After running a successful start-up company for a while, the next step is to scale it up. However, scaling up a business can be a complicated endeavor, and sometimes a lot of start-ups end up failing and eventually going out of business. Ask yourself, does your company have the capacity to grow? Do you have the necessary infrastructure, team, and business systems to enable and accommodate the growth? Here are some tips to assist you.
1. Evaluate and plan your growth
The first thing you need to do is take a long hard look at your business and see whether you are ready for growth. With scalability, timing is everything. You have to be prepared to handle the new influx of work and customers. If your orders doubled overnight, do you have the human resources and systems to handle it? Think hard about how scaling up will affect your business, research thoroughly, and strategize to come up with the best plan of action.
2. Find enough financing
Your growth plan may include adding equipment, new facilities, implementing business systems, and hiring more staff members. All of these things require money. You need to know where you will find money to finance the growth of your enterprise. Lack of funding can hamper your growth plans, so identify ways to get the financing you need. For instance, you can get small business loans business open less than a year from various banks or grants. Some businesses can have a hard time securing bank financing, so try other forms.
3. Increase your sales
Scaling your business means you will sell more. However, to maintain the sales volumes you need, examine your sales history, and ensure you have a sales structure in place to generate more sales. This structure should have a sufficient lead flow to generate the required leads, marketing systems to keep track of and manage these leads, enough salespeople, a reliable system to take and manage orders, and a billing system to ensure invoices are collected on time.
4. Invest in technology
If you invest wisely in technology, you will gain huge economies of scale and more output with lower labor costs. As you scale your business, technology can help make work easier and reduce operating costs. There many ways to include technology in your business, such as automation in your production or having business systems such as inventory management that can facilitate day to day operations.
5. Build a great team
As you grow, you will probably need more employees. They must understand your business values. For your business to grow, you need employees who are talented and hardworking. Invest in them and let them drive your vision of growth by creating an environment where people want to be and want to succeed. When they feel valued, they will share in your vision and work harder to help you achieve your growth goals.
Scalability is about capacity and capability. Remember to maintain and protect your company values and never compromise on quality or consistency. By implementing these tips, you can grow your business unhampered.
