How far can your small business take you? Most entrepreneurs are determined to grow their company to reach its full potential. That involves scaling up – working with your existing team, clients, and customers to take your organization to the next level. Are you thinking about expanding your business? Read our five essential steps below.
Understand Why You’re Doing It
Ideally, growth should be a part of your small business’ strategic plan – something that you’ve been working towards from the beginning. However, if you’ve made the decision to scale up later in your company’s lifecycle, it’s still possible. You just need to take a step back from the business to determine why you want to grow. Are you after more customers? Do you want to expand your product offering? Are you hoping to sell your company? Whatever your reason, it’s important to identify it and understand how it will work with your overall goals for your business.
Identify Core Competencies
Your small business is probably doing some pretty cool stuff that has never been written down. If you didn’t write a business plan before, you should definitely do that before starting to grow. Identifying your core competencies (what you do better than anyone else) is a good place to start. (You can also check out our 6 Must-Haves for Every Business Plan blog post.) Knowing what sets you apart from your competition is going to help you to understand where you need to invest in your growth-motivated strategy.
Focus on Branding
While building a path to where you want to be, it’s important not to forget where you came from. It’s likely that you’ve spent plenty of time crafting your company brand, and creating positive memories for your customers. Use those good experiences to help shape your business as you move forward. Let your brand lead the way as you continue to connect, inspire and influence your target market and reinforce that image at all levels within your organization.
Evaluate Your Processes
To effectively scale your business, you’re going to need standardized, repeatable processes across all areas of the company. This may mean investments in support systems, such as reporting platforms and other information technologies, as well as training for employees. As a founder, it can be hard to let go of certain tasks, however, for your business to grow, you need to be able to delegate.
Hire the Right People
Looking for people with shared values and relevant business experience is especially important as your business grows. Start by leveraging your network to identify individuals who could be a good fit for your company, and take your time to find the right people. These collaborations are going to set the foundation for this new, exciting stage of your business, which may mean hiring ahead of your needs. Ensure the people you take on believe in your vision and strategy, and are willing to grow with you.
In order to scale your business successfully, you need to ensure that you have the right processes and people in place, as well as a solid understanding of your brand and your target market. Let us help you take your company to the next level. We’ll work on your business while you work in it. Contact us today.