A Beginners Guide to Scaling a Business

Small business owners need to tread carefully here, as the whole idea is to grow the company without a huge escalation in costs. The subscription model makes it simple to add extra users and features, while paying one monthly fee—and you can integrate existing apps for things like CRM, accounting, and marketing. It’s like having multiple toppings on one delicious pizza. A customer relationship management system houses all your customer information in one place, so your team can quickly access the info. Salesforce is one of the most popular CRMs, and there are also tools like HubSpot and Zoho CRM.

The key is to make a playbook for how your business will execute a digital strategy and implement technology that creates change. Where do you want to go, what are the different ways to get there, and who will help make it happen? Map out paths that can stand up to uncertainty and evolve as your business grows. The Dialpad for Startups program is designed specially to help you scale in a manageable way, with startup-exclusive discounts on a business communications platform with a built-in phone system.

Set Definitive Goals

I’ll share some specific examples of each step and where the challenges lie in implementing them. The premier hands-on business coaching company for 6 & 7-figure entrepreneurs looking to drive more predictable growth and profits for long-term success. All these people have taken their service business to the next level, because they’re no longer stuck working inside their business. This is how you scale, especially with a service business that relies on a lot of personal touchpoints.

Keep your channels up to date with interesting and relevant stories. In the end, you want people to come back and build a relationship with them. Give them something they can use, such as tips, tricks, or behind-the-scenes stories. But keep in mind that the most important thing is providing services. Your service needs to be something that people need or want.

After running a support team for years, Mat joined the marketing team at Help Scout, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. Successfully scaling a customer support team might mean letting go of some behaviors and approaches that will just not work at a larger scale. The trick is to replace them with new approaches that achieve the same underlying features of a quality customer experience. As Rayport says, “A lot of businesses don’t anticipate scale.” But by understanding what the common challenges are, it’s something you can, and should, start to plan and prepare for.

If you’ve never scaled a business to 7-figures before, it can feel like an uphill battle. They dialed in their numbers, optimized their business model, and are now making the best decisions for THEIR business. But don’t take my word for it… Here are a few people we’ve worked with recently at 2X who have seen just how easy all this is….

How to Prepare for Scaling

Give them time to get up to speed before the real rush so the results will be better for everyone. However, there are more ways to expand your customer service team than by directly hiring. Mousumi Behari leads the Digital Strategy practice at Avionos. Mousumi has written and been quoted in several articles on digital transformation, including inYahoo,Modern Retail, andBusiness Insider. Scaling a business can be difficult when your technology, people, and processes are not built for growth.

Many owners of service businesses struggle to leave things in the hands of their employees. If you don’t, they will never be able to do anything without you. Once you’ve recruited the right employees, you should empower them, provide good working conditions and encourage team collaboration to propel your organization upward. A detailed staffing plan can help you keep on top of each employee’s utilization, performance, and training opportunities, leading to increased satisfaction and retention. This, in turn, feeds back to increased productivity and exemplary services for your clients. Offering many different products or services for various customers can be an obstacle to your company’s scalability.

What Is a Scaling Plan?

This takes time, and businesses that focus on billing by the hour, instead of a fixed fee, tend to put performance metrics that encourage people to skip these steps. However, if you spend 15-20% of your time planning for the other 80-85% of your week, you’ll build a high performing team and a more profitable business. Scalability allows a company to successfully grow and adapt to increased volume without compromising on quality, performance, service, or any element that’s key to the business. Growing a business means that sales have to be the number one priority. On the other hand, maintaining excellent customer service to retain current customers is also a number one priority.

As a result, you will be able to focus more on maintaining your product’s quality. This will help your brand get more clients and earn their loyalty. Remember that having open communication with your team can build trust between your employees and you as an employer. It will help you delegate tasks easily without micromanaging your employees. As a result, your employees will be able to run the business even when you’re not there.

• The early years of your business are a time to listen to feedback, find issues and improve your offerings until they meet your customers’ expectations.
• Scaling a business is often necessary to keep up with the competition and maintain a healthy bottom line.
• In addition, ask your employees to share how they would improve your business operations.
• Business leaders need to be willing to innovate and evolve, embrace opportunities, and invest in technology, while remaining rooted in strategy, alignment, and consistency.
• For most, getting access to that kind of capital is out of the question.

BUT… and this is REALLY important… just because you’re working ‘on’ the business doesn’t mean you have all the answers. And getting caught inside your own head like this can make spotting what is and isn’t working difficult. We’ve taken these lessons into 2X, because we have ONE avatar and offer them with ONE core service. In fact, once you start saying NO to people, you make your life A LOT easier. This aligns with ‘defining the rules’, ensuring you’re specific about who and how you can help. This is why we ALWAYS begin with strategy when working with a new client at 2X.

As I’ve gotten more narrow, accounting equation and friends refer me more and better new clients. These new clients come in with some understanding of what we do, so they’re easier to work with and more similar to others I already work with. When I first started the business, I took just about any client that wanted help with their engineering blog or technical copywriting. I knew I wanted to do something at the intersection of software engineering and writing, but I wasn’t yet sure where the profitable, scalable niche was in this area. The dust is just starting to settle after an amazing two days at our Mastermind Event in Austin, Texas last week. Sometimes the growth of your business can lead you into a false sense of security.

The Middle Ground: “Productized” Services

If you like the idea of systematizing your business, read The E-Myth Revisited. This is the book I recommend the most to entrepreneurs who are struggling to get out of the day-to-day execution work in their business, and it’s the primary inspiration for my process above. I never expected to build Draft.dev off trailblazers alone. First, there aren’t enough of them out there and which I have access to. You might think that choosing a niche that narrow would hurt my chances of ever closing a sale, but the opposite happened.

Knowing who you are – and who you are not – is a vital foundation on which to scale your business. On the other hand, scaling uses strategies to grow the business more efficiently without adding many costs or resources. The focus is on improving solutions and producing a consistent service. Scaling a service-based business is a special kind of feat. As a service provider, there are only so many hours in the day that you can dedicate to client work after all. This can definitely make scaling seem impossibly difficult or out of reach.

Scaling your business will require you to automate and streamline as many processes as possible. That means investing in the right technology, whether it’s customer relationship management , accounting, or project management tools. The best way to attract them is with a sound marketing strategy. Figure out who your target market is and what they want, then craft a plan to reach them through the most effective channels. As a business grows, it often becomes more attractive to job seekers looking for stability and opportunity.

After all, selling a service isn’t as simple as completing a transaction; customer relationships must be nurtured and built over time, and more sales mean more clients to pay attention to. The demand for your services, your cash flow condition, and the capability of your staff will all affect when it is best to start scaling a service business. Before growing, it’s critical to have a strong foundation in place, including a distinct understanding of your target market, a well-defined value proposition, and a steady stream of income.

This worked out well for Pérez, too, because winning operating contracts required far less bureaucracy than tendering for major capital expenditure projects. Even better, no new developers were required at Rock Solid’s end when new clients came on board. Ljubica Buha is a Digital Marketing Specialist with extensive experience in the IT industry.

Resource management software can be a valuable tool for this kind of strategizing. For example, Runn’s People Planner makes it easier to develop a smart hiring plan, based on the types of employees you need to hire, and when you need them to join the team. It can also help you decide how to train, retain, and optimize their services.

Daily standups create cohesion and reinforce the service culture. Daily standups help team members overcome roadblocks, resolve issues, and get help when it’s needed. These forums often result in invaluable peer-to-peer training opportunities. At GrowthForce, we’ve developed a web-bsed project management system called “GrowthForce Connect™”. This web-based platform connects our team, our clients’ staff, and the CPAs and CFOs who advise them, allowing us all to work as a single team on each project with seamless connectivity.