8 Valuable Tips You Can Follow Now to Scale Your Business Later
Beth Worthy — March 28, 2018 — March 28, 2018
When you start a business, your main goal may be to get some additional income to cater for your increasing bills, or to build up your savings. However, with time, you may look for suggestions to grow your venture and expand your operations.
To grow your business, it is critical to build, early on, a foundation that can help you expand. Planning for scaling is easier during the initial periods when you are not flooded with client work.
Here are 8 key tips you should follow now to scale your business later.
Start Small and Focus on Your Strengths
You may or may not see the bigger picture of your venture. However, it is important to focus on where you want the business to be; not where you are. A good suggestion would be to start with the areas that you are proficient in.
Set Up Your Agency for Scaling
Make it easy for the business to scale. Scaling does not have to be expensive if you prepare for it in advance. For example, you can start by setting up systems that will make you efficient in the way you find clients, do their work and market your business.
Even if you are conducting business from inside your home, project the image of a successful company. Have basic things in place, such as a professional website and social media pages for your business.
Also, sign up for tools that can scale as the needs of your business grow. Use cloud software for tasks such as invoice generation, sending emails or newsletters, and so on.
Learn From Your Competitors
Competition in the marketplace is fierce, but a great thing. You can use the established business agencies as a benchmark for your progress.
Follow the leading agencies to learn how they operate their business. For example, subscribe to their blog to get updates about their business or other topics they write about. Submit a file to the agencies to find out about their client-on boarding process.
You have to be creative and do things better than your competitors to scale your business further.
Build a Great Team
Having the right team is critical to building a successful business. However, before starting to build a team, you should get in the trenches yourself to learn how business is done and what clients expect. From there, it should be easier to transfer your knowledge to the team members you hire.
You don’t need a physical office to build a team. The realities of remote working make it easy for anyone to operate a business online. You can use tools like Asana to assign work and Slack to communicate with your team.
Get Expert Help Whenever Necessary
Do not be afraid to seek outside professional help when you cannot do things on your own. As your workload and responsibilities increase, you will need proper business structures. Sometimes, the solutions you need aren’t as obvious to you as you’d expect. In those circumstances, you might want expert advice to help you out in the most profitable ways.
Produce Quality Work Consistently
Like is the case with any service business, quality beats everything. Clients will be eager to sign contracts with you if you are consistently producing quality work.
As you start to get more clients, you may start being overwhelmed with the work to be done. At this point, you can begin expanding your team.
Train your employees to work at the quality standard that clients expect. You may need to review the jobs done by new employees to ensure they reach the high standards that your agency is known for.
Stick to Your Business Values
All in all, have a set of business values and stick to them. Scaling businesses can be challenging, but fun. You can build lifelong friendships and relationships with your clients and employees. Moreover, the income can be good.
However, do not forget your values. It is easy to lose sight of your core business values when you start scaling. Always take some time to step away from your business and reflect on your life. Think about the core values that made you start the business. What impact did you want to make? Stick to your core values to have a successful business.
Consider Outsourcing a Few Tasks
When a business grows in size and undergoes operational expansion, the productivity may lower in the beginning as you may not have adequate resources to handle additional tasks. In this situation, you can consider outsourcing a few of them. For example, you may need to outsource your accounting, bookkeeping and transcription services to a professional that would do the work better. It will help you reduce your overheads by reducing the need to hire additional employees and keeping them on your company payroll; at the same time, you will be assured of timely and quality turnaround of your delegated work at a fraction of the cost. You can utilize your saved time and resources on implementing more effective marketing strategies to scale up your business even further.
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