It’s a wonderful feeling when you have reached a point where your business is so successful that you need to upscale. Whether hiring more people or moving location, upscaling has its unique challenges. What can you do to ensure that you are hitting the ground running while upscaling?
Businesses should set realistic and actionable small goals which they can work towards, rather than broad goals which provide no direction. Setting broad and unrealistic goals is demotivating and makes any progress made seem insignificant. Every person in the business should be given a target to meet over a reasonable timeline, contributing to achieving a larger goal.
Small businesses can make the mistake of ‘doing things as they come’, but this means that as the business grows, adjusting to high-scale tasks is difficult. To avoid this, businesses should standardise all processes of work. Any individual placed into a role should be able to follow standardised procedures and yield a product that is of similar quality to the previous one. Investing money into automation tools is worthwhile for this procedure. This can include automating social media management, email, and customer relationships. Both of these will contribute to creating structures that support growth.
Recognising the strengths and weaknesses of one’s business is essential. Strengths will allow businesses to hone in on their unique qualities, giving them a competitive advantage. Weaknesses will reveal which areas require growth so that changes can be made before upscaling takes place.
Businesses should continue to develop relationships with service providers, sales channel partners, suppliers and customers. Keeping an open mind about partnerships or potential collaborations could open up different avenues of business growth.
No matter how prepared you feel, any change in an organisation will require a period of adjustment for the rest of your team. Give them time to recognise the need for change and accept this opportunity’s challenges. More importantly, they need time to understand their roles in the bigger picture of your organisation’s plans to scale and determine how they can make the most of their skill sets and add value to the company. Make sure to consider adjustment protocols and allocate a reasonable period for such adjustments in your scaling plans and process.
As the business increases in stature, there will be a lot more little and frustrating tasks, meaning that you can’t focus on what’s important. Outsourcing components like payroll or marketing to companies with the professionals to do it effectively means that you can focus on upscaling the business.
Upscaling can be very stressful, but whether it’s making changes to your business’s technology or outsourcing things in the short term, to upscale a business means focusing on what is best for your business.
To get to this point, you’ve made a success of it, so it’s important not to lose your identity in the process. Upscaling your business is taking what’s great about your current operation and building it outwards.
If you are looking towards how your business can take itself to the next level, business planning for any eventualities can be of benefit. Consulting with a trusted adviser can be of great help when moving forward in your business’s upscaling endeavour.
