So, you’re thinking of scaling a business. That’s fantastic! Prepare for the next challenging task: figuring out how to scale your business for prosperity. Even though you manage to sell brilliantly, you’ll quickly run into another issue: you’ll need to be capable of delivering to all of those new customers. Scalability is involved with capacity and capabilities. Is there room for expansion in your company? Will your company’s systems, infrastructure, and staff be able to handle advancement?
The manual procedures were great when you were a small-scale business, but now they won’t let you go quickly enough. You’ll either be fighting flames or struggling to keep your head above water. All of this is exhausting.
What Exactly Is Business Scaling?
Scalability is a quality that indicates a company’s capacity to operate effectively under a growing workload. When you scale a company, you successfully increase its performance even when you test it with greater result criteria.
Scaling a business is mostly determined by two factors: capability and capacity. Consider this: Is your company capable of expanding? Is it capable of accommodating future growth? What if one confusion causes your company to falter? Orders not being filled, misunderstandings, and a lack of personnel are all factors that will result in dissatisfied consumers.
Scalability in business refers to a company’s capacity to expand without being constrained by available resources as output rises. Scalability has been made easier in recent years as technology has made gaining customers, developing markets, and scaling the company simpler.
Scaling a Business vs. Growing a Business
Growth denotes a rise in revenue, while scaling denotes an increase in revenue without raising production costs.
Assume you’re a service-based agency that has collaborated with a new customer. With a higher production need, you may need to employ additional resources since the new customer will generate more money for your company, and that’s growth.
Nevertheless, scaling a business occurs when your existing team can meet all of your new client’s production needs without the need for an extra resource.
Why Do You Need to Scale Up Your Business?
Technology has indeed created enormous possibilities for businesses and given a means for business people to travel worldwide. The most recent, user-friendly applications have influenced the way people think about engaging with or buying from a business.
You may not want to rule the globe, but there’s no reason you can’t advance by studying the latest strategies for expanding your company. You could diversify your existing products and services by opening additional stores in various places.
Here are Critical Steps to Scaling Your Business Properly
1) Plan and Evaluate
Examine your company’s internal processes to determine whether it is ready for growth. You won’t know what to do until you first assess where your business is now.
Plan out what you need to do to boost sales. Suppose your orders have multiplied or tripled in size overnight. Does your company have the personnel and processes in place to manage these additional orders without failing or acquiring a bad reputation? And here is when having a solid strategy comes in handy.
In our opinion, the ideal planning begins with a comprehensive sales growth projection broken down by the number of new customers, orders, and income you intend to create. Include a spreadsheet that breaks out the figures by month. Your sales acquisition strategy will be more effective if you are more detailed. Then, create a comparable cost estimate based on the addition of technology, people, infrastructure, and systems to handle all of the additional sales orders. Examine every line item on your existing profit and loss statement to determine how it may be affected. Expenses will rise; you must predict where and how. Include another cost worksheet that lays down the expenses required to achieve your sales estimate.
2) Identify Your Barriers to Growth
Once you’ve established your goals, part of creating a development plan includes considering potential roadblocks to expansion. Be genuine and realistic. Several issues, such as a lack of leadership skills, a lack of financing, poor cash flow, and simply being on the incorrect premises, may hamper your development plans. Identifying possible obstacles may assist you in addressing your shortcomings and the risks they may offer.
Other challenges can also come into play. For example, according to Fit Small Business, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused immense damage to small businesses globally. Are you ready for such big challenges?
3) Secure the Sale
Scaling your business presumes that you will sell more. Do you have a sales structure in place that will allow you to create more sales? Examine sales from beginning to finish. Do you have the following:
- Is there enough lead flow to produce the required number of leads?
- A solid method for managing sales orders?
- A billing system and a collections function to guarantee on-time bill collection?
- Marketing systems for lead tracking and management?
- Is there a sufficient number of salespeople to follow up on and close leads?
4) Make an Investment in Technology
Scaling a business has become simpler and less costly as a result of technological advancements. If you invest properly in technology, you can get massive economies of scale and higher throughput with less labor.
Support automation may help you operate your company at a lower cost and more effectively. In most companies, system integration is a high-priority area for development. Companies nowadays may have a dozen or more systems rather than a single system. If such systems do not communicate with one another, silos occur, which exacerbates communication and management issues as your business develops.
It’s a perfect time to look at new items on the market that will save you time and money while allowing you to handle considerably larger volumes in every aspect of your business. Consider CRM, inventory, manufacturing, accounting, marketing automation, sales management, human resources, shipping, and other technological systems.
Examine software, networks, and hardware, such as servers, PCs, printers, and telecommunications equipment.
5) Find Employees or Outsource Strategically
Last but not least, there are the hands required to do the job. Technology provides us with enormous power, but humans are still required at the end of the day. Do you have a sufficient number of customer care representatives? Examine industry standards to establish a general rule of thumb for how many clients one service representative may be anticipated to manage.
What about the individuals in charge of your product or service production, inventory, and delivery? How many per client is normal in your business, and how many will you require?
How do you rapidly find competent assistance? Recruiting, recruiting processes, benefits, and payroll are critical. Don’t overlook management. The value of a management bench increases in tandem with the size of your company. You won’t be able to keep track of everything. Rather than hiring domestically, it is sometimes better to outsource or seek partners.
Treinetic Can Assist You in Scaling Your IT Business
Scaling necessitates making difficult decisions. What internal functions can and should you do — or not perform?
Third parties may have the personnel and investment in systems to handle tasks far more efficiently than your business. Attempting to duplicate that function internally may be too expensive in terms of both time and money. Instead, find a trustworthy partner to outsource to, allowing your company to scale better, quicker, and cheaper.
So, if you want to outsource your IT development services to a professional team, choose us. We are a multi-award-winning software engineering company. Please get in touch with us so that we can discuss your business scaling plan.