There are several reasons why entrepreneurs want to grow and scale their business fast. Besides the obvious, making money as fast as possible, there are more reasons why a business should grow and scale fast. Success loves speed! Speed activates momentum and virality.
If you’re an entrepreneur with audacious goals and want to find strategies to grow revenue while scale your business to maximize profits, keep reading!
What Does Scaling A Business Really Mean?
It is important to note that growing a business and scaling a business are not the same thing. As a business grows, meaning the business is increasing revenue, it is also utilizing and adding resources equally as fast in order to sustain the and build that growth.
While it is encouraging to see an increase in revenues, business owners need to be able to adjust their revenue-generating model to find ways to get more customers with minimal added costs. This is where having the knowledge of scaling becomes key.
Scaling a business, on the other hand, means you are adding revenue faster than costs to generate new clients.
For example, a business that is scaling may gain $50,000 in new revenue for which they spent only $5,000 on marketing automation tools to allow more efficient marketing to a wider audience. The business’ gains outpaced its losses, allowing it not only to grow but also to scale, by not adding additional costs.
For small business owners, growth and scaling are a must, in order to survive and make it to the next level; otherwise, you will be forced to cap your income potential. Business owners who have not been able to successfully scale either have to turn business away or return to the job market.
5 Ways Small Business Owners Can Scale Their Business
Let’s explore the key activities that entrepreneurs or small business owners can do to scale their business.
Number 1. Delegate Strategy To Experts
I’ve seen so many business owners that have started their company “by accident.” They identified a problem, created the solution, and talked to a couple of friends, and the next thing they know … they have a business!
If your business started “by accident” there’s a good chance you are analyzing success just by seeing the revenue that comes in and the expenses that go out. Typically, that is a good plan for the first 1-2 years, until you realize that you have no life and need to add more resources in order to have a sense of normalcy..
Can you relate?
Can you see your business getting to a point where you can’t sell more products or serve more clients because there’s only so much you can do alone? For professional services, this happens very quickly.
To avoid the hectic days when your business is no longer fun, it’s important to have a scaling strategy. Don’t try to do this yourself. Find a business strategist who can help you see what you can’t.
I’m a fan of recommending the Business Model Canvas exercise to my clients, and then discussing with them a way to create even bigger opportunities. Typically, their vision is smaller than the opportunities we create for them.
One of the most effective strategies that help entrepreneurs scale is automating their customer acquisition process. This means acquiring more clients without hiring a sales team. By automating the customer acquisition process, the cost structure is more predictable, allowing business profits to skyrocket.
Number 2. Invest In Yourself
In order to scale, as a business owner, you need to find ways to increase your value. If you’re a service-based business, adding a new skill can help you add more services, especially if those services can be presented as “add-ons” to your existing clients.
Are there other services that you can add, without adding costs?
If you have a team, for example, learning customer service strategies can help you become a better leader. Can you think of ways you can invest in yourself so that you can offer more value in your business?
Number 3. Outsource Strategically
In the ideal world, marketing should pay for itself. This means, your marketing costs should bring you a return on investment, plus more. For startups, this is a challenge. There are many marketing costs associated with developing a brand that will take more than a year to recover.
When it comes to identifying a company that has done a beyond-amazing job at branding its product, Starbucks is at the top. As a small business owner, you might not have access to the kind of capital that Starbucks has, but you still can use some of their branding strategies, adapted to your budget.
When you look at Starbucks, you will notice that their message is clean and consistent. If you go to the website, you will see a campaign called “Black History Month”. They use social media to share the message around this campaign.
How can you do the same? While you might not be as creative and great with words as Starbucks, you can simply outsource your content strategy to a marketing wizard who can structure the content for you, even if you take care of your own social media management!
Social media can be a powerhouse for any marketing team if used correctly, and Starbucks is doing just that by:
- Repurposing content
- Interacting with their customers
- Starbucks creates a lot of content; however, they make it easier by repurposing content across all of their social media channels.
By repurposing, I mean breaking down a larger piece of content into smaller sections to reuse across multiple channels.
Let’s be clear, Starbucks is not copying posts word for word and pasting them across every network. Each social media channel is different and requires its own message.
Outsourcing strategically means you don’t need to increase the costs by outsourcing everything, but you can outsource the critical steps of acquiring a client.
You can find content creators for as low as 2 cents per word these days. If you’re not having the conversions from your marketing, then outsourcing content should be your next key resource to find.
Number 4. Find Money
While it’s true that a business can’t grow without money, it’s also true that money, without a strategy and a plan to scale, will just be wasted. Your business will always be in debt, and quickly you will be out of business.
Money is a crucial factor to scale your business, but only if it’s used for resources that can help increase profits.
Investing in automation is a great example of how you can use money to add more revenue streams to your business, without investing in human resources and labor costs.
Putting money in your SEO plan, for example, will allow you to replace your sales force. It will cost you less money to have a sales team, than to get your website ranking in Google, and converting web visitors into clients.
5. Find Marketing Partners Who Can Get You Visible
Let’s just make a pact! You want to build a business, but you also want to have a life. For this to happen, it’s crucial for you to find opportunities to collaborate with others.
Your goal is to find other companies so you can expand your visibility by tapping into their audience. They don’t have to be equity partners in order to establish a synergy where both businesses can benefit.
Vertical partnerships are your best bet, as long as they share your same values, because teaming up with a horizontal competitor is asking for conflict.
Aligning with key influencers in vertical industries have given my company enormous access to a qualified audience of potential new customers. As a result, we saw the explosive growth that quickly increased sales and made us more attractive to future partners.
This process doesn’t have to be complicated. You can start with identifying opportunities to collaborate, on Instagram, for example. Play team!
