Most start-ups and new small businesses are defined by the desire for growth. There’s an inherent need for more customers, higher revenues, and consistent growth. The need to scale up is a given in most cases, but that doesn’t mean that there’s one right way to do it. Each business is different, and yours may have challenges that are unique to your situation.
Whatever the case, there are some things you can do that will help you to scale your business as you grow. Take a look.
Plan Ahead
When you begin the process of scaling your business, you need to sit down and evaluate your processes so that you can create a plan for growth. Scaling your business isn’t just about selling more product, it’s also about how you’re going to manufacture, ship, and perform quality control on those new products.
Adding thousands of new sales is great, but you have to have a plan in place for making sure that they actually get to consumers. This is where you can be proactive, rather than reactive. Anticipate problems, decide ahead of time how you’ll act, and generally plan for different contingencies.
Always remember the foundations of your business. You may be tempted to stray from the key components of your success. Keep in mind that you’d never be in this position without the model that you originally built. There’s a difference between tweaking that model as you grow and heading off in another direction.
Hire The Right People
For a product based business, scaling up most likely means adding new employees. You just can’t double or triple the size of a business without adding talent somewhere. And that’s what you should be looking for–talent. The individuals you hire will have a huge effect on your ability to continue to grow.
A bigger team may be more difficult to manage, but then again, no one said that growth would be easy. Bring the right people on board as you scale your company and business will flourish.
Double Down On Your Marketing Efforts
You’ll want to wait to make new marketing moves until you have that plan in place that we talked about earlier. You want to have a firm direction in mind before you start ramping up your marketing efforts. But when you do, go at it from all angles.
This may be one of the reasons you hired some new talent. Leveraging SEO techniques, starting a blog, connecting with influencers, building a social media presence, and other online marketing efforts take time and energy. Together with email marketing, targeted ads on Facebook, contests, giveaways, and other tactics, you can help create some of the demand that you’re scaling your business to accommodate.
At Pivot, we’ve helped businesses through many different stages of growth. Whether it’s manufacturing, new product development, or supply chain management, we can help your product based business scale and grow. So contact us today to learn more about what we can do for your business.
