How to Scale Up Your Business
A business does not survive and prosper without growing. And it doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a lot of deliberate growth and careful planning if the business wants to continue expanding.
A plan is an essential starting point when it comes to successfully scaling up. You need more than a good idea, you need a robust well-thought-through plan.
Getting your business to scale also requires strong leadership on your part, along with support, and an experienced coach could well be the answer.
Scaling up can be a make-or-break moment for your company, mainly because businesses do not grow in straight lines, they grow in steps. If you scale your startup too quickly or unwisely, you may create operational difficulties that will be hard to solve. Premature expansion, without the cash available to fuel the growth, can have an adverse effect on your business.
And if you scale too slowly, you can miss out on key opportunities that come with greater resources and revenue.
01 – Get Your Strategy Right
Before you start anything, you need to define your Vision for your business. You make a decision to take your business to a whole new level for a very particular purpose; what is it? You know what you want, but if you want to develop a strong strategy, you have to know where you are going.
Working with New Level Results, you’ll be able to turn your vision into actionable tactics and create a ‘one page’ business plan that contains meaningful and measurable objectives to achieve.
02 – Build a solid team, who are bought into your Vision
Get “A” players through rigorous recruitment. It is crucial to attract and hire the right people. These people will either make or break your organization, particularly in the fast growth phase. They MUST be aligned with your strategic direction.
A growing scale-up business cannot be run by one person alone. The team that supports you is crucial to the success of your business. You cannot build a business – you build the people – and the people build the business. Your board of directors should complement your expertise and bring a depth of skills to your business’s leadership.
The end goal is to build a board of directors or a team that does not need you. A business that depends too much on its founder will have more difficulty securing investment and will be less valued. If your team are not able to run the business when you decide to go on a family vacation for a fortnight, then they need to develop more skills.
03 – A Flawless Execution
The most important execution guideline is to align the executive team and managers to the plan. A lack of alignment will compromise scalability. Execution should be implemented according to monthly goal priorities.
Clear mapping and tracking of each stage of the plan, with well-defined roles and responsibilities of the team and clear expectations and metrics at each stage, are all essential for success.
In addition, quick feedback and regular meetings are very important to listen to and explore ways to implement continuous improvement across your business and know where the problems are so that corrective action can be taken rapidly.
From our experience, monthly meetings are one of the most important factors to identify operational difficulties. A clear ‘one page’ plan, with a dedicated person in charge of each task and a specific due date, should be established after each meeting, so we can hold people to account, to keep moving forward.
In addition, celebrate your wins after each milestone to keep your team motivated and committed to achieving the results.
04 – Be patient
Be patient… Scaling up is a period of rapid growth, but it still takes time. Do not rush into anything until you are completely ready and take the time to do it right.
Rushing can leave some parts of your business behind. There’s no point in pushing to develop parts of your business if there’s still a bottleneck at a significant stage. After all, being better at selling doesn’t do much good if you have nothing left to sell.
Not everything will work out as you planned, so don’t be afraid to fail. Being resilient in the face of failures is necessary to stop them becoming fatal to the business. Many crises offer up opportunities, and keeping a level head will give you the chance to spot them.
To summarise
Preparing to scale up means being critical of your current situation and understanding where you need to go. From there, you understand what changes you need to make to thrive in your new form. Being prepared will help you succeed when you decide it’s time to take the first big step. Find out more about what you need to know before you start with these 4 tips.
New Level Results has helped over 500 companies to scale up their business. We have been endorsed by the National Scale Up Institute as ‘Exemplar’.
We can bring the expertise you need to take your business to a whole new level. We know what we’re doing.
If you want to scale your business based on a proven growth methodology, contact us to see how we can help you.
