek to target as many different customers as possible. While this can bring in more income right now, it can also put your ability to scale at risk. When you are not focused on what you are offering, you might start to engage unsuitable customers. This can take your focus away from current customers because you will be more focused on the new ones, which can prevent you from standing out as an expert in your field. Being able to scale successfully means you will need to understand how to focus your services on your target market.

Expand Your Team Carefully

As you look to hire more employees to meet the increased need, make sure you first take stock of the skills you already have within your team and then consider the skills that will be needed to ensure you meet your business goals. Think about both soft and hard skills to support customers and meet business outcomes. Ask yourself what type of experience is likely to have created the type of candidate you are looking for. Even if you are not looking to hire any more managers right now, you may find you need them in the future as your company continues to scale. That’s why it’s important to check your options for HCM software to help streamline your processes and take leadership potential under consideration when evaluating employees. These types of team members will be able to determine what needs to be done to be successful.

Get Help from Outside Resources

As your business expands, you may find you have only a few team members, each of whom has multiple responsibilities. However, expecting everyone to be able to perform so many functions and do their best can lead to burnout, which results in expensive errors. As you begin to scale, think about working with specialists who can put their best effort into one or two key areas. It might sound expensive to hire a full-time specialist, but that doesn’t mean you need to hire them on a full-time basis.

More and more businesses are working with independent talent and engaging them on a contractor basis. That way, you don’t have to go through the expensive process of hiring a full-time employee that you might not be able to keep busy. You can pay your independent contractors on a project basis, engaging them only when needed. There are many platforms where you can search for freelancers to take care of everything from marketing and lead generation to social media.

Set Realistic Goals For Your Plan

It is important to create a balance between realistic goals that still challenge you to grow. If your goals are not clear enough, team members might not be motivated to succeed, and this can negatively impact how well you will be able to scale. Ensuring leadership is aligned with where things need to be is the first step. You can then let the rest of the team know what the plan is, so they can get on board with it.

You might decide you want to increase your customer base by 25 percent by this time next year - You can then create regular milestones to make sure you are on track. These milestones can be translated into tasks and expectations for each team member. Based on previous company data, you may be able to determine how many meetings or calls each member of the sales team needs to hit to get there.

Depending on your industry, you may be affected by the season, and you might find you need to take advantage of certain times to make up for the slower times of the year. It is common for hiring to slow down in the middle of the summer, and many companies selling products find their sales pick up around the holidays. Make sure you create a plan for slower periods of time. You could work with a business planner to help you figure out how to pace yourself.