As a self-employed entrepreneur who’s taken the ambitious journey into start-up management, you’ll know that the methods by which you scale and grow could spell disaster or exponential success. It’s a serious step in your business plan, to move from your home office, to hire staff, and to begin the journey to becoming an established small business.
In this short guide, you’ll understand the key elements that’ll help you run a start-up business, and where and when you should scale in order to make a resounding success of your entrepreneurial stab at business ownership.
The Right Time
There is no definitive right time to scale, but it’s usually understood that if you’re experiencing demand that you cannot meet, you’ve possibly left it too late. The only way that you can find the right time for your business to scale – by hiring additional staff, and by finding an office – is by monitoring your sales and projections. It’s through this monitoring of your fortunes, and the curve on the graph that’ll predict your increase in sales volume over time, that you’ll be able to make an informed decision as to the timing of your scaling step.
Moving Offices
It’s thrilling to work from a home office. Not only will you get that ‘garden shed’ working atmosphere, but you’ll be saving on the infrastructure and facilities that other, larger businesses require to run efficiently. In the back of your mind, though, will be the desire to move out into an office – and this is a key element to your scaling ambitions. Finding the right office space – with the flexibility to add additional desks and workers over time – will be key to your physical scaling here. Make sure, too, that you’re paying the correct price for your overheads – like using Utility Bidder to ensure that you’re getting the very best price on utilities such as electricity in your company.
Hiring Staff
Next, you’re going to need to find the finest staff in your locality to fill your vacancies and to enable your company to deal with the increased workload that you’re anticipating.
There are some simple steps to this process that it’s worth bearing in mind:
- Look at the skills you need in your company, and highlight those in your job advert
- Advertise on specialist forums and job sites, and use LinkedIn to find specific talent
- Leverage your own network in order to find the very finest talent to onboard
- Make sure you’re paying an attractive salary, in order to find the very best
When it comes to making that final decision on who to hire, it often pays to go with your gut. You’re still a small team, and it means more to get along well with new recruits than to find a great candidate who will cause internal friction in your team.
Matching Scale with Orders
Of course, after these significant investments, you’re going to want to ensure that you’re getting the volume of orders, and therefore work, that will keep you in the black and far from debt and instability. This means that you need to get your sales team working their socks off to increase your sales, and your marketing team creating great content in order to draw in more web users with inbound marketing techniques. Only through a coordinated and concerted effort to bounce into your new stage of growth will you drift smoothly into the new chapter of your start-up’s existence.
Reviewing Elements
Once your scaling efforts have landed stably and your future is secure, you’ll be able to begin thinking clearly about all that you’ve built thus far. Remember that it’s never too late to review your brand and your core messaging, in order to shape your business to the consumers you’re most interested in targeting. Remember also that it’s in the assistance of outsourced help – like marketing agencies and brand development teams – that you might find the most important and refreshing breakthroughs in your business development to date.
Getting Serious
Of course, any start-up business needs to be responsible, operating within legal guidelines and regulatory limits. Nonetheless, in your most embryonic stage, you may well have neglected to set up legal representation, insurance, and other key ingredients that, now your business is getting serious, it’s time to think about. Use your new-found scale and energy to look into all of these additional fail-safes and guarding mechanisms in order to protect your new gains in the face of competition and other market forces.
In this short guide, you’ll have learned all of the most important considerations to bear in mind as you attempt to scale your start-up enterprise.
